Picasa Web Albums (Test)

My Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums (by Google) was released today in "Test" mode, rather than "Beta". I think they called it that b/c they were sick of all their products in "Beta". It's nothing particularly ground breaking, but it's pretty slick and gets the job done. I resisted using other sites (eg. Flickr and its variants) because it was a pain in the ass to upload lots of images, flipping through images was slow, and storage space was limited.

Picasa Web Albums is nice because:

1. While it says that you're only supposed to have 250 MB, my account has 1 GB :)


2. Uploading from Picasa is a cinch and that's the most important thing - making it easy to put the pictures up. The best part is that it resizes the images before uploading because there's no reason I need to have pictures 1 MB in size just for viewing on the web. This not only makes it faster to upload, but also saves on storage space.


3. Viewing images is fast and easy. You can flip through the images by using the left and right cursor keys, it prefetches the images to make this fast, and since it uses AJAX, it doesn't need to reload the page for each image, which is really nice.

But it would be nice to have:

1. Growing storage space like Gmail


2. Tags/labels like Facebook, where you can label people/things in the picture by drawing a box around them


3. Ability to SEARCH the photos


4. Ability to upload in batch from Mac OS X and Linux

Here are my albums. Just random photos I had lying around. Pictures from my ATV camping weekend at Oceano Sand Dunes are up there. And of course there are photos of my grass and pet pictures.