Picasa's brand-new Photo Viewer

Tuesday, September 16, 2008 7:00 AM

Posted by Clay Wood, Software Engineer


The new Photo Viewer that ships with Picasa 3 is quick and straightforward, so I'll try to keep this blog post equally focused.

We designed Photo Viewer to be a better, faster image viewer. A quick double-click on any photo will give you a beautiful full-screen view (with Picasa edits applied) and puts a select few options at your fingertips: you can quickly rotate an image, star it, upload it to your Picasa Web Albums drop box, or play a slideshow with other photos from the same folder.

What else can it do? Tap the scroll wheel on your mouse to discover how nice it is to have a fast, smooth zoom at hand when reviewing your photos, or try the 'More Options' button to bounce an image to your printer, blog, or favorite photo editor.

Obviously, Picasa 3 (beta) can also do all these things, and more, but we know users don't necessarily want to launch a photo manager or image editor every time they double-click a JPG. Most of the time, a lightweight viewer is all you need -- we hope you'll agree that our new Photo Viewer fills that need nicely.

A note on installation: You can add the photo viewer during the Picasa 3 install -- it's easy to revert to your previous image viewer later, if you'd like. If you've already installed Picasa 3, and originally chose not to use the viewer, but now want to give it a try, just go to "Tools / Configure Photo Viewer" in Picasa.

Sharing photos with Creative Commons licensing

Sunday, September 14, 2008 12:02 PM

Posted by Mark Geller, Business Product Manager

We know that many photographers on Picasa Web Albums are interested in having their photos be seen by as large an audience as possible. We also know that some users--but by no means all--are happy allowing their photos to be re-used elsewhere, as long as proper credit is given.

Fortunately, there's an organization called Creative Commons (a separate non-profit group not affiliated with Google), which has created a set of usage rights known as Creative Commons licenses for just this purpose. CC licenses enable you, as a content owner, to allow for certain uses of your images by other people or companies, while still retaining ownership and control.

Now, with the new Creative Commons licensing option on Picasa Web Albums, you can change the usage terms on some or all of your images from "all rights reserved" to "some rights reserved" and apply one of six CC licenses. For example, you might choose to allow others to use your images as long as they give you attribution, or you can enable use of your images as long as they're not re-mixed into derivative works or used for commercial purposes.

Of course, you still retain complete ownership and control over your own images--and if you do not want to allow any kind of re-use, you don't have to. By default, we assume that photos you upload to Picasa Web Albums are "all rights reserved" by you (i.e., standard copyright). But if the idea of opting in to Creative Commons licensing sounds interesting, click here to learn more about all the licensing options available.

New email upload in Picasa Web Albums

Wednesday, September 10, 2008 11:49 AM

Posted by Justin Zaren, Software Engineer

Photos don't belong cooped up in your email's inbox, they belong on the web where you can share them with family, friends, or the world. As part of last week's major update, Picasa Web Albums now supports the ability to upload photos to your web albums using email.

Here's how it works: If you'd like to enable email uploads, you're asked to personalize your '@picasaweb.com' email address by providing a secret word that is private to you. Once you save your settings, you will be able to upload images directly to Picasa Web Albums by attaching them to an email and sending the email to your picasaweb email address.




So what's this good for? Lots! For starters, if you have a cameraphone that lets you mail pictures directly from your phone (like an iPhone), you can now shoot and post pictures in real-time. It's kind of like sending instant postcards from wherever you visit – no computer needed. And how about all those pictures of you that are sitting in your email Inbox, sent by family and friends? Simply forward those emails to your Picasa Web Albums email address and start organizing and sharing them.

Speaking of friends and family, while we give you a private, customizable email address to use for your email uploads, you may well find that sharing your email upload address with a few trusted contacts allows for interesting collaborations. For example, email can be a painless way to get your extended family to upload snapshots to a central group album – whether or not they have their own Picasa Web Albums accounts.

To get started, visit the Settings page in Picasa Web Albums and look for the new 'Upload Photos by Email' section. Then, set up your personal '@picasaweb.com' email address for image uploads, which will be a combination of your username and a secret word that you can change at any time. After that, when you email pictures to that address, the image attachments will automatically be placed in your drop box, or whatever album you specify in the subject line. All other email content sent to this address is ignored and discarded. We also won't resize or downscale any pictures you send, although there's a limit of 20 megabytes per email.

We hope you'll have fun and get creative with the way you upload photos.

Photo Collages!

