Picasa 3.1 & name tags localized in 38 languages

Tuesday, December 16, 2008 5:27 PM

Posted by Pam Benjatanaporn, Program Manager

You may have caught the news on the main Google blog; today we're releasing Picasa 3.1 and the "name tags" feature to all 38 languages we currently serve.

If you've been waiting for a localized version of Picasa to try all the new tools in Picasa 3, or if you've been wondering when a name tags opt-in button would appear in your localized version of Picasa Web Albums, well, now's the moment!  Visit picasa.google.com to download Picasa 3.1, or sign in to Picasa Web Albums to get started with name tags.

Improved sharing, international name tags, and more

Thursday, December 4, 2008 11:28 AM

Posted by Ping Hsin Chen, Software Engineer

A few months ago, we released our "name tags" feature in US English, which helps you easily organize all your photos based on who's in each of your pictures. By automatically clustering similar faces in your photo collection together, name tags makes it easy for you to label hundreds of photos in a matter of minutes -- so you can do things like create slideshows featuring specific friends with just a couple of clicks.

We're proud of the great reception name tags received, and today, we're happy to announce that the name tags feature is now available in the full panoply of languages (38 in all!) that Picasa Web Albums currently serves. To get started with name tags, just click the opt-in button on your Picasa Web Albums gallery page.

That's not all we're releasing today, however. We've been busy building finer-grained sharing controls, better video playback quality, and a few other nice surprises, like automatic translation of comments and an improved gallery page design.

So what's new with sharing? To start, we've made it easier for you to quickly see who you've shared your albums with -- you'll notice this information in the right-hand column of any album page. For viewers, we've reciprocated by making it easier to see shared albums, too: whenever your friends or family look at your gallery page, they can now easily see all the albums you've shared with them -- public, unlisted, or sign-in-required -- in one place.

Of course, we can only track sharing that happens from inside Picasa Web Albums -- if you're in the habit of copy & pasting links to your unlisted albums into an email, these social features won't work. So go ahead and give the 'share' button a try: it's faster, it's integrated with your contact list, and now provides a better photo-sharing experience over the long run.

By the way, did you catch that mention of 'sign-in-required' albums? Yep, that's new, too. From the beginning, we've always offered a choice between 'public' and 'unlisted' albums -- public albums are for photos you want to share with as wide an audience as possible, whereas an unlisted album remains essentially invisible until you share its URL with friends or family. (One of the great things about unlisted albums is that they don't require your friends to sign up for a Google account just to see the photos you've shared -- and it gives family members the freedom to pass along a link to favorite baby picture, and so on.)

Today, we're adding an even higher degree of control -- the ability to share only with specific individuals. This is the most restrictive sharing setting, and it requires recipients to have (or sign up for) a Picasa Web Albums account. As such, it's a bit more work than the well-balanced convenience of unlisted albums, but if you're looking for exceptionally tight control over exactly who can see specific photo albums in your collection, give this feature a spin. (If you use Picasa software on your PC, we'll be issuing an update in the next few weeks that will allow you to manage these new privacy options directly from your desktop.)

There are several other changes out today as well, like the aforementioned improvements to video--now all your videos over a certain size (320 pixels) will play back in higher-quality MPEG4 format. You don't need to re-upload the files or make any other changes, just enjoy your existing videos at higher quality! Also, we made some tweaks to our page layout design to add a bit more polish.

We hope you enjoy the new changes -- as always, let us know what you think in our new Picasa Help Forum.

Picasa 3 -- fresh out of beta!

Wednesday, October 29, 2008 3:00 PM

posted by Mike Horowitz, Product Manager

Today's a big day for us -- we're peeling the 'beta' label off of Picasa 3, and will shortly be rolling out an official 'Picasa 3.0' update to our US-English Picasa 2 users.

Faster performance and increased stability were two important goals for Picasa 3, and we certainly owe a hat tip to the millions of Picasa fans who downloaded and helped test our public beta.  Thanks to their feedback and error reports, we've further refined and and optimized today's release of Picasa 3.0.  Along with many bug fixes, the official Picasa 3 build includes improved RAW support and a faster scanning engine than the beta  -- so as you add or alter photos on your system, you'll see changes reflected more quickly inside your Picasa library.

Previous posts on this blog covered Picasa's new features in detail -- like automatic web sync, a greatly-improved collage tool, a new text tool, the ability to edit movies, and a lighting-fast photo viewer.  (See them all in action in this video.)  If you haven't taken Picasa 3 out for a spin, now's definitely the time!

As always, let us know what you think of the new release by visiting our Google Group.  

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.