Tech Tip 135 - Getting the Most Out of Picasa
Web Album

By Scott Nesbitt -Sunday, August 26, 2007

Picasa Web Albums from Google is a simple, but powerful photo sharing service. Like many of Google's other Web applications, Picasa Web Albums does one thing, and does it well. But, that simplicity hides a lot of power and depth.


There are a number of thingsthat you can do to take full advantage of Picasa Web Albums. This Tech Tip explains a few simple ways to do that.

Uploading Smaller Photos

Most digital cameras these days take fairly high resolution photos. But, unless you're using Picasa Web Albums as an online portfolio, or are getting prints of the photos that you have on the service, you should consider uploading smaller or lower-resolution pictures. That's easy to do. In a photo editor, just resize your photos or crop some of the extraneous portions out of them. Be careful when resizing, though -- your pictures may lose some detail and become fuzzy. you should shrink your photos to 640x480 pixels at the most. Anything smaller and even the clearest details start to lose their luster.
So why crop or resize your photos? Even with a high-speed Internet connection, it can take a while to upload large photos, or batches of photos. And if properly edited, smaller or lower-resolution photos look good online. On top of that, Picasa Web Albums limits you to 1 GB of storage space. That might seem like a lot, but larger photos will eat up that storage space very quickly.

Use Picasa

Keeping your photos organized on Picasa Web Albums is one thing. But, it's just as important to keep them organized on your computer. That's where Google's Picasa software comes in. Picasa can scan your entire hard drive and find all of your image files. Or, you can tell it to only look in certain directories. From there, you can quickly group your photos into albums, and view them individually or as a slideshow. In some ways, the software is like Picasa Web Albums for your computer.

Picasa isn't just an organizer, though. It's also a simple image editor. You can crop and resize photos, add effects, and even captions. You'll be surprised at how powerful the editing tools are. I had a picture of my daughter taken at an airport early one morning. The background was bright, but where my daughter was standing was dark. I used the Fill Light tool and away went the darkness.

On top of that, you can use Picasa to upload your photos directly to Picasa Web Albums. These uploads are quite speedy and smooth. Currently, though, Picasa is only available for Windows and Linux. The upload feature is Windows only, at least for the time being.

Get Organized Using Albums and Tagging

Unless you enjoy physically walking through your photos to find the one that you like, or forcing the people with whom you are sharing those photos to do that, then you should consider grouping your pictures in albums. An album, as you've probably guessed, is a group of photos with a similar theme or taken in a single place. Say, for example, you've got a bunch of photos from the inaugural U.S. Grand Prix at Indy. You can create an album just for those photos and upload them there. So, if you want a find that first-corner battle between the Ferrari and the McLaren you'll know exactly where it is.
Another easy way of categorizing your photos is tagging. Tags are keywords that you attach to photos. They enable you to quickly search for photos in albums. A tag can be, for example, "Maui 2006". If you have a large number of photos on Picasa Web Albums, tagging them makes it easier to zoom in on the picture that you want to find when doing a search. And if your photos are visible to the rest of the world, tagging them makes it easy for other people to find them.
Geotagging takes tagging a step further. Geotagging photos enables you to tell people where in the world you took the photo. So, if you upload a bunch of snaps of your vacation to London, England you can tag the photos as such and, depending on the service, those photos will appear on map. It's a neat feature, and one that offers a unique way of organizing your photos. I find geotagging to be limited, though. I don't feel the need to mention where I took every photo.

Use Picasa-aware Tools

Like many of Google's other offerings, Picasa Web Albums has become quite popular. So much so, that a number of developers have crafted software that works seamlessly with the service. As noted earlier, Google has its Picasa software for Windows and Linux. There’s also a pair of Picasa tools for Mac users. One is a small tool for directly uploading files to Picasa. The other is a plug-in for Apple's iPhoto software.

Also available for Mac users is a tool that enables them to upload directly to Picasa Web Albums from Apple's Aperture photography software.

On the Web, you can use the online photo editor Picnik to edit your pictures directly from Picasa Web Album. If you have a WordPress blog, then you can use the Picasa Web Matrix plugin to insert random thumbnails of your albums on your blog.

Users of the Firefox and Flock Web browsers can take advantage of the Fire Uploader extension. This extension is a small upload tool that you use within either browser to move files from your hard drive to Picasa Web Albums (or any of the other five Web services that it supports). Fire Uploader is a bit faster than using Picasa Web Albums' upload interface, although I've found that it's not quite as quick as Google's Picasa software.

If you're more technically inclined, you can create “mashups” with the photos in Picasa Web Albums. A mashup is a Web page or site that combines content from multiple sources. In order to create a mashup, you need some Web programming skills. This page outlines how to create one.

One way to create a Picasa mashup is to use the Google Mashup Editor. This is a new developer tool from Google, which is currently being tested. If you're interested, you can sign up here.

Conclusion

It's very easy to take advantage of the power and flexibility of Picasa Web Albums. With the right tools, whether on your computer or on the Web, you can do some interesting and fun things with this photo sharing service, all for free!