Announcing Picasa 3.0 and a new version of Picasa Web Albums!

Tuesday, September 2, 2008 1:20 PM

Posted by Mike Horowitz, Product Manager

Today, we're pleased to announce the public beta of Picasa 3.0, the next generation of Google's photo management software. We're also launching a redesigned Picasa Web Albums with a brand-new 'name tags' feature, which gives you the power to quickly label and organize your photos based on who's in each picture.

From the start, Picasa's goal has been to help people get more from their digital cameras. Earlier versions of Picasa focused on supporting users at every critical juncture in the digital photo lifecycle -- making it easy to import, organize, edit, print, and (since the advent of Picasa Web Albums) publish your photos online. Unlike piecemeal alternatives, Picasa manages all these things inside a single application, and with a consistent, easy-to-use interface.

Fast-forward to today, and a few things have changed. Sharing online has skyrocketed in importance, as more of us develop a network of friends and family who are tuning into our pictures. Online availability also matters more as we start to use our phones, TVs, and wifi frames to deliver our photos. And as users get more experienced, they're demanding more creative ways to remix, enjoy, and distribute their photos.

We've therefore brought the Picasa software and Picasa Web Albums much closer together, breaking down barriers between your home PC and your online albums. New controls in Picasa 3 make it much easier to quickly upload photos, and we've added a new 'sync to web' feature that automatically updates online albums when you add or edit photos on your computer.

That's just the start. Picasa Web Albums now includes a new 'name tags' feature that helps organize your growing photo collection by people. Opt-in to name tags, and our technology automatically groups photos containing similar faces. Instead of asking you to painstakingly label pictures one-by-one, name tags lets you rapidly tag many photos at once. By doing so, you can easily find that photo of your cousin from two years ago; create a slideshow of you and your best friend, or share an album with everybody who appears in the photos. Take a look at this video to see name tags in action.

There's much, much more. This blog posts only scratches the surface of what's new in Picasa 3 and Picasa Web Albums - an Explore page featuring recent photos from all over the world, the ability to email photos directly to your online albums (great for mobile phones), Creative Commons licensing, and numerous interface refinements. And we haven't event mentioned the compelling new creative tools inside Picasa 3, like a new movie maker, totally-revamped photo collages, a powerful retouching tool, text tool, and more. Check out the video after the post for a complete overview.

We'll be exploring more of what's new in Picasa 3 (beta) on this blog tomorrow. And over the next couple weeks, we'll have daily posts to help introduce you to some of our favorite new features on Picasa Web Albums and inside Picasa 3.

Picasa and Picasa Web Albums are unique in how they work together to make it easier for you to manage your photo collection -- on your computer, or on the web. So get started, have fun, and let us know what you think!

Picasa Web Albums prints now available at Walgreens

Tuesday, August 5, 2008 1:41 PM

Posted by Mark Geller, Product Manager

Here's some good news for impulse shoppers out there: we've just added Walgreens as a print provider in Picasa Web Albums, which means you can order prints from your favorite online photo albums and pick them up in about an hour at your local Walgreens store.  Not only will you have your prints in hand quickly, but there are no shipping costs to worry about.

Our Picasa client software has always put a strong focus on offering many print providers for you to choose from, but one of the nice things about having several print providers on our online site is that it makes it very easy for friends and family to order prints on their own.  Just make sure you have the "Allow visitors to order prints of my photos" option enabled in Settings.  That way, even far-flung relatives can order their favorite prints, anytime -- and if they live near one of the 6,200+ Walgreens in the US, they can pick their photos up in no time at all.

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!