Picasa -- it's not just for photos, anymore!

Tuesday, October 21, 2008 3:45 PM

Posted by Fred Zhang, Software Engineer

Shooting video isn't limited to videocameras, anymore -- people are now capturing video content on everything from their mobile phones to their high-end SLRs. Thankfully, Picasa 3 can help you easily manage all that video footage, just like it does for your photos, so you can organize, edit, and share your favorite movies.

Videos appear right alongside photos in your Library. But when you double-click any video, you'll enter the "Edit Room", which gives you playback controls and some straightforward editing features:

• Zoom the video size with slider, play your video in full screen or rotate a video -- just like you do with photos.
• Find a particular frame interesting? Go ahead and click the "Take Snapshot" button, and Picasa will capture the frame in its native size, saving it in a "Captured Videos" album for you.
• Want to trim your video? The "In" and "Out" buttons allow you to set start and end points for your clip, or you can simply drag the two triangle markers under a video. Don't worry about making a mistake -- just like with its photo editing features, Picasa provides full Undo and Redo. If you're happy with your edits, and want to save the polished results, just click "Export Clip". Picasa will save a new copy in your "Exported Videos" album.
• Did your digital camera generate a massive file for a short video? Many cameras don't do a great job compressing videos for easy sharing, but Picasa can help. When you click "Export Clip", Picasa will compress your movie into a smaller file, which saves disk space and makes uploading much faster.
  

If you'd like to get a little more creative with your video -- or turn a photo album into an entertaining slideshow movie with music, captions, and more -- be sure to check out the new Movie Maker tool in Picasa 3. The Movie Maker tool shines at creating fast, simple videos and helping you share them without a lot of fuss. To get started, simply select a few photos or video clips, then click the "Movie" button. There's lots of customized touches you can add:

• Use different transitions like Pan or Zoom to create cool effects when going from one slide to the next.
• Got MP3s? Add your own music soundtrack to your slideshows.
• Select your video quality: create a YouTube-friendly videos at 320x240, or render High-Definition videos at 720p or 1080p.
• Mix and match photo and video clips in your movies -- don't forget you can use the built-in webcam tool to create video, too.
• Movie Maker lets you easily add title slides and end credits, but you can also use the text and collage tools in Picasa to get creative, and make the perfect photo slide to introduce your movie.
• Like collages, you can always revisit a movie to make changes, add new pictures, or swap out the soundtrack. To do this, click the "Edit Movie" button at the top of the edit room when playing or viewing movie.
  

Like photos, movies are more fun when you share -- so give the Movie Maker a spin, and start uploading your work!

Share movies from your Mac with Picasa Web Albums

Friday, October 10, 2008 12:06 PM

Posted by Greg Robbins, Software Engineer

Attention Mac users:  The Mac team at Google just released a new update of the Picasa Web Albums Uploader which now includes the ability to easily export movies from iPhoto '08.  This update also preserves geotagging information in your photos, so if you're lucky enough to have a camera that adds G.P.S. data to your snapshots, you can see them automatically mapped inside Picasa Web Albums.

For Mac users, the Picasa Web Albums Uploaders are the fastest, easiest way to share photos (and now movies!) on Picasa Web Albums.  Like earlier versions, the download provides you with both an iPhoto plugin, as well as a standalone application.  Visit the download page to get the latest version, and don't hesitate to give us feedback about the uploaders at the Picasa Help discussion group.

You can learn more about this release and other news from the Google Mac team at the Google Mac blog.  (For a quick demo of Picasa Web Albums Uploaders, see the video below)

Picasa 3 (beta) for Linux

Thursday, October 2, 2008 9:43 PM

Posted by Lei Zhang, Software Engineer

We're proud to announce the public beta of Picasa 3.0 for Linux (just a few days past the end of summer :-)

With version 3, Picasa adds improved Linux desktop integration. For instance, it now uses your preferred file manager, and you can use your preferred email program to send photos directly from Picasa. Picasa even integrates with the camera detection features in Gnome and KDE, so your desktop environment will ask you to
launch Picasa when you plug in your camera. Our native Firefox integration also makes it easy to download entire albums from Picasa Web Albums with just a click.

