If you’re considering migrating your social media life from Facebook to Google+, you’ll probably want to start with your pictures. Move2Picasa.com drags your entire photo library from the House of Zuckerberg over to Picasa, which will soon be Google Photos. More »
Google’s Google+ initiative has brought us a lot already. Turns out, there’s more coming. Mashable is reporting that Google will retire the Blogger and Picasa brands and flip them into something like Google Blogs and Google Photos. Laaaaaaame. More »
Picasa is limited to 1GB of storage (unless you pay up for more Google bytes) but now there’s a free workaround. You can upload unlimited photos (smaller than 2048×2048) and videos (under 15 minutes) Google+ and it doesn’t touch your storage limit. [ReadWriteWeb]
You recognise the convenience of Google’s cloud-based apps but remain a command line devotee. Thankfully, Google’s new command line tool lets you edit Google Docs, upload photos to Picasa and post to Blogger while maintaining your geek cred. [Google]
One of the more straightforward acquisitions Google’s made in a while, they’ve just bought the online image editor Picnik. Given Google’s past acquisition strategy – turning Grand Central into Google Voice, Writely into Google Docs – the logical expectation is that it’ll get merged into its already excellent Picasa photo managing app. [Picnik]
Everyday, Gmail makes desktop mail clients feel a little more dated. The latest Labs feature now previews stuff from YouTube (no more Rickrolling??), Flickr, Picasa and Yelp, just like it does with images now. Awesome.
iPhoto hasn’t had a great free competitor and in my opinion, Google’s photo management is just, well, better. That’s why Picasa for Mac is awesome news.
Most people have thousands of digital photos in their collections. One of the cool new features available in Picasa’s Web Albums (which kind of got swept away in the torrent of Chrome coverage the last couple of days) is the ability to tag faces in your photos quickly and easily.
If you have photos on a Picasa web album already, you can enable the feature in settings. It then scans all your photos in the Picasa web album, before grouping similar faces together. You then work through those by giving name tags.
You’ll quite often have to repeat the same person in different groups of photos, so it’s a far from perfect solution. But it does make the tagging process much quicker than manually going through every photo.
It’s also secure, enabling better searching and more freedom for specific collections of photos, and you can share tagged photos with the people in them easily as well. Any images you share via Picasa also only shares the nicknamed tag you’ve put on the photo, not any further details like contact information.
This is a really useful development for cataloguing your photos, but why it’s only available online and not in desktop photo management software like iPhoto or Picasa for Windows is beyond me. Hopefully we’ll see it rolled out to desktop applications sooner rather than later.
Sending another (admittedly pretty) digital picture frame into an already overcrowded, under-innovated field, Sony has announced is US$300 Vaio CP1, which boasts wireless networking, RSS feed integration and – most interestingly – Shoutcast radio streaming. The picture display capabilities are also above average, as the frame can show photos directly from its 128MB of internal storage, a wide variety of common media cards or even Picasa albums stored online.
