Picasa Web Albums - Review of Google's Tool for Online Photos

Picasa Web Albums lets you post photos to the Web directly from Picasa on Windows computers or iPhoto on Macs. Picasa Web Albums also lets you sort and share your photos into public and private areas and post those photos to your blog.

Web Albums is easy to use, and it is very convenient to post photos directly from your favorite desktop photo management software. However, there isn't anything spectacular about Picasa Web Albums as a stand-alone product.

Picasa Web Albums is most closely competing with Yahoo! service, Flickr, but Web Albums is a less polished product.

Uploading Photos

You can upload photos directly from the Web Albums interface by clicking Upload Photos. This is not the most efficient way to upload photos, and it's pretty similar to other free Web photo albums, such as Photobucket or Flickr.

Photos can be uploaded directly from photo management software Picasa or iPhoto. To upload photos from iPhoto, you first need to download and install the special iPhoto extension. After the extension is installed, upload photos by choosing Export in the File or Share menu. This is a slightly different process than uploading photos to .mac, but it is just as easy and considerably cheaper.

Uploading albums from Picasa is a snap. Select one or more images, press the Web Albums button, and then either choose from an existing album or create a new one. You can customize the album settings before you upload, so you could quickly upload a gallery of images from the beach or a set of pictures from Halloween.

Picasa Web Albums lets you pick three size settings, optimized large size, medium size, and largest size. The optimized large setting seems to work well for most photos without looking pixelated. If you're sharing photos for printing, you'll want to go with the largest size, but this may eat up your storage space quickly.

Uploaded photos do not sync with Picasa or iPhoto albums, so if you rename a photo or apply a filter in Picasa, you will have to upload the image again for those changes to be reflected in Picasa Web Albums. There's also no way to automatically upload and share certain folders.

Managing Albums

Photos in Picasa Web Albums are arranged into album sets. You can comment on photos, edit captions, and rearrange the order of photos within albums. However, the interface sometimes makes these tasks annoying and slow.

To rearrange the order in which photos are displayed, you have to first click on the album, then click on the rearrange button, then drag and drop, and then click the save changes button. That's a lot of steps. Other tasks are similarly cumbersome, and this may be a stumbling block for new users.

Sharing Photos

Picasa Web Albums allows two levels of security