Collaborate on Picasa Web Albums

Wednesday, August 19, 2009 9:57 PM

Posted by Thomas Kang, Software Engineer

After a recent trip to Yosemite, I was frustrated to see my traveling companions share their photos in three different online albums on three different photo-sharing sites. What we really needed was a single album to which everyone could add their photos. Google Docs makes collaborating on documents easy. Why not try a similar idea with photos? Starting today, every album on Picasa Web Albums is potentially collaborative: multiple people can add pictures to the same album.

To make an album collaborative, sign in to Picasa Web Albums and add contributors. Just click the 'Share' button, add contributors, and leave the 'Let people I share with contribute photos' checkbox selected.


You can also manage access for contributors you've added to the 'Shared with' list by toggling the 'plus' icon next to their name – when the plus icon is green they can add photos.



Contributors will need to log in to Picasa Web Albums with their Google Account to add photos. When they visit your collaborative album, they just need to click the 'Add Photos' button to start uploading.


Contributors' photos will be attributed to them, and they can rotate, delete, or add captions to the pictures they've uploaded.

A few limitations worth noting: contributors won't be able to upload to collaborative albums from the Picasa software. Also, if you're contributing to an album using Internet Explorer, for now you will only be able to upload five photos at a time. While this limit is standard for other browsers, we're already working to allow easier collaborative uploads for Internet Explorer.

As always, we'd love to hear your feedback in our help forum.

Update (8:25 PM, August 20): We've fixed the issue with Internet Explorer, so contributors using IE can now upload more than five photos at a time to a collaborative album. Learn more.