Monday, September 8, 2008 1:46 PM

Posted by Mike Clement, Software Engineer

Picasa 3 (beta) features an entirely new and expanded collage maker that you can use to create pixel-perfect masterpieces suitable for printing or just sharing online. There are six different collage "themes" to play with, ranging from a simple contact sheet to a "Picture Pile" theme that gives you complete freedom to arrange, resize and rotate pictures on a background of your choice. It's kind of like a virtual scrapbook.

If you're feeling like your composition skills aren't quite up to the task (or if you're just feeling lazy), press the "Scamble Collage" button and Picasa will even rearrange the collage for you automatically. There a lots of document sizes to choose from, including the most common photo, paper, and desktop screen sizes. This makes it easy to create postcards, CD covers, or even posters with just a few clicks. Try this:

• Select a folder of pictures and press the Collage button
• Choose "Mosaic" in the collage theme drop list
• Choose "8.5 x 11: letter paper" in the Page Format drop list (or whatever size you want)
• Press "Shuffle Pictures" a few times
• To really add interest, explore the Grid Spacing slider and the Background Options
• Press "Create Collage"

That's all it takes to create a collage image like this:

Best of all, collages are saved like documents -- so you can always go back to make changes or add new pictures to an existing collage. To do this, click the Edit Collage button at the top of the screen that appears when viewing a previously created collage. (Note: all your collages are placed in a special Collages project album so that it's easy to find and edit all of your collages).

The real fun happens after the collage is finished rendering -- now you can treat the collage like any other picture and apply fun effects like Soft Focus or Sepia, or maybe add a title using the new Text feature. Once you've created your masterpiece, don't forget to show it off! Share it with your friends and family in a web album, or maybe use it as the title slide in a new Movie project.

The possibilities are pretty endless...so get creative and make some collages!

Start Exploring

Friday, September 5, 2008 9:00 AM

Posted by Ping Hsin Chen, Software Engineer

Have you ever wondered what types of snapshots are being shared on Picasa Web Albums by other users? Or have you ever felt like taking a break to browse through fascinating and beautiful photos from far away?

Now you can, with the new Explore page. The Explore page features several different "widgets" to help you find cool new content and have a bit of fun:

Recent Photos - See the world through somebody else's camera lens -- our recent photos stream is a captivating, near-real-time view of public photos being uploaded to Picasa Web Albums. Because we're localized in 38 languages, if you check back at different times of the day, you'll see a different slice of culture from around the world!

Featured Photos - View a selection of the most popular public images uploaded by fellow photographers. It's updated regularly, so check back often to see some of the best photos our site has to offer. Who knows, maybe your images will show up here one day!

Where In The World? - Are you well-traveled or a good at figuring out little clues? Try your hand at guessing where various geo-tagged photos were taken...some of them might surprise you! We'll keep track of your high score so you can brag to your friends.

Popular Tags - Just don't know what to type into that search box or just want to browse for interesting photos? Come see what images appear for some of our most popular tags.

We hope these new features help you enjoy some of the great public photos on our site, interact with the users sharing them, and possibly pick up some new photography tips and tricks. Stay tuned as we add more widgets for you to explore content in the future.

Retouch and restore your photos

Thursday, September 4, 2008 11:20 AM

Posted by Tara Morrison, Software QA Engineer

As you may have seen in yesterday's post, the beta version of Picasa 3 offers many improvements and additions to the existing Picasa software. One of the new features I'm most excited about is our powerful retouching tool that can fix things like acne and scratches -- and it's great for restoring old photos.

If you've ever scanned decades-old prints, you well know they're not always in the best condition. Our Retouch tool now allows you to remove scratches, marks, and stains. A little bit of Tuning and the 1-click Sharpen Filter are the perfect finishing touches. Then you can order new prints of your old photos. Check out these before and after photos to see the kinds of things you can do:

(click to enlarge)

Here are some tips to help you get started with retouching your photos in Picasa:

• Use your mouse wheel to zoom in. Zoom out after retouching each patch to make sure it's blended well. If it's not, just use Undo Patch and try again.

• Zoomed in, particularly on faces, there is a huge range of color tones. When correcting something like acne, you should use a replacement section of skin close to the blemish for the most natural look.

• If you're fixing a large area, it helps to correct gradually instead of in one patch so that the areas all blend well together naturally. Try working on smaller areas, starting at the outside.

