Collaborate on Picasa Web Albums

Wednesday, August 19, 2009 9:57 PM

Posted by Thomas Kang, Software Engineer

After a recent trip to Yosemite, I was frustrated to see my traveling companions share their photos in three different online albums on three different photo-sharing sites. What we really needed was a single album to which everyone could add their photos. Google Docs makes collaborating on documents easy. Why not try a similar idea with photos? Starting today, every album on Picasa Web Albums is potentially collaborative: multiple people can add pictures to the same album.

To make an album collaborative, sign in to Picasa Web Albums and add contributors. Just click the 'Share' button, add contributors, and leave the 'Let people I share with contribute photos' checkbox selected.


You can also manage access for contributors you've added to the 'Shared with' list by toggling the 'plus' icon next to their name – when the plus icon is green they can add photos.



Contributors will need to log in to Picasa Web Albums with their Google Account to add photos. When they visit your collaborative album, they just need to click the 'Add Photos' button to start uploading.


Contributors' photos will be attributed to them, and they can rotate, delete, or add captions to the pictures they've uploaded.

A few limitations worth noting: contributors won't be able to upload to collaborative albums from the Picasa software. Also, if you're contributing to an album using Internet Explorer, for now you will only be able to upload five photos at a time. While this limit is standard for other browsers, we're already working to allow easier collaborative uploads for Internet Explorer.

As always, we'd love to hear your feedback in our help forum.

Update (8:25 PM, August 20): We've fixed the issue with Internet Explorer, so contributors using IE can now upload more than five photos at a time to a collaborative album. Learn more.

Picasa Web Albums Stats

Monday, July 20, 2009 11:45 AM

Posted by Lei Wang, Software Engineer

I took a vacation to Baja Sur a couple months ago, camera in tow. When I got back, I narrowed 500+ shots down to the 50 touched-up photos that I thought really spoke about the trip. I uploaded them to Picasa Web Albums, invited a bunch of friends and family to view and...nothing. After a few Picasa Web Albums comments and a couple email responses, my vacation had been quietly tucked into the shoebox.

How many people actually looked at these photos? Which ones did they like?

I'm happy to announce that Picasa Web Albums now gives you a way to find out. While viewing any photo or video, you can now see how many 'Views' it's received and also how many people liked it.

Views from all sources are included in the 'Views' count: Picasa Web Albums, photos embedded on a third party site, Google Image Search, etc. The view count is visible to anyone with access to the photo or video.

Clicking "I like this" allows visitors to offer quick feedback, especially when they can't think of anything clever to post as a comment. Similar to 'Views', the number of likes is visible to anyone with access to the photos or video.

Easier to find Favorites - better Fan control

Thursday, July 9, 2009 3:35 PM

Posted by Simon Han, Software Engineer

An engineer on our team, Ping, has over 700 Picasa Web Albums Fans. Each of these Fans has signed up - by clicking "Add to Favorites" - to be notified each time he uploads new public content. In this way, the uploads Ping wants to share publicly are broadcast to the people who care about his photos.

"Add to Favorites" has been around for awhile, but up until this point it hasn't always been easy to know which of your friends and family use Picasa Web Albums. Enter "Suggested Favorites." Similar to the way chat contacts are handled in Gmail, we'll suggest friends and contacts who you may want to add as Favorites, allowing you to easily keep track of what they're sharing with the world in their public albums.



Of course Favorites is a two way street. While you can find more photos from people you care about, this means that they can find you too, which isn't always a good thing. For this reason, we're also introducing the ability to block certain users. With three distinct levels of sharing, Picasa Web Albums already allowed you control over exactly who can see your photos. The addition of Block helps you ensure that the activity in your public albums isn't marred due to unwanted activity from a specific user.


Blocking a user immediately removes them as a Fan, preventing them from receiving future email notifications about your public albums. It also cuts off their ability to comment on your photos and deletes all their old comments across your gallery.

The Fast and The Full-Screen

Thursday, June 4, 2009 3:37 PM

As you may have read on the Google Blog today, we just gave Picasa Web Albums a major tune-up -- flipping through photos is now a whole lot faster.

You can see for yourself by visiting any album and hitting the arrow keys as you flip through pictures. Better, yet, take your browser full-screen, and fire up a slideshow -- if you've got a decent broadband connection, you can see our responsiveness at high-resolution by pressing (or holding) the arrow keys.

We're proud of the fact that we've managed to accelerate the photo-viewing experience without compromising on quality -- as always, we still dynamically retrieve and display the largest-size photo that'll fit inside your browser window, up to a whopping 1600px. (Sure beats looking at small, blurry photos.)

For many of us, the early constraints of the web ingrained the habit of hunting-and-pecking through thumbnails, trying to isolate the few gems in each album. Around the office, we've noticed that we're often skipping this step altogether, now, and flipping through entire albums at full-size -- it just seemed faster and easier.

Give it a try, yourself -- here's a demo album, and an example of what you can see when you turn on the "Full-Screen" view. Let us know what you think!

Posted by Justin Zaren, Software Engineer

The coffee-table book goes custom

Tuesday, May 26, 2009 9:13 AM

Last year's presidential campaign gave photographers -- professionals and hobbyists alike -- a fantastic opportunity to capture both the personalities and the process of politics in America. Between the cross-country whistlestop tours, the crowds flocking to party conventions, and motivated grassroots activity, it was easy to see why "all politics is local" -- and to snap a photo that captured that idea.

We've previously pointed to the crowd-sourced photography project America At Home, which used the Picasa Web Albums Data API to allow customization of the book's dustjacket. Now, the same publisher is releasing The Obama Time Capsule, which introduces a new (and we think interesting) degree of customization for a photography book -- along with the cover, you can add personal photos to a few interior pages, and personalize other elements, like the dedication page. The book itself includes some top-notch photography from leading photographers, along with essays penned by Joel Klein, Colin Powell, Arianna Huffington, and others.

Obviously, the appeal of this particular title may depend on your own political interest and leanings, but politics aside, we think this kind of customizable photography book is a pretty nifty idea for a keepsake, and a great example of how digital photography lets us do more with our photos. If you're interested, you can learn more about the book (and transfer photos directly from your Picasa Web Albums account) at TheObamaTimeCapsule.com.

posted by Brian Axe, Product Manager

Calling all students: Google Photography Prize

Friday, May 8, 2009 2:45 PM

Posted by Louise Rigby, Associate Product Marketing Manager, iGoogle

We just launched the Google Photography Prize, a global competition for students to create new themes for iGoogle.

The contest aims to find talented student photographers and will give them unprecedented online and offline exposure: Winning submissions will be available for millions of Google users around the world to display on their personalised iGoogle homepages, and will also be part of a special exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London. The overall winner will also receive £5,000 ($7,500) and an invitation to spend a day with renowned photographer Martin Parr.

It may seem brave to unleash student art on our homepage, but given the amazing talent of student photographers today, our esteemed panel of judges, and the draw of being able to exhibit at the Saatchi Gallery, we're expecting to see some great entries!

The Google Photography Prize is open to higher education students around the world, and runs until May 31. You can enter by submitting a series of five photographs at google.com/photographyprize.

The thirty-six top entries will be selected for the shortlist and made open to an online public vote on June 11. The top six vote-winners will then be flown to London for the opening night of an exhibition of their work at the Saatchi Gallery, and the ultimate winner will be decided by a panel of art critics and artists, including Idris Khan, Martin Parr, Michael Hoppen, Susanna Brown and Tim Marlow.

Millions of user are already adorning their iGoogle page with images, including original art created by Jeff Koons, Radiohead, Rolf Harris, Stella McCartney and Philippe Starck. We're excited to now be adding more photography to the mix, and we look forward to see how art will continue to develop online.

Good luck!

Using Eye-Fi with Picasa - new album presets & video uploads

Tuesday, May 5, 2009 7:41 AM

Posted by Jason Cook, Product Marketing Manager

When the Eye-Fi card was first introduced over a year ago, it quickly won fans among the Picasa team -- after all, here was an affordable piece of hardware that bestowed WiFi superpowers on almost any digital camera, and used the Picasa API to effortlessly upload photos to Picasa Web Albums (and with nary a cable in sight).

Since then, the Eye Fi team has steadily added features like geotagging, hotspot subscriptions, and more. There are new settings in the Eye Fi manager that enable some features that we think Picasa Web Albums users will particularly benefit from: the ability to specify which online album your camera should upload photos to when it connects via WiFi, as well as new options to auto-tag photos, preset description text, and so on. In addition, they've just launched a brand-new generation of cards which add the ability to upload movies from your camera straight to Picasa Web Albums.

For example, say you're heading out on a cross-country road trip, and want to keep a select group of friends and family up-to-date with photos and videos. Instead of having to wait until your trip is finished and your camera connected to your home computer, now you can share an unlisted album with friends as you set out, have your Eye-Fi Explore Video card upload to that specific album, and then hit the road. That way, whenever you're in range of a supported WiFi hotspot, your camera will upload your newest pictures and movies to your vacation album, allowing others to vicariously travel with you.

There's a nice video tutorial on the Eye Fi site that covers these features in more detail. You can also learn more about uploading video files from your camera's Eye-Fi Explore or Share Video card to Picasa Web Albums on the Eye-Fi site.