Full-album Downloads

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 10:10 AM

Posted by Jason Cook, Product Marketing Manager

Here's a tip for families sharing photos on Picasa Web Albums, or for anybody else who needs to shuttle large sets of photos from one computer to another. With Picasa Web Albums, your viewers can download entire photo albums to their Picasa library on their PC with just a click. This is perfect for situations like parties or big family get-togethers, since you know other guests will probably want original-resolution files they can print at home, or save to their local photo library. Obviously, we love it when people browse and enjoy photos on the Picasa Web Albums site itself, but we won't step in your way if you're trying to share full-resolution originals with your friends.

Downloading full albums is pretty simple, and enabled by default -- just look for the "Download Album" link on the left-hand side of an album page. Note that the PC you're browsing with needs to have Picasa installed for this link to appear; downloaded albums will automatically appear in a 'Downloaded Albums' folder inside Picasa.

Of course, if you prefer not to show this link to others, you can easily disable album downloads via your Settings page. Once you do, the 'Download Album' link won't appear on your pages.

Something for (almost) every phone: Nokia S60 support, new iPhone tap & zoom, Windows Mobile Standard support, and more

Monday, June 9, 2008 7:59 AM

Posted by Petteri Koponen, Product Manager

Much as we like sharing photos online, we know that sharing photos with the friend who's right next to you is even better. That's why we launched a high-end mobile version of Picasa Web Albums for the iPhone back in December, followed by a version for Windows Mobile Pro in April. Both platforms make it easy to carry your entire photo collection in your pocket.

Today, we're happy to say that our high-end mobile experience now includes the tens of millions of people around the world using S60 3rd Edition phones -- a panoply of devices that includes all the latest smartphones from Nokia. Here's what our S60 experience looks like:

Of course, sharing photos around the world is easier when you speak the local language, so we're equally proud to announce support for 36 new languages in our mobile interface. (We cheated just a bit: You may notice we've judiciously replaced some text buttons with universal icons.)

We also took this opportunity to refresh and improve our iPhone and Windows Mobile support. Starting today, iPhone users can try our new zoom feature -- just tap the magnifying glass icon. This loads a higher-resolution page, where you can use those wonderful finger gestures for zooming and panning, like so:

 

And on the Windows Mobile side, we've extended our support to Windows Mobile Standard, making our site accessible to many more users.

To try Picasa Web Albums on your phone, head on over to picasaweb.google.com on your mobile device. And be sure to let us know what you think.

America At Home

Thursday, June 5, 2008 10:35 AM

Posted by Mark Geller, Product Manager

A few months back, you might've caught a promo link on Picasa Web Albums encouraging folks to participate in America At Home -- a project that asked amateur and professional photographers to try and capture the many meanings of 'Home' across the USA. As you might expect, the range of emotions and experiences associated with home and family life is a fantastic (and fascinating) subject for a collaborative photography book.

If you're interested in seeing the results, the America At Home book is out now, and you can flip through sample pages online. Cooler still, you can create a custom cover for your own copy of the book (and maybe make it a personalized Father's Day gift, even). The America At Home team implemented the Picasa Web Albums API, so it's easy to use any photo that you've uploaded to Picasa Web Albums as a custom cover. For more info, visit the America At Home website.

More Picasa-enabled products

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 4:59 PM

Posted by Jason Cook, Product Marketing Manager

From the start, we've designed Picasa Web Albums to be 'open' -- after all, your photographs belong to you, and you should be free to decide how to share them. For instance, if you'd like your albums to be downloadable, we make sure friends and family can grab your pictures at the full, original upload resolution, allowing them to print out great-looking photos at home. Of course, if you want to pay for professional prints, we also offer you a choice of print providers in both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums.

From a technical perspective, we offer a free and open API. In a nutshell, this makes it easy for other companies to build products that connect seamlessly with Picasa Web Albums, so you can do more with your photos.

Our team has seen some pretty cool product demos lately, and we're glad to see some of these Picasa-Web-Albums-enabled items are now making their way to store shelves. EyeFi, for one, announced a new generation of their wi-fi memory card, which not only lets any camera upload photos without being attached to a computer, but can also geotag your photos as you take them, adding location-based data that makes it even easier to put your photos on a map. (No dragging-and-dropping required!)

