Search engines make the best picture frames

Monday, June 7, 2010 11:01 AM

Posted by Jon Emerson, Software Engineer

Photos can be displayed in all sorts of places; on a wall, on your desk or in a Picasa Web Album. We recently announced yet another place — the Google homepage, where you can use your favorite photos or images as a background. If you store your photos in Picasa Web Albums, you can choose a photo right from your existing albums. There is also the option to upload a photo from your computer or choose one from a public gallery of featured photos hosted by Picasa.


When you visit google.com, you’ll see a link in the lower left-hand corner inviting you to "Change background image." For those of you outside of the U.S. we will begin rolling this out to you within the next few days. If you don’t see the link yet, please check back soon.

Once you’ve customized your homepage with a fun personal photo we’d love to see what it looks like. Tweet a picture of your page with the hashtag #myGooglepage to share it with us.

Have fun customizing your new photo frame!

Last chance: free Eye-Fi card with Google storage purchase

Monday, May 24, 2010 10:15 AM

Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager

Six months ago we began offering a free 4GB SDHC Eye-Fi card (a $95 value) to anyone who bought 200 GB of Google paid storage for $50, which is shared between Picasa Web Albums, Gmail, and Google Docs. An Eye-Fi card lets you wirelessly upload photos and videos from your camera directly to Picasa Web Albums, or straight to your computer - no cables needed.

As with all special offers, this too must come to an end: this Thursday, May 27th, is the last day to take advantage of this deal. Head to picasa.google.com/eyefi.html to check out all the details and get one for yourself.

The Panoramio Widget API: Embedding Panoramio photos and slideshows

Tuesday, May 11, 2010 10:58 AM

Posted by Roger Trias i Sanz, Panoramio Software Engineer

The Panoramio team is happy to announce the recent launch of the Panoramio Widget API, an easy way to publish photos of your favorite places on any site or blog you own. Using a Panoramio widget, you can share photos from your far-off travels or pics of your favorite local haunts.

The Panoramio widgets are highly customizable, so you can embed a photo slideshow, a set of thumbnails, or just a single photo. We'd love your feedback, so please let us know what you think about these new widgets in the Panoramio forum.

More ways to share your photos

Thursday, April 29, 2010 10:02 AM

Posted by Ping Chen, Software Engineer

Like many other things in life, photos are best when shared. I share the majority of my photos on Picasa Web Albums, but I also sometimes tweet about specific photos or share them on my blog. Today, we're making it a little simpler to share your PWA photos to whichever destination you want, with the launch of easy share buttons for Google Buzz, Blogger and Twitter.

To share a photo or album from Picasa Web Albums straight to any of these sites, just click the appropriate icon to the right of your photo, customize your message, and post it.


We also know that sometimes you don't want to share quite so publicly, but actually just want to share a link to a single unlisted photo, without revealing the whole album. We've now made this possible, by updating the "Link to this photo" URL so that the album name is hidden on the viewer's photo page (the "Share" button still works as normal).

Check out our Help Center for more information, and please let us know what you think about the new sharing options in our forum.

Ten times more albums

Monday, April 5, 2010 11:58 AM

Posted by Evan Tsang and Tammy McLeod, Software Engineers

We want Picasa Web Albums to be a place you can share and store all your digital photos, regardless of how many you have. We recently made extra storage really affordable, but until now, Picasa Web accounts have been limited to a maximum of 1,000 albums. We heard that you needed more room, and because we want you to keep sharing your photos and posting them to Buzz, we've worked hard to now raise this limit to 10,000 albums.

Since we want the Picasa Web experience to be really fast, the default view still only shows a hundred albums. If you have more than a hundred albums, you'll see two links at the bottom of your screen that let you to load the rest.

The bigger the better

Thursday, April 1, 2010 8:23 AM

Posted by C. Amera, LifeSize Engineer

In a world where everything seems to be getting smaller and smaller, we still believe that bigger is sometimes better. On the photos team, we know this is definitely true. That's why we're happy to announce LifeSize^TM on Picasa Web Albums, an easy way to create and print larger-than-life versions of your photos, all from the comfort of your own home. LifeSize uses intelligent shape detection software to find the subject in your photo and automatically determines its approximate real-life height based on background scenery, surrounding objects, and the ratio of the subject's foot-to-navel length and the navel-to-head length. Check it out and make your own really, really big photo at picasa.google.com/lifesize.

Picasa 3.6 for Mac, now in 35 languages

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 10:53 AM

Posted by David Catmull, Software Engineer

We launched Picasa for Mac in Google Labs just over a year ago, and it's grown up fast. With the 3.5 launch, Picasa for Mac matched the features of Picasa for PC, and today we're excited to announce the next milestone: Picasa for Mac is now available in 35 languages. For the first time, Mac users who speak languages other than English can take advantage of Picasa's free photo-editing and organization tools, plus lots of new stuff that's been added recently: adding name tags, creating collaborative albums, and geotagging photos using Google Maps. For an in-depth overview of all the new features available, check out our launch blog posts for Picasa 3.5 and 3.6 or the Picasa Help Center.

To get Picasa 3.6 for Mac in your language, download the newest version from picasa.google.com/mac/ or from your local Picasa site. When you load Picasa for the first time, it displays in the same language as your operating system, and you can always easily change your language settings in System Preferences.