The most important features from our Windows release are all present in this beta of Picasa 3 for Linux: Along with faster performance, Picasa 3 for Linux introduces new features like automatic web sync, a greatly-improved collage tool, a powerful retouching tool, and an intuitive text tool that's both fun and useful. A full list of changes can be viewed here.

To get started, visit our download page. You can also use the Google Linux Software Repository to install and stay up-to-date with all of Google's Linux software. If you have questions after installing, please visit our Linux-specific FAQ or Linux User Group.

And, for those who have been keeping score, we've contributed about 850 patches to Wine so far this year, bringing our total to about 2700. Many of this year's patches have been to improve video support (courtesy of star intern Maarten Lankhorst), but those changes are not yet finished, so the Movie Maker feature and movie support in general is still disabled. To learn more about Google's participation in Wine, see our blog post from earlier this year or our Wine contributions page on code.google.com. Thanks to the Wine Project for a fabulous tool!

Stay in sync

Monday, September 29, 2008 1:49 PM

Posted by Ella To, Test Engineer

One downside to revisiting old photos on your PC and editing them is that you have to remember to re-upload those photos to the web in order for your changes to be reflected online. Well... that used to be the case. With the new Sync functionality in Picasa 3 (beta), you can now sidestep that chore completely.

Picasa 3 allows you to effortlessly keep photos and videos you've uploaded up-to-date. With a click of a button, you can enable syncing of any album. This means that whenever you make a change to a photo or video in Picasa (that includes edits, captions, tags and geotags) your online copy of the album will be seamlessly updated as soon as you log in. If there are some photos that you'd rather not share, you can always suppress those photos from appearing in your album.

And here's a power tip that can really speed things up: the sync feature also allows you to sync starred photos only -- so if you use stars to single out the "cream of the crop" in your photo collection, this can make sharing your very best shots easy. Use the drop-down menu next to the 'Sync to Web' and 'Share' buttons to enable starred-photos-only syncing, or specify other sync preferences, such as upload resolution, etc.

Tagging Improvements

Thursday, September 25, 2008 11:52 AM

Posted by Tara Morrison, Software QA engineer

With the release of Picasa 3, we made many updates; improvements to keywording and tagging are no exception. You probably knew about Tag button next to the Search field, but did you also know that CTRL - K, and CTRL - T bring up the tagging dialog? While editing photos, this keyboard shortcut is very convenient to help you add tags on the fly. 

The blue status bar at the bottom of the screen now shows any tags applied to your pictures --  this works on the single image, and the album level. 

Tags are also a thumbnail caption option now! You can try it out in
View > Thumbnail Caption > Tags. 

Multi-word tags are now supported. In Picasa 2, "happy birthday" would become "happy" and "birthday". Now it works like you want it to :) 

Last, but certainly not least, bulk tagging is faster. Oh and, by the way, we also have auto-complete in the tags dialog, and in the Search bar.

The Text Tool: enabling your photos to speak for themselves

Monday, September 22, 2008 3:28 PM

Posted by Tara Morrison, Software QA Engineer

In addition to some of the other cool new features in Picasa 3, we're excited to announce that you can now add text to your photos. You may have already spent time captioning your photo collection, but now, with the Text Tool, your words can appear directly on the photos themselves.


The Text Tool allows you to create multiple areas of text, while easily customizing how your text looks. You can adjust the font or layout, re-size, adjust the angle, and drag it anywhere. You can also edit your text anytime, so have fun experimenting.



To get started with the Text Tool, check out these examples and read some of our tips:

• Using a color that already appears in the photo can be a nice complement for your text.
• Add the same text to multiple photos (a watermark, for example), using the Copy Text and Paste Text options under the Edit menu
• Create a more subtle looking caption using the Transparency slider
• Create interesting effects by layering text, especially using different transparency settings

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.