And if Panasonic's PZ850 Vieracast announcement at CES caught your eye, you might be interested to know that the official pricing on these Picasa and YouTube-enabled flat screen HDTVs has been announced: 46" for $3,100, 50" for $3,500, 59" for $4,300 and $8,000 for the 65 inch model. Head over to Gizmodo to see some video of the sets in action.

If you're an impulse shopper, we recommend you head straight to Tokyo and hunt down a Sony Canvas Online CP1 digital photo frame, which is currently available only in Japan. We were lucky enough to see this gorgeous wifi-enabled photo frame in person, and trust us, it's a beauty. Sitting stately atop a clear lucite base, this 7", 800x480 LCD frame can stream your favorite Picasa Web Albums directly from the internet.

Announcing the release of Picasa 2.7 for Linux

Tuesday, April 15, 2008 6:04 PM

Posted by Dan Kegel and Lei Zhang, Software Engineers

It's not quite Godot, or even Duke Nukem Forever, but the long wait for Picasa 2.7 for Linux is finally over.

If you're still using Picasa 2.2 for your Linux machine, you'll want to update to get all the 2.7 goodness, including web album upload and download, folder hierarchy views, better raw support, localization in many languages, and more. Check out the download page for a full list of improvements and known issues. If you have questions after installing, please visit the FAQ or support forum.

For those interested in the open source aspect of Picasa 2.7: we did contribute a few dozen Wine patches to support Picasa 2.7, mainly to improve Wine's support for non-English languages, but also to fix a number of bugs.

Thanks to all the Linux users who helped test the beta version!

More good news for mobile

Wednesday, April 2, 2008 10:30 AM

Posted by Joe Walnes, Software Engineer

We built the mobile version of Picasa Web Albums to support as many devices as possible; you can use it to see your favorite pictures on almost any Internet-capable phone. That said, having a high-end mobile device has the potential to make your photos really shine. That's why we launched an optimized-for-iPhone interface a few months ago, which took special advantage of its large, high-resolution screen.

Now we've got some exciting news for those of you with newer Windows Mobile touchscreen devices: Today, we're launching another specially-optimized mobile interface, one tailored just for Windows Mobile 6 touchscreen devices. You can enjoy Picasa Web Albums slideshows, community photos, and all of our other mobile features using an interface that takes full advantage of the advanced browser in Windows Mobile 6. To see the new interface, just visit picasaweb.google.com on your Windows Mobile device.

To make things even more interesting, our Windows Mobile 6 interface also includes support for viewing your favorite photo albums even when you have no network access, thanks to the new beta release of Google Gears for mobile. We're very excited about the possibilities that mobile Gears technology will ultimately enable for Picasa Web Albums users. Being able to store your photo collection in the Internet 'cloud' and also having that data copied on your local device will allow for some nifty scenarios, like having the ability to flip through your photos much faster, or being able to show off your favorite pictures in spots where the mobile Internet doesn't reach (like an airplane cabin, subway car, or overseas trip, for example). And with Picasa using the latest version of Gears you can now add a Picasa icon to your Program Files folder and have instant access to your favorite photos offline or online.

If you're a software developer, we'd encourage you to visit the code.google.com blog to learn a bit more about our recent Google Gears for mobile announcement.

Thomas: not your average bear

Tuesday, April 1, 2008 4:09 AM

Posted by Thomas the bear on behalf of the Picasa team

It has been speculated that Google has a history of leg-pulling around this time of year. In the spirit of silliness, we wanted to share a warm and fuzzy true story about how a bear named Thomas made Picasa his home.

As you may know, Picasa has many helpful keyboard shortcuts to save you time and clicks. But there's one shortcut you may not have heard about: the Thomas shortcut.

Back in 2004, the innovative photographer and photoblogger Noah Grey was working with the Photos team on developing Picasa. He contributed a great deal to the design and evolution of the software, but one of Noah's most unforgettable contributions can be seen by pressing Control-Shift-Y while in Picasa. Continue pressing it, and watch what appears all over your screen. Given to Noah as a gift by an old friend, this bear has had a special place in Noah's life for over 15 years; and Noah decided to return the favor.

That's Thomas. And that's his bear. And that's how he became part of the Picasa story.