Posted by Roger Trias i Sanz, Panoramio Software Engineer
Since we know the Picasa community takes great photos of beautiful places, we're happy to announce that you can now easily upload your photos to Panoramio, a Google-powered site for exploring places through photos. Photos you upload will be shared with the Panoramio community and with the world on Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Search, and more.
To upload a photo to Panoramio, click the "Upload to Panoramio" link below the location map next to a photo in Picasa Web Albums. You'll need to sign in or create a Panoramio account to upload. Photos must be shared publicly in Picasa Web Albums and have a location set to be eligible for upload to Panoramio.
Note that Panoramio creates a duplicate copy of all uploaded photos, so if you choose to delete a photo in the future you'll need to delete it from both places.
Thanks for sharing your favorite place photos with Panoramio!
While thousands of lucky fans get to experience the excitement of the Games live and in person, most of us will only be able to watch from afar. This year, we've created a special Picasa Web Albums gallery so people around the world can get a front row seat to all the action. Whether you're at home or in Vancouver, you can peruse the best user-submitted photos of the Games from Picasa and recent photos from Google News. Click any user-submitted photo to see the full screen version or check out other photos from the album.
Wherever you are in the world, we'd love for you to submit your photos celebrating the Games. Simply upload your pictures to Picasa Web Albums, tag them with "wintergames2010", and make them public. You can even add a location geotag so people can see exactly where your photos were taken. If you're uploading photos from your mobile phone, you can use "wintergames2010" as the email subject and we'll recognize those as well. We'll select the best photos and feature them for the world to see at picasa.google.com/explorethegames.
While you're at it, check out some of the other great stuff Google is doing for sports fans. See it all at www.google.com/games10, including slope-level Street View imagery featuring snowmobile-captured ski runs on Whistler Mountain, an iGoogle gadget with real-time medal counts, news, event results, and schedules, plus much more.
For many of us, the best part about taking photos is sharing them with others. Today, with the launch of Google Buzz, we're giving you a new way to share and view photos online, and start conversations about the things you find interesting.
Google Buzz is built right into Gmail and is fully integrated with Picasa Web Albums. Any photos you upload to and share from Buzz are automatically stored in a new unlisted album in your Picasa Web Albums account, so you can view them from either site. It's easy to upload multiple photos at once from Buzz - just click "Insert: Photo" from a new post, select "upload files," and click "Add photos to post" once they're fully uploaded. Since photos are meant to be viewed fast and full-screen, clicking a photo in Buzz opens an embedded viewer designed to give you an optimal viewing experience.
Getting started with Google Buzz is easy. Just head over to Gmail and click the "Buzz" link below "Inbox" -- Buzz will be linked to your Picasa account by default. Any public photos you upload to Picasa Web Albums will automatically create a new Buzz post populated with the photos. You can also email photos from your Gmail account to buzz@gmail.com, which will automatically upload them to Picasa Web Albums and create a new Buzz post.
Check out the video below for a run-down of some of the stuff you can do with Google Buzz:
Visit buzz.google.com for more information, or head to the Picasa Help Center to find out more about how Buzz and Picasa Web Albums work together.
P.S. Keep in mind that Google Buzz is rolling out gradually, it might be a few days before you get it for your account.
In the past year, we've added several advanced search options for finding public photos in Picasa Web Albums. To help you find the right photo, you can filter your search by aspect ratio, size, photos vs. videos, photos with faces, and more. We're now happy to add one more dimension: the ability to search by camera. Searching by camera allows you to sample the quality of photos taken with a particular brand of camera or a specific model, and could help you make a decision between buying a Nikon D90 or a Canon EOS 50D.
To search by camera, first do a search in Picasa Web Albums. Click the 'Show Options' button, click 'Camera Models...' and then either choose your preferred make or type in a specific model.
Posted by Kelvin Ho, Nexus One Product Manager and Soujanya Bhumkar, CEO and Co-founder, Cooliris
Managing your media on a mobile phone can sometimes be cumbersome – many phones have cameras that make it easy to take photos and record videos on the go, but trying to find and share them afterwards can be a time-consuming process. The new Gallery app, which was developed in partnership with Cooliris for the Nexus One, makes it easier to browse, edit, and share photos and videos on the go.
For starters, when you take photos or videos with your phone, they'll automatically be available in the Gallery under the "Camera" category, so you can quickly browse photos and videos you've taken or view them in automated slideshows. Since you often want to access photos you have stored in the cloud, the Gallery can also sync with multiple Google accounts so you can view and share all of your Picasa Web Albums photos from the Gallery.
Similar to syncing for contacts and email, thumbnails of synced photos are transferred wirelessly, so there's no need to plug your phone into your computer. You can add and select the Google accounts associated with the Picasa photos you want to sync with the Gallery in the "Accounts & sync" tab under Settings. Click on an account and mark the checkbox next to "Sync Picasa Web Albums" to automatically pull your online photos into the Gallery.
It works both ways -- you can upload one or multiple photos from the Gallery right to your Picasa Web Albums, Facebook accounts, or other 3rd party applications. Just click "Share", choose Picasa or Facebook, add a caption, select your destination album (or create a new one) and click Upload.
With just a few clicks, you can also send photos or videos directly to friends or family via text message, email or bluetooth. For photos taken with your phone, you can perform simple edits like cropping or rotating, and can set any photo as a contact icon or wallpaper. To share or edit photos, simply click "Menu" from any photo to bring up the options.
The new Gallery app also makes finding photos really simple. In any album, you can switch between the standard view and grouped view using the toggle at the top right. When you're in grouped view, photos and videos are automatically grouped into digital stacks by date and time, and even by location if geotagging is enabled.
Here's a short video that shows features of the Nexus One camera and Gallery in action:
For now, the Gallery is native to the Nexus One, but it will be available in the future for other Android devices with Android 2.1 or later versions.
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.
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.
