Ads Next to Picasa Web Albums Search Results

Google started to display text ads above the search results from Picasa Web Albums. In the recent months, Google turned to the services that weren't yet monetized to improve its financial performances: Google Image Search, Google News, Google Finance and now Picasa Web Albums.


"We've been testing different advertising formats for years (some have been more successful than others), and over the next few months, you'll see us continuing to experiment with new ads in new places. (...) Whenever we make changes like these, we carefully evaluate users' reactions to ensure we're holding true to our basic principles: that ads by Google should always be relevant and useful. Of course, these experiments benefit Google because they generate revenue from new sources — but by ensuring that we show the right ads at the right time to the right people, we'll add value for users too," explained Google in November.

Now that the revenues from advertising grow much slower than in the past, Google will probably launch more paid services like the App Engine or Google Apps Premier Edition. Even Google Checkout, a service that has been subsidized by Google for years, will use the same processing fees as PayPal from May.

Google Shared Storage

In 2007 Google added an option to pay for additional storage for Gmail and Picasa Web. The prices have changed since then: for $20/year you get 10 GB instead of 6 GB, for $75/year you get 40 GB from 25 GB, for $250/year you get 150 GB instead of 100 GB and $500/year is the price for 400 GB, up from 250 GB.

Google's offer doesn't look very good if you compare it with the storage offered by Yahoo Mail and Flickr. Yahoo Mail promises to offer "unlimited storage" if you don't abuse the system. "The purpose of unlimited mail isn't to provide an online storage warehouse. Usage that suggests this approach gets flagged by our anti-abuse measures."

Flickr is less generous: you can only upload 100 MB of photos each month if you have a free account. Picasa Web Albums offers 1 GB of storage for free, but a Flickr Pro account costs $25/year and you get "unlimited storage".

Google's offer would make sense if you could use the storage in a service like GDrive, but uploading photos and storing more attachments in Gmail is not enough. There's no defined limit for uploading videos at Google Video, but you need to pay if you want more than 1 GB of storage at Picasa Web Albums.

Google offers a way to purchase more storage space to use with some of its products (currently Gmail and Picasa Web Albums). This extra storage acts as overflow when you run out of free storage space in either product. If you've filled your free storage (5 7.2 GB and counting for Gmail or 1 GB for Picasa Web Albums), you'll automatically use your purchased space to store more pictures and messages up to your new storage limit.

Your shared storage space will be used by whatever product needs it. Picasa's free storage is for photos only, and Gmail's is just for Gmail messages, but the shared storage can be all photos, all messages, or a mix of both. You can't set aside shared storage space for one product - it will be used by any product that's over its free storage quota on a first-come, first-served basis.

Picasa Web Search Tips

Picasa Web Albums has a search feature that can be restricted to your albums, to the public albums of your favorite users or to all the public albums hosted by Google. Here are some ways you can use Picasa Web's simple search engine:

1. Find random photos published by Picasa Web users: just click on the search button from the homepage, while leaving the search box empty.

2. One view for the photos uploaded by your favorite users. If you want to see the photos from the users you've added it to favorites, click on the search button and select "Favorites".

3. Navigate between the results. After selecting a result, you can move to the next result by clicking on the right arrow button or by using keyboard shortcuts: j or right arrow. To go to the previous result, type k or use the left arrow.

4. View the results in a slideshow. Click on the "Slideshow" option to view the results without manually navigating between them.

5. Adjust the size of the thumbnails from 72 pixels to 288 pixels width using the selection bar.


6. Download the results in Firefox. Picasa Web Albums provides a feed output for search results and you could use it to download the photos.

7. Restrict the results to a user. Open the album gallery of that user, enter your query and then select the name of the user from the line "My Photos | Favorites | Community photos | User's Gallery".

8. View the search results in a screen saver. Picasa 3 lets you create a screensaver that shows images from media RSS feeds. The feed generated for search results can be added to the screensaver.

9. Find photos from a certain location. Go to Google Maps, find the desired location, select "My Maps" and check "Photos from Picasa Web Albums" from the featured content section. The mapplet lets you enter a query and it displays the results on the map.


10. Use Google Image Search to search Picasa Web Albums photos. Just add site:ggpht.com to your query, for example: [christmas site:ggpht.com]. Google Image Search doesn't include all the photos hosted by Picasa Web, but it produces more relevant results.

Picasa Web Albums Translates Comments

Believe it or not, Picasa Web Albums is a big success outside US and, since the interface is available in 38 languages, many people post comments in their native languages. Click on a featured photo and you'll certainly see at least a comment written in Spanish, Italian, Chinese, French or other language.

Google's photo-sharing service started to use Google Translate API to automatically translate comments in your interface's language. The translation is displayed below the original comment.


Of course, the translation is not perfect and Google didn't do a good job at properly disclosing that it's an automatic translation (there's a "Powered by Google Translate" tooltip when you hover over the translation). This is yet another integration of Google Translate in Google's services, after translating Google Reader subscriptions and YouTube's search results. What other services would you like to integrate machine translation?

