Googlified

Orkut recently announced to increase their silly limit of 50 photos per user to 10,000 and up to 10MB per photo. Now let’s do some simple math, 10,000 photos * 10MB/photo = ~100GB of photo storage, and guess what, you need to pay about $200 per year to have that much storage in Picasa Web Albums (PWA doesn’t have a 100GB plan, but it has a 150GB plan for $250 a year).

Not that everyone have cameras that take 10MB photos, but still (I have ~1700 photos - mostly 6 megapixels - on PWA right now and it takes a bit over 1GB - PWA probably compressed them).

A couple of downsides are that you can’t upload photos directly from Picasa (or any other major photo management tools that I know of. They do have bulk uploader for Internet Explorer and Firefox though, but the link for the Firefox one is currently showing a “Cannot be found” page) and no API to access the photos (you can always roll out your own!).

IT’S OVER NINE THOUSAND!!

Google and Tivo partner up to bring your Picasa Web Albums to your TV using Tivo! With this new feature, you can use Tivo to:

• access your personal photos by signing into your Google account
• find and bookmark photos from your friends (and strangers)
• show off your photos on the living-room TV, instead of crowding everyone around a computer screen - I love this one, that’s why I got my computer and TV hooked up

Good, the big holiday (Christmas) is coming up, so don’t forget to share the photos you have taken over the past year with your family on that new TV you got for cheap on Black Friday. :) (Well, I don’t have a Tivo, let along the new TV. Arrgh. I am looking to get a new camera though)

Google launched another new blog today, Google Photos/Picasa Blog. (the logo says Photos but the title is Picasa, come on Google, be consistent!)

We’ll be using this space to post feature updates, photography tips, and (of course) some of our favorite photo albums, all of which will keep you current with the latest developments from the Picasa team.

From past experiences, a new blog signals major update(s) for the product, in this case, Picasa or Picasa Web. My bet goes to Neven Vision this time, you know, it’s been over a year.

I uploaded a load of photos to my Picasa Web account today, including this one. Hehe, artistic, isn’t it? (okay, but I drew those stick-figures in like 10 seconds) :)-

[thanks Andre, happy holiday :)]

So you have join the crowd and have your storage-hunger Gmail upgraded. You then email your friends with huge attachments and upload trip photos to Picasa Web Albums worry-free. A year later, you found yourself already used 99% of the total storage … and broke, not being able to renew your $500 premium paid storage. Now you start wondering what Google’s going to do with all the chain letters you have.

This FAQ (Archive.org) from Picasa Web Albums explains (there aren’t anything particularly useful in the Help Center),

If I cancel my subscription for additional storage, what will happen to my photos?

[…] If you cancel your subscription at any time, your Picasa Web Albums account will revert to 250MB of free storage space, and any photos beyond the 250MB limit may be deleted.

You can choose to renew your account or have your beloved chain letters “be deleted”.

For comparison, Flickr offers “permanent archiving of high resolution original images” and Yahoo! Mail gives away unlimited storage for free (restrictions apply).

Google Account today introduced a new feature that allows users to purchase additional storage space that can be distribute between Gmail and Picasa Web Albums. If you have already upgrade your Picasa Web Albums plan, you should be able to see the “Paid storage usage” section in your Manage Storage page, which details your usage of the purchased additional storage.

There are currently 4 plans available, ranging from 6GB ($20/year) to 250/GB ($500/year). Two of the plans in the “shared storage program” (coined by Philipp Tony Ruscoe) are cheaper than the original plans for Picasa Web Albums, which were 6GB for $25/year and 25GB for $100/year. The latter two stay the same.

Tom and I both got free upgrades last year which will be expired tomorrow, hopefully the nice Googler will renew the plan for us, thanks in advance. Oh well, I don’t think I will need that much extra storage.

So is this the pseudo-GDrive? I thought it’s going to be free, as in beer.

[thanks Luka]

The now-Googler Adam Lasnik predicted in December 2004 (he was not working for Google at the time) that Google will buy Flickr in 2005, he reasoned that,

• [Flickr’s] already well-respected and well-liked by bloggers, including at least one prominent Blogger.com team member.
• Open API!
• Small, smart, dedicated team behind the service.
• It’s not evil; Flickr strongly considers member concerns and interests.
• Flickr uses tags, very similar in concept to Gmail’s labels.
• Strong focus on community: groups, live chats, etc.
• It’s based in Vancouver, not all that far from Google’s new Washington office.

