Use your extra storage to store any file online

Friday, January 15, 2010 8:35 AM

​Posted by Peter Harbison, Product Marketing Manager, Google Docs
​
If you missed the announcement earlier this week, the good news is that Google Docs is rolling out the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file. This new feature means that you now have an easy way to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for files that are too big to send over email.

Each account will get 1 GB of free storage in Google Docs (in addition to the 1 GB of free storage in Picasa Web Albums and over 7 GB of free storage in Gmail) and will be able to upload any file up to 250 MB. If you’ve already purchased additional storage for Picasa Web Albums and Gmail, that storage is now shared with Google Docs as well, giving you more ways to use your online storage space. As we announced in November, additional storage is only $0.25 per GB per year. And because of the enthusiastic response, the Google Photos team has extended the special offer with Eye-Fi: users in the US or Canada who purchase 200 GB of extra storage for $50 will receive a free wifi-enabled SD card from Eye-Fi.

The any file upload feature will be enabled over the next couple of weeks — look for the bubble notification when you sign in to Google Docs.

Looking sharp for the holidays

Wednesday, December 23, 2009 2:57 PM

Posted by Thomas Kang & Jon Wray, Software Engineers

A helpful feature of Picasa Web Albums is that when you view photos, they're automatically resized to fit your browser. We always display the largest-size photo that will fit inside your browser window, up to 1600 pixels if you have a nice big display. This resizing happens behind the scenes and doesn't require any input from you.

Here's how it works: when you upload a photo to Picasa Web Albums, our photo servers store it and create a couple of smaller versions of the photo. Later, when you click to view a photo, your browser sends a request to the servers asking for the version that will fit best. If the size matches one of the stored versions, that one is served directly. But if the request is for some in-between size that doesn't exist, the servers create it on the fly. And of course, the resized photo always preserves the size ratio of the original so it's not distorted, and we don't scale photos to be larger than the original.


As you can imagine, all this server processing can get pretty intensive. Because loading your photos as quickly as possible is really important to us, until now we streamlined our servers to just resize the photo and send it out right away. But since we recently implemented some optimizations that made Picasa Web Albums much faster overall, we decided to take advantage of the new speed improvements by doing a little extra processing to improve the look of our photos.

A well-known issue with all digital photos is that when a photo is resized, the sharp corners and edges look softer from the color blending that occurs. The standard fix for this is to apply a sharpening filter, which brings dulled edges back into razor-sharp focus. As long as you're careful not to over-sharpen, this can help resized photos look much clearer.

Original Image:

Sharpened Image:

From our extensive testing, we found that adding a little bit of sharpening can make a subtle but noticeable improvement in the visual quality of resized photos in Picasa Web Albums. So we recently added some logic to the server processing code that adds the appropriate amount of sharpening when necessary, before sending it out to the browser. We also reduced the image compression slightly to help preserve the clarity of the fine details in the photos that the sharpening brings out. To make sure you don't notice any latency impact on your Picasa Web Albums viewing experience, we're only applying sharpening to newly uploaded and smaller versions of resized photos for now. And just to be clear, we never alter your original photos – we just create new versions as needed whenever we resize and sharpen.

These sharpening and image compression improvements are our first step towards improving the quality of all images in Picasa Web Albums. We're committed to making your photos look as good as possible, and we're investigating other ways to improve the visual quality of your photos without impacting site performance or excessively altering the look of your original photos. On behalf of the entire Picasa team, happy holidays! Take lots of pictures as you gather with your friends and family to celebrate the season, and we'll see you next year.

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.