Private Albums in Picasa Web

Picasa Web Albums added a new option that makes your albums truly private. If you edit an album's properties and select "Require sign-in to view", only the people you are explicitly sharing the album can see it.

"Select the 'Require sign-in to view' option to set the highest level of privacy for your album -- you specify who has permission to view it, and visitors must sign in to their Google Account to verify their identity. Anyone not included on the album's 'Shared with' access list will be unable to view the album," details the help page.


The access list is displayed in the album's sidebar and you can add or remove people from that list at any time. The only problem is that your friends need to have Google accounts to validate their identity and access the album.

Until now the only alternative to making the album public was to make it unlisted, but the album still had a web address that allowed anyone who knew it to view your album. If you try to view an album that has the new visibility option enabled, you'll get this error message:


Since you now have three levels of visibility and it's difficult to remember which albums are unlisted or private, Picasa Web Albums' homepage displays the access setting next to each album using an icon.


{ Thanks, Michael. }

Add Photos by Email in Picasa Web Albums

There's an easy way to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums if you don't want to install Picasa: send your photos by email to a secret address.

First you need visit the Settings page and check "Allow me to upload photos by email." The secret email address where you can send your photos has the following format: username.secretkey@picasaweb.com, where secretkey needs to be defined in the settings.

By default, Picasa Web uploads your photos to the built-in Drop Box albums, but it's a good idea to choose your destination by entering the name of an existing album in the subject of your email.


Make sure you don't share the secret email address with other people, like I did in the screenshot above. And if you do, just choose a different secret key for your address.

You can attach up to 20MB of photos in JPG, GIF and PNG formats, which is a pretty reasonable limitation. Since Picasa Web's mobile site still doesn't support uploading photos, the new option should be really useful when you want to share photos from a phone with email or MMS capabilities.

Where in the World? (Picasa Web Game)

The new version of Picasa Web Albums added a simple game called "Where in the World". Your mission is to find the correct location for some photos that are already geolocated. To find the game, go to the Explore section and click on "Start Game".


Inspired by Flickr, Google created a new section that displays features photos, recent photos, popular tags and locations.


(As you can see, the screenshots show Google Chrome, which has been released less than an hour ago. The browser is promoted on Google's homepage and you can install it at google.com/chrome, but only if you use Windows XP or Vista. It has a very simple interface and it's incredibly fast.)

Picasa Web Albums Adds People Tagging

CNet reports that Picasa Web Albums will add some interesting features today. After implementing face detection in the image search engine, Google adds face recognition in Picasa Web Albums to facilitate photo tagging.

"The problem with tagging is that it's a chore, so most people don't bother. But Picasa's name tag feature automates the process enough--and provides enough reason to use it--that I believe many users will take the tagging plunge. (...) The most impressive moments are when Picasa presents a large array of photos with the same face, and you can label them all with a single click," says Stephen Shankland from CNet.


The technology comes from the NevenVision acquisition and I'm sure we'll see more features that depend on image analysis in the future. Other new features in Picasa Web Albums: new views for exploring photos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums, Creative Commons licensing and an option to add photos by email.

Interestingly, the people tagging feature will not be available in Picasa 3, which will also be released today. The software will finally synchronize photos with Picasa Web Albums, but the synchronization is unidirectional. You'll be able to create videos from photo albums and export them to YouTube. There's also an improved collage maker that lets you control how pictures are arranged.


Picasa 3 and the updated Picasa Web Albums are set to be available today at 12 pm PDT.

Update: Picasa 3 can be downloaded from http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa3-setup.exe (thanks, Anonymous!).

Photo Albums in Google Docs

Google Docs will expand beyond documents. After adding support for storing PDFs, Google Docs will provide ways to create photo albums. It's not very clear if you'll be able to access the photos stored in Picasa Web Albums or create different photo albums, but GDrive is certainly here and its name is Google Docs.

The first screenshot has been created using information from Google's code, which already includes an icon of the photo section. The other screenshots show an empty list of photo albums and a new image search feature.




I suspect Google Docs will become the place where you can upload, share and manage any kinds of files. It's also likely that all the files that are uploaded to other Google services will be accessible in Google Docs in much the same way as the photos uploaded to Blogger blogs can be found in Picasa Web Albums.

Update: Radu noticed that if you go to docs.google.com/#photos and type the first letters from the titles of your Picasa Web Albums, Google shows the full titles as suggestions. It seems that it only works for public albums.

Google Photos?

Launched in 2006 as an online extension of the Picasa photo management application, Picasa Web Albums didn't become very popular, as Flickr continued to grow. Besides lacking a community of photography enthusiasts and leaving out a lot of basic features like stats or adding a photo to favorites, Picasa Web Albums is not a great name and many might not even know that Google has a photo sharing service.

There are many references in Picasa Web's code which show that the service will change its name to Google Photos. The navigation bar already uses "Photos" as an anchor text, there's a Google Photos Screensaver and the service's blog is titled Google Photos Blog.


Other upcoming features referenced in the code include content licensing options, uploading photos by email and tagging people in your photos.