• Don't forget texture! It's important to try and follow any existing patterns on the surface you're retouching. If there is a line in the face (that you're not trying to get rid of), it would look unnatural for the line to be broken by a patch of unlined skin. Go back over the corrected area, and replace it with a matching texture. Try this for pores, hair, etc.
• Use plus and minus keys on your keyboard to quickly re-size the brush. Use the slider bar for more precise adjustments.

A closer look at Picasa 3 (beta!)

Wednesday, September 3, 2008 6:00 AM

Posted by Todd Bogdan, Software Engineer

We’ve been working on a new version of Picasa for a couple of years, and we think you're going to like the changes and improvements. Mike's post yesterday gave some background on Picasa 3's general focus on easier sharing and smarter integration with Picasa Web Albums. Today, I'll focus the spotlight on our powerful new creative tools, as well as some of the other refinements to be found in Picasa 3.  (Note that this beta is currently US-English only.)

First, a quick aside on performance: Compared to earlier versions of Picasa, Picasa 3 gets some enormous speed and scalability improvements, even in beta form. We’ve done internal testing up to one million photos (this seemed like plenty), and for most photo collections out there, things should just be quite a bit faster.

In a similar vein, we’ve also added a small Photo Viewer that can view files anywhere on your computer. More than anything, it's designed to launch quickly, so you can examine any photo file immediately -- and check out what happens when you use the scroll wheel on your mouse. We’d like you to try it out (and make it your default viewer for JPG, etc.), but if you prefer to use Windows Preview or another program, we remember the last application you were using, so it’s one click to go back.

Okay -- on to photo editing. A new text tool lets you add text to your pictures, and lay it out exactly as you wish, at any transparency level. We have also created a new retouching brush to take care of unsightly blemishes, camera dust, damaged photos, and the like. The red-eye removal tool does a lot of its work automatically now -- there's no need to draw boxes around people's eyes. Our crop tool will also recommend interesting starting points to crop, based on faces and objects in your photos. (As you might've guessed, we're using some of the technology from our name tags feature in Picasa Web Albums to make Picasa 3 smarter, which means less work for you.)


Movies have gotten a big revamp in Picasa 3. You can now “trim” any movie as you’re watching it, or rotate it just like a photo. As we do for photos, you can always undo the trimming or rotations later. You can also capture stills, scrub through time, and play movies fullscreen or as part of a slideshow -- movies are even zoomable, now. Also, when you upload a movie to Youtube or to Picasa Web Albums, Picasa 3 better compresses the movie to make it transfer faster.

The biggest change for movies is that you can now take your favorite collection of photos and videos and stitch them together into a custom movie, complete with soundtrack. Picasa 3 will let you add your own title slides and post to the web in one click. Your custom movies can run the gamut of full HD resolution to tiny mobile phone or photo-frame-ready files.


A lot of our changes are driven by customer feedback. We’ve heard many of you say, “Picasa’s collage looks cool, but why can’t I move the photos?” Well, now you can... and then some. We've gone ahead and added a half-dozen different layouts, each of them customizable, and the output images are gorgeous, because they’re produced at print resolution. (Posters, anyone?) Even after rendering, you can go back and edit all your collages forever. It still takes just one click to turn a photo collage into your Windows desktop wallpaper, but you can also email or upload these for anyone to see, too. Check out the sample below to see how you can also combine collages and text:


We’ve made a lot of improvements to the screensaver as well. You can add your favorite friends (and feeds), and there are some new visual effects too. The screensaver is sharing some DNA with Picasa's slideshow, so both of them can now show the same transition effects.

Feedback from folks who use Picasa the most has helped drive a number of other small refinements: Tags can have multiple words in them, and tagging is much faster. You can migrate whole folders to another drive without losing your album data (try out Folder->Move). This is convenient if you’re running out of space on one disk. Network drives are a lot faster, too.

The list goes on: Raw files now show camera information like JPEGs do, and our RAW support has been extended to more cameras, including the 39 megapixel Hasselblad, for the lucky few. Importing now separates shoots into event groups, so you can import just one day’s photos and leave the rest on your card. Geotagging with Google Earth is available in the main button bar, and there’s a loupe placed close by to zoom on your thumbnails. We've been working on everything from crop (with sizes now covering HDTVs to passport pics), to new watermarking protections on export/upload, and the ability to catpture video or stills direct from your attached webcam. (Hello, YouTube!)

Phew.

I don't want to run too long in one post, but over the next couple weeks, we’ll be doing in-depth tours of individual features, so watch this space. Have fun with the beta, and let us know what you think!