Tune into Picasa Web Albums on Tivo®

Monday, December 3, 2007 12:32 PM

Posted by Derek Collison, Technical Director

There are plenty of good reasons to share your photos online -- after all, half the fun in taking pictures comes from sharing them with friends and family.

But here's another benefit that hits much closer to home: now you can view Picasa Web Albums on the living room TV using TiVo. In terms of comfort, it's hard to beat a plush sofa and a big-screen TV for browsing your personal photo collection and keeping track of new photo uploads from your friends. You can also search through millions of publicly-shared photos from people around the world.

With Picasa Web Albums on TiVo, you can:

• securely access your personal photos by signing in to your Picasa Web Albums account
• quickly find and bookmark publicly-shared photos from your friends
• show off your photos on the living-room TV, instead of crowding everyone around a computer screen
• search for keywords like "sunset" or "flowers" and discover images from users all over the world

This new service is available to all TiVo users with Series2 devices or higher using broadband Internet connections. Photos are displayed at the highest-possible resolution for each box, so TiVo Series3™ and TiVo HD subscribers will see their photos in full high-definition. If you're a TiVo subscriber, visit the "Music, Photos, Products & More" screen on your TiVo to give it a spin. To learn more, visit the TiVo website.

Better connections with Picasa Web Albums

Monday, November 5, 2007 10:58 AM

Posted by Mark Geller, Product Manager

A few months back, we made it easy for almost anyone to partner with Picasa Web Albums by launching a free and open API that allows other services to connect to ours.

For Picasa Web Albums users, this means you can now 'automagically' download photos from Picasa Web Albums to partner sites, where you can do things like create animations, make hardcover books, or send photos to and from your mobile phone.

For partners, you can use the API to make it easier and faster for your users to import pictures to your service, which translates to users having more fun and getting more from your service.

Here are five companies that are using our public API to connect with Picasa Web Albums -- you can remotely access your photo collection while using their services:

Animoto.com: Create ice-cool animations from your snapshots. They call themselves "the end of slideshows," and we can see why.

Blurb.com: Self-publish hardcover photo books featuring your best photos. They offer the works -- library bindings, custom dust-jackets, even linen hardcover cases.

Picnik: Fast and easy online photo-editing in your browser.

Shozu.com: Send and receive photos directly from your camera phone.

Eye-Fi: A wireless memory card that adds Wi-Fi to your current digital camera so you can automatically transfer photos directly from your camera to Picasa Web Albums.

Look for more fun and interesting things you can do with your Picasa Web Albums pictures on partner sites coming soon!

New languages & new features for international users

Thursday, November 1, 2007 11:49 AM

Posted by Pam Benjatanaporn, Program Manager

Photography has always helped people see more of the world we live in, and exploring the photos in our 'Community Search' gets more interesting every time we add support for a new language. Today, we're happy to announce that Picasa and Picasa Web Albums are now available in 38 language interfaces. Our newest arrivals include Bulgarian, Catalan, Hindi, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Filipino, Thai and Vietnamese. Additionally, we've just added international support for Picasa Web Albums for mobile devices, as well as for our 'Map My Photos' feature, which lets you show people exactly where you took your favorite snapshots.

We're looking forward to seeing even more great pictures from across the globe -- so have fun!

New Mac Uploaders released

Monday, October 15, 2007 3:57 PM

Posted by Jason Cook, Product Marketing Manager

Earlier today, our Mac team released version 1.1 of the Picasa Web Albums Uploaders. For Mac users, these tools provide the fastest, easiest way to share photos on Picasa Web Albums. Both an iPhoto plugin (which can upload pictures and albums from within iPhoto itself) and a standalone application are included in the same download.

This release adds support for Apple's iPhoto '08, along with a few other refinements, like an improved installer and the ability to convert keywords from iPhoto to tags in Picasa Web Albums. Under the hood, the uploaders were rebuilt using our public Google Data API, which will make it easier to integrate new features from Picasa Web Albums.

If you're a Mac user, give it a spin, and let us know what you think in the Picasa discussion group.

Lesser-known (and secret) Picasa features, cont'd

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 4:30 PM

Posted by Mike Herf, Picasa Engineering Manager

Continuing Monday's discussion of Picasa's less-visible features, I thought I'd start by talking about Backup. This shouldn't be considered a minor detail, really -- keeping a backup archive is downright crucial.

If you tried our Backup feature in the past (look in 'Tools -> Backup') but had concluded that you no longer have enough blank CDs (or even 4.8-gigabyte DVDs) to easily store your growing photo collection, think again. Grab an external hard drive and try the 'disk to disk' backup, which eliminates the need to swap a big stack of CDs when creating your archive. (We built the 'disk to disk' feature to work over networks, too, so you can even use network-attached storage, like fancy RAID drives.)

