Picasa 3.6: Now with collaborative albums

Tuesday, December 8, 2009 2:00 PM

Posted by Susanna Leng, Software Engineer

In August, 2009, we released collaborative albums for Picasa Web Albums, making it possible for multiple people to add pictures to the same album. Since the easiest way to upload to Picasa Web Albums is using the Picasa software, we're happy to announce that in Picasa 3.6 you can upload photos and videos directly to friends' collaborative albums. Just select your photos, click the 'Upload' button, and select 'Contribute to a friend's album.' Type the name of your friend and Picasa will show you the albums to which you have permission to contribute.


You can also add contributors to your collaborative albums, right from Picasa. You can add contributors when you're uploading photos or when you're sharing photos.


We've also made some improvements to the name tags feature that launched in September. In Picasa 3.6 you'll now see suggested name tags in the "People" pane when viewing a folder or album. You can also control which photos are scanned for faces – just click "Tools" and then "Folder Manager" and toggle face detection for any folder.

We've implemented a few additional features that make it easier to share, organize, and customize your photos. Sharing with groups is now an optional part of uploading to Picasa Web Albums, so you can upload and share photos in one step. In the import room, you can save photos by date taken, today's date, or a custom folder name; if "date taken" is selected, photos will be automatically organized and saved to separate folders by date. And you can now create and save custom crop sizes, expanding your photo size possibilities beyond the standard presets. Finally, we've added an option to preserve original JPG compression quality when uploading to Picasa Web Albums. This will take up more online storage space, but upgrade plans are now much more affordable. You can download Picasa 3.6 at picasa.google.com.

Happy holidays from Picasa Web Albums and Eye-Fi

Monday, December 7, 2009 6:28 PM

Posted by Brian Axe, Product Manager

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

I used to take a lot of photos with the best intentions of sharing them with friends and family. But most of the time they just sat on my camera's memory card, never quite making it to my computer, let alone to my friends and family.

Three weeks ago we made extra storage more affordable for Picasa Web Albums and Gmail, and now we're making it easier to get your photos in the cloud and share them, right in time for holiday picture snapping. We've partnered with Eye-Fi, makers of WiFi-enabled memory cards that make it easy to upload photos directly from your camera to Picasa Web Albums — no cables required. For a limited time, when you buy 200 GB of Google paid storage for $50 you'll get a free 4GB SDHC Eye-Fi card (a $95 value). The Eye-Fi card lets you wirelessly upload photos and videos directly to Picasa Web Albums or to your computer. It even includes automatic geotagging, so you'll know exactly where your pictures were taken. And you won't need to worry about running out of space — 200 GB is enough storage for a hundred thousand original resolution photos. Visit picasa.google.com/eyefi.html to get yours today.

By using Eye-Fi and Picasa Web Albums together, you can automate your photo sharing: photos are wirelessly uploaded and shared with the people that matter. Based on my experience as an avid Eye-Fi user, here's some tips on setting it up:

• Configure the Eye-Fi card to send photos to an active album (in my case, "Axe Family 2009 Lifestream")
• After the first photo posts to the album, share this album with individuals or a group (I created a "Family" group)
• Whenever the Eye-Fi card uploads photos to Picasa Web Albums, the people on the album's shared list are automatically notified via a daily digest email.
• Advanced tip: If you add yourself to the group, you'll get the digest email as well to remind yourself to curate your photos (delete bad pics , add captions, etc).

Eye-Fi can even make the holidays more fun: with nearly instant access to photos of her grandkids, my mother-in-law felt like she was with us this Thanksgiving, even though she was two thousand miles away!

Twice the storage for a quarter of the price

Tuesday, November 10, 2009 6:15 PM

Posted by Elvin Lee, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

People today have more personal data online than ever before. More and more people are starting to move the bulk of their data off the desktop and into servers "in the cloud," where it's accessible from any computer or mobile device and easily shareable with friends and family. At the same time, digital photo technology is making it easier and cheaper than ever to take a lot of pictures, and client software like Picasa 3.5 makes it easier than ever to move photos from your camera to the cloud. That's why we've always given you lots of free storage in products like Picasa Web Albums and Gmail, and why for the past two years we've offered additional storage you can purchase if you need even more space.

While the cost of hard drive storage has continued to drop in these two years, we've also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce your costs even further. Today we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage even more affordable. You can now buy 20 GB for only $5 a year — that's twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera. Since most people have less than 10 GB of photos, chances are you can now save all your memories online for a year for the cost of a triple mocha. If you need more than 20 GB, plans range all the way up to 16 TB, which is enough room for 8 million full resolution photos! And Google paid storage offers an extra level of security, protection and accessibility that you can't get with an external drive — at a similar cost per gigabyte.

As always, extra storage acts as an overflow that you only start using when you reach the limit of your free storage, and people who have extra storage will be automatically upgraded. So if you need more space for thousands of photos of your toddler, or if you're running out of room in your overflowing inbox, visit www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage to see all the plans and to buy more storage.

