The Fast and The Full-Screen

Thursday, June 4, 2009 3:37 PM

As you may have read on the Google Blog today, we just gave Picasa Web Albums a major tune-up -- flipping through photos is now a whole lot faster.

You can see for yourself by visiting any album and hitting the arrow keys as you flip through pictures. Better, yet, take your browser full-screen, and fire up a slideshow -- if you've got a decent broadband connection, you can see our responsiveness at high-resolution by pressing (or holding) the arrow keys.

We're proud of the fact that we've managed to accelerate the photo-viewing experience without compromising on quality -- as always, we still dynamically retrieve and display the largest-size photo that'll fit inside your browser window, up to a whopping 1600px. (Sure beats looking at small, blurry photos.)

For many of us, the early constraints of the web ingrained the habit of hunting-and-pecking through thumbnails, trying to isolate the few gems in each album. Around the office, we've noticed that we're often skipping this step altogether, now, and flipping through entire albums at full-size -- it just seemed faster and easier.

Give it a try, yourself -- here's a demo album, and an example of what you can see when you turn on the "Full-Screen" view. Let us know what you think!

Posted by Justin Zaren, Software Engineer