It's faster than you'd expect. After you first create your archive, Picasa is smart enough to only backup the most recent changes the next time around. Using an external drive with our backup feature is also a great way to migrate to a new PC, since it preserves all of your albums and edits in Picasa.

Sometimes we build little features into Picasa that are essentially invisible -- they don't show up in the interface at all. The color engine in Picasa 2.7 is one of those changes; it's become far more adept at handling extra-orange or extra-blue photos. If you have some old 'problem photos' where the lighting just seemed hopeless, try going to the 'Tuning' tab and picking a neutral color with the picker. The color temperature slider in 'Tuning' also uses this new color model, and it can give you some wonderful results.



Other goodies? To see captions and filenames under thumbnails, you can enable this via the settings in 'View -> Thumbnail Caption ->.' You can also turn your thumbnails into cool-looking 4x6 contact sheets (sometimes useful for archival purposes) by using the 'Print a Contact Sheet' function in the 'Album & Folders' menu.

And if you've made it this far, I probably owe you an Easter egg! Try this: Edit a picture in Picasa and choose the 'Effects' tab. Hold down 'Ctrl' while clicking on the 'Graduated Tint' filter, and you will find the 'Radial Tint' filter -- not listed anywhere else. You can make colored vignettes and really nice colored glows with this one. Enjoy!

Lesser-known (and secret) Picasa features

Monday, October 8, 2007 8:33 AM

Posted by Mike Herf, Picasa Engineering Manager

Every piece of software has a couple of features that its designers think are pretty important. You can usually guess what those are simply by examining the user interface -- the biggest, shiniest, and most prominent buttons tend to look that way because a developer thought, 'Here's something that'll get used every day.'

Other features tend to get buried in menus, or sub-menus, or maybe implemented only as an Easter egg. Now, good software teams will move things around little by little, as they get a better understanding of how people actually use the software. Done right, this can make an application more usable over time instead of more complex and crufty.

Most of you reading this are already very familiar with the 'big' features in Picasa, so I thought I'd write a couple of blog posts about Picasa's less-visible features, especially the ones you might not have discovered.

First up is search. Photos tend to be hard to search for, so we've been trying for a number of years to figure out what kinds of things users actually look for in their photos. Dates have turned out to be pretty important, so you can type 'December 2005' into Picasa's search box and it will show you photos you took that month. Of course, you can also search for folder names, filenames, descriptions, and locations, too. But we also index information about the camera that took each picture: search for 'Sony' or 'Canon' or 'Powershot' and you'll find the photos you took with each camera type. Or try this: 'Flash' will find photos taken with a flash, and 'focal:50' shows any pictures you took using a 50mm lens. Even 'iso:400' works as a search term.

For a little more fun, try searching for a color name, like 'color:red' or 'color:gray.' There's a full list of available colors in 'Tools->Experimental->Search for....' Try it against your photo collection and see what happens!

Here's another search feature that can be pretty useful: the ability to locate all duplicate photos on your hard drive. Try 'Tools->Experimental->Show Duplicate Files' to see this in action; the filter shows you only those files duplicated in more than one place on your hard drive. The neat idea here is that you can safely delete any file you see listed in these results, because there are at least two of them on your computer. (You might see both copies disappear from the list, but this simply means that the second copy isn't a dupe anymore.)

Tune in Wednesday as I'll tell you about a few other lesser-known features (and Easter eggs) that should please you, whether you're a power user or just a regular photographer.

Ready for our close-up

Tuesday, October 2, 2007 9:45 AM

Posted by Jason Cook, Product Marketing Manager

A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes there's still more to say. That's why I'm happy to introduce our new Google Photos Blog. We'll be using this space to post feature updates, photography tips, and (of course) some of our favorite photo albums, all of which will keep you current with the latest developments from the Picasa team.

As you might've guessed from the name of this blog, our Santa Monica team works on more than just Picasa and Picasa Web Albums -- we're responsible for a variety of photo-related technology here at Google, such as hosting Blogger's image-uploading infrastructure, developing Orkut's photo picker, and creating Mapplets for browsing geotagged photos inside Google Maps.

I myself am a newcomer to this team; I joined a few months ago as a transfer from our London office. It's been an exciting move -- partly because we have some really-neat photo products in development, and partly because sunny Southern California is where I grew up. Seeing as how my new job is all about helping you organize and share your photos, I thought I'd start by posting a few pictures of my own from my time in England.

We hope you'll visit us often for more visual news and notes!