Add your photos to Google Sites

Friday, October 30, 2009 11:15 AM

Posted by Scott Johnston, Product Manager

Google Sites lets you easily create, update and collaborate on your own site - no technical know-how required. And now you can easily add photos from your Picasa Web Albums to your sites, instead of having to manually upload photos from your computer. Whether you're using Google Sites to keep friends and family updated on your life or to manage a team or project, adding photos can give your site a lift.

The 'Insert' menu in Google Sites now includes an option to insert an existing Picasa Web Albums photo or to upload new photos.


Never used Google Sites? Learn more or sign up now.

Picasa and Windows 7

Thursday, October 22, 2009 11:00 AM

Posted by Brian Axe, Product Manager

We're happy to report that the new version of Picasa 3.5 is compatible with Windows 7. We'd also like to provide some guidance for people who switch to Windows 7 from Windows XP or older versions of Windows, as you'll need to follow a few extra steps to ensure Picasa works as expected. During the installation, Windows backs up all your application data to a new directory, but Picasa and other applications that rely on this data will not see it. To fix this, you'll just need to copy and paste your data to the right place. This will ensure that Picasa doesn't need to re-scan your whole hard drive, and you don't need to re-create your albums and name tags. Check out full details of how to do this in our help center here.

Importing Photos in Picasa 3.5

Thursday, October 15, 2009 10:29 AM

Posted by John Gardiner, User Education and Outreach

We re-designed the import experience in Picasa 3.5 to make it easier to organize your photos, right when you download them from your camera. Now when you click "Import," you can control exactly which photos you want to import to your computer, which ones you want to upload to Picasa Web Albums, including what resolution you want and who to share them with.

As an example, I recently took some great pictures sailing with my family, and when I returned home I wanted to do different things with the different photos. With Picasa's improved Import features, I was able to control which images I only wanted on my computer, which images to post for the world to see, and which images I preferred to share just with my friends.

I think it's funny to hear my friends say I'm a Picasa and Picasa Web Albums expert...little do they know how easy it all is. Check out this video to see what I mean:

Announcing Picasa 3.5, now with name tags, better geotagging and more

Tuesday, September 22, 2009 1:12 PM

Posted by Todd Bogdan, Software Engineer

Today, we are pleased to announce Picasa 3.5, a new version of our free photo editing software for Mac or PC. Picasa 3.5 has name tags and uses the same technology that powers name tags on Picasa Web Albums. With name tags, you can organize your photos based on what matters most: the people in them.

When you first launch Picasa 3.5, it will start scanning the photos in your computer's collection to create groups of similar faces. It puts all these groups into the "Unnamed People" album, where you can easily add a name tag to a set of faces by clicking "Add a name" and typing the person's name. Make sure you're signed into your Google account so names you type will auto-complete with your Google contacts.



After you add a name tag, all pictures that Picasa has identified as that person are automatically added to a new album named after them. As Picasa scans more faces, it will suggest pictures that it thinks match faces already in your people albums. These suggestions are shown with an orange question mark next to the person's album.

In addition to uploading and sharing your newly tagged photos to Picasa Web Albums, you can use the name tags you've added and your new people albums to do creative things with your photos. For example, you can find all of the photos with the same two people in them, create customizable face collages, time-lapse movies, and more.



Since name tags now work on both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, you can share name tags between the two. If you've added name tags in Picasa Web Albums, go to Tools > "Download Name Tags from Picasa Web Albums" in Picasa to import all the names you've added online (and save yourself a lot of time). It works the other way as well: if you're using name tags in Picasa Web Albums, any name tags you add in Picasa are automatically uploaded to Picasa Web Albums when you upload tagged photos, but you can keep all name tag info on your computer if you choose.

Picasa 3.5 also has integrated Google Maps to make geotagging even easier. Now you can add location info to photos -- one photo at a time or several photos at once. Simply select pictures, click the Places panel, search or surf to a place, and drop a pin in the right place on the map. Once you've added geo tags, you can select a group of photos and see where they were all taken.



Nothing has changed in the way the geo information is applied to your photos -- it will still write exact location data to your photo file, but now you don't need to install and open Google Earth to add geo tags (although you can still geotag with Google Earth if you want). And of course, any location data you add in Picasa will automatically sync to Picasa Web Albums when you upload.

We've also given our import process a major make-over. Designed based on feedback from Picasa users, you can now upload photos right to Picasa Web Albums during the import process from your camera or memory card. Since you don't always want to share or upload every photo that you import, you can choose to upload or share only the starred photos, while the rest are imported to your hard drive.



Plus, we've added an entirely new 'Tags' panel in Picasa 3.5. You can use the 'Quick Tag' functionality to access your most commonly used tags, or use tag counts to see the number of photos to which a tag has been applied.



Finally, we launched Picasa for Mac as a beta Labs product 9 months ago. Now that Picasa for Mac has almost all the same features as the PC version, we've decided it's time to remove the beta label. Remember that Picasa for Mac is designed to "play nice" with iPhoto -- Picasa takes a special read-only approach to editing photos stored in the iPhoto library, duplicating files as needed, so your iPhoto library isn't ever affected when you use Picasa.

Here's a short video overview of what's new in Picasa 3.5.



As always, we'd love to hear what you think about Picasa. For now, Picasa 3.5 is available in English only, but we plan to roll it out internationally soon. Download Picasa today and start tagging!