Democracy Photo Challenge

Wednesday, July 7, 2010 4:37 PM

Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager

What does democracy mean to you? This is a personal question whose answer can be expressed in many ways--with lines of prose, a video documentary, or a even single photo.

To inspire people around the world to use photography to share their individual perspectives on democracy, a unique group of partners made up of democracy and youth organizations, academia, the film/entertainment industry, technology companies and the U.S. Department of State launched The Democracy Photo Challenge, the first contest powered by Picasa Web Albums.



Submissions will be accepted by photographers of any experience level until July 28, followed by the selection of 36 finalists by an independent jury. The public will choose 12 winners during a global online vote from August 19 - 26, and the winning photos will be part of a special exhibition at the United Nations and at other venues.

Let the power of an image be your voice. To submit your photo, visit democracyphotochallenge.america.gov.

Got Soccer Fever?

Tuesday, June 8, 2010 8:58 AM

Posted by K. Michael Alexander, Picnik UI Designer

The Picnik team recently launched a set of soccer-themed photo editing effects that make it easy and fun to show the world which team you’re cheering for in South Africa.



With the new effects, you can add digital face paint, soccer-themed stickers and team flag overlays, customized for each of the 32 qualifying teams. To get started, go to picnik.com and choose a photo to edit — you can upload from your computer or import one of your photos from Picasa Web Albums, Facebook, or other photo site. Pick a team from the pulldown menu, select a Soccer Fever effect you want to add, and edit away.

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.