Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager
In the few weeks that have passed since we announced the first ever Picasa Web Albums powered contest, the Democracy Photo Challenge, nearly 3,000 photos from 131 countries were submitted.
A jury has narrowed down the field of democracy themed photos to 36 finalists and now it's up to the general public to vote for the 12 winning photos, by clicking the "like" button under any photo in the finalist Picasa Web Album.
The winners will be announced on the United Nations’ (UN) International Day of Democracy, September 15, with the winning photographs exhibited at the UN in New York.
Today, we released the latest version of Picasa with lots of cool new features but there’s one item that we’re particularly excited about.
Face movies create a movie based around one person both figuratively and literally. Instead of the usual transition from one photo to the next, the images align themselves to the face in the photo. This creates an extremely smooth viewing experience which allows the person in the photos to remain the focus rather than the transition effects themselves.
Words cannot adequately describe this feature, it’s better to see it for yourself:
Some more items in this release:
Picnik integration
A few weeks ago we announced the integration of Picnik, the powerful online photo editor, into Picasa Web Albums. We’re now excited to bring this same functionality to Picasa. You can now use Picnik’s rich editing tools and effects from right inside of Picasa and see where your creativity takes you.
Batch upload from Picasa to Picasa Web Albums
With this new version of Picasa we’re also fulfilling a popular request: batch upload from Picasa right to your Picasa Web Albums account. In addition to uploading multiple photos, you can now upload entire albums, all at the same time, plus remove albums from your Picasa Web account, change the upload size, visibility and sync state of photos that are already online.
Metadata updates
For those of us who enjoy the technical side of photography, we have some nice metadata (information stored inside of your image file) updates too, including support of Color Management. Picasa will now read the metadata from your photo and present the photo in the correct color space, thus improving the way your photo displays on your monitor or TV screen.
Picasa also has expanded support of XMP, which will be presented in an easy and accessible way alongside your image in the Properties panel. You can find people, places and tags in this space as well.
We’re also adding a few other under-the-hood updates such as improved support of external drives, increased efficiency of CPU usage, and improved settings when sharing with your Gmail contact groups.
This latest release is in English only for now, but we plan to roll out additional languages soon. Download Picasa today and, as always, feedback and questions are welcome in our forums.
Updated 10/20/2010. Now these features can be enjoyed around the world. Today, we launched Picasa 3.8 in all 38 (35 for Mac) supported languages.
Last fall, as northern hemisphere-dwellers were enjoying the picturesque crisp days of autumn, we had an idea to host an Autumn photo challenge to uncover the hidden talents of the Picasa community. We were excited by the creativity and skill that our Picasa lovers displayed in our gallery &mdash see for yourself!
On a recent visit to Europe, we were so impressed with the architectural variety of the historical and contemporary buildings there that we were inspired to host the first Picasa Photo Challenge in Europe. We invited Dutch, French, German, Polish and Spanish communities to show off their best photo of architecture. Our Picasa community in Europe impressed and delighted us all. Unfortunately we could only choose one winner for each language group. The most ‘liked’ picture won the challenge and they are proudly featured on our Featured Photos page.
We want to thank all of our European users for their enthusiastic participation and a send a big congratulations to the winners!
