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Google Picasa Online

2 min read

Yesterday I heard about a neat new feature in the next version of Picasa (the photo management feature from Google) - photo albums. Sure, every photo management program supports photo albums. However, Picasa takes it a step further than most and has an online mode. So now I can save photos onto the web photo album from right inside Picasa. It comes with 250megs of space, which arguably isn't much, but you can upgrade to an additional 6 Gigs if you want to pay $25/year (comparable to Flickr).

Right off the bat, let me say, Flickr is better for finding neat and new photos to look at. However, so far, Picasa Web is better for the shear simplicity of uploading my photos. I just pick the ones I want to upload, click a button, and I can add them to an existing album or create a new one on the fly. Another nice bonus is that Picasa web keeps them at a much larger resolution than Flickr does in the free version. I don't know what the max space you can fill on Flickr is but you can only upload 10megs a month with the free account - so it would take me 2.5 years to fill up my Picasa account at that rate. Today alone I uploaded 15MB of photos to Picasa Web.

You may be wondering how I'm using this feature since it is for an upcoming release of Picasa. Well, you can sign up now and if you are lucky and get picked you can start using the new version now (in Beta or test condition). So far I haven't encountered any bugs so it seems pretty stable. Plus there are some User Interface enhancements.

Finally, if you want you can check out my online photo album at Picasa. http://picasaweb.google.com/bill.rawlinson