EnigmatriX
Adept
Google launched a new beta of Picasa on Tuesday. Its biggest new feature is the capability to post pictures directly from the application to a Google-hosted Web album called picasa web albums. Picasa has become the PC-based photo manager for many people, and many of them have become frustrated that you need a separate non-Google service to post photos online.
At first blush, integration appears quite good. You create an album by first selecting photos from your Picasa library and then pressing the "Web Album" button in Picasa. It couldn't be simpler. Album titles and descriptions transfer over automatically, but you can easily change them if you want. The albums get nice human-readable URLs and sharing them is a snap. Other Picasa users can download images (if you allow it) into their own Picasa libraries. And the Web pages that Picasa Web Albums creates are very clean and easy to navigate.
But there are small snags: While albums on Picasa Web Albums can be made either public or unlisted, there's no way to password-protect them. And although Web Albums will display slideshows, captions that you attach to photos don't show up in them.
There's a bigger issue with this service: It's one-way. Once you upload photos from Picasa to Picasa Web Albums, there's no link between them. If you write a caption or delete a photo on your PC, nothing changes on your online album (or vice versa) unlike that of Sharpcast and Phanfare, both of which feature live synchronization between media files on your PCs and your online albums.
Surprisingly Google is being stingy with online storage space for photos: Free accounts are limited to 250 megabytes. That's adequate for a bunch of slideshows but not it's not enough to be a serious online photo storage solution. Oddly, Gmail, which is also free, gives you 2.7 gigabytes to play around in. If you want more photo storage, you can get 6 GB online for $25 a year.
Homepage: http://picasaweb.google.com/
Source
At first blush, integration appears quite good. You create an album by first selecting photos from your Picasa library and then pressing the "Web Album" button in Picasa. It couldn't be simpler. Album titles and descriptions transfer over automatically, but you can easily change them if you want. The albums get nice human-readable URLs and sharing them is a snap. Other Picasa users can download images (if you allow it) into their own Picasa libraries. And the Web pages that Picasa Web Albums creates are very clean and easy to navigate.
But there are small snags: While albums on Picasa Web Albums can be made either public or unlisted, there's no way to password-protect them. And although Web Albums will display slideshows, captions that you attach to photos don't show up in them.
There's a bigger issue with this service: It's one-way. Once you upload photos from Picasa to Picasa Web Albums, there's no link between them. If you write a caption or delete a photo on your PC, nothing changes on your online album (or vice versa) unlike that of Sharpcast and Phanfare, both of which feature live synchronization between media files on your PCs and your online albums.
Surprisingly Google is being stingy with online storage space for photos: Free accounts are limited to 250 megabytes. That's adequate for a bunch of slideshows but not it's not enough to be a serious online photo storage solution. Oddly, Gmail, which is also free, gives you 2.7 gigabytes to play around in. If you want more photo storage, you can get 6 GB online for $25 a year.
Homepage: http://picasaweb.google.com/
Source