Well, by any measure, this is rational, I would think the same as well, but things don’t always go the way we would expect. And what goes into our history book is that Yahoo was the one that bought it and Google launched Flickr-killer (your mileage may vary) - Picasa Web Albums a year later.

However, my book says, “Picasa Web Albums is losing the game so far.” I guess things would have been much different if Google bought Flickr, say, I would have become a camera whore (2nd OR 3rd definition).

In a way, I am kinda glad that they didn’t. :)

[photo from Adam’s Flickr album. He got promoted?]

Google Photos, or Picasa Web Albums, got a new feature today that allows users to map their photos. Look for “View map” () on every album page and start mapping your photos now!

I somehow think Google got this from Panoramio, the location aware photo sharing website Google acquired last month.

You can now also access your Google photos on your mobile by visiting http://photo.google.com/m/.

Now you can easily add a Picasa Web Albums slideshow to your web site by copy & pasting the code from the Embed Slideshow option on your Albums pages. There aren’t much configuration and customization you can do except for the size of the photos and whether to display caption as default.

If you want to have more control over how to display the photos in a slide show, you will need to use Google AJAX API’s new function, Slide Show Control. The new function “allows you to easily embed a slide show of images from PhotoBucket, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, or any feed that uses the Media RSS extensions.”

Cheers! (I will still write my own script because I think that the API is not good enough…)

[via Official Google Blog]

It is frustrating that Picasa Web Albums does not display the total number of photos on the footer as they do with the storage, which made me to add the number of photos manually when writing “How Many Pictures Are There on Picasa Web?“.

In case I have to repeat the tiresome process in the future, yesterday I created two scripts to handle the job for me. One is to see the total number of photos, and the other one is to see the number of public photos. (I tried to make a GreaseMonkey script, but doesn’t work)

To see the total number of photos, copy this link (or bookmark it), go to Picasa Web Albums, paste it in the address bar, and then press enter. If you want to see how many public photos you have, go this page and enter your Gmail username, or somebody else’s.

Hey, I have a total of 867 photos, of which only 95 of them are public. You are missing a lot of fun. :)

UPDATE: Video tutorial available here.

Google today has added a new member to the GData family - Picasa Web Albums, the Google Code Blog announced. Like other GData APIs, you can add, request, update and delete albums, photo and tags.

Although it is not mentioned in the API page, but there’s a JSON format of the API you can use - as you might already know, my Albums page on Googlified is powered by the my little script.

What I would like Google to improve is to have the smaller, square thumbnails, (maybe 75×75 pixels) instead of thumbnails that comes in all dimensions.

Plenty, around 34 million photos, Zmarties estimated. He searched a number of popular terms and record the number, and rank them descendingly. Here is some of the most popular words used in Picasa Web Albums.

• the - 1,128,279
• and - 1,075,975
• in - 823,335
• of - 782,688
• a - 600,900

I have just checked my photo album, and very surprising to me - more than 800 are photos hosted there (mostly unlisted). “[T]here are as many unsearchable photos as there are searchable ones - many users are making use of non-public albums, and even when they do have public albums they have not elected to add them to the community photos search.” Sure, you can’t find a single one of my more than 800 photos using the Community Search. (Though you can still search the ones that made public.)

For more about his analysis, check out Zmarties’ blog post.

[photo by Beatrice Murch, used under a CC-license]

Picasa Web Albums now is hugely improved with:

• More storage space, it’s now 1GB (and counting, according to the Official Google Blog)
• A search feature: you can search for Community Photos;
• You can see blog albums marked with the orange ‘B’ symbol (Blogger) , like in the image, containing images you uploaded for your posts;
• Email notification for comments;
• and much more.

This is how a Blogger blog album looks like, compare with a normal album. Below you can see a sample search. You have to switch to the Community Photos tab to see other people’s photos.

Note: when you enter Picasa Web Albums, you are asked if you want to include your public pictures in the Community Photos on the right column. You can always change that answer from Settings.

Teo | via the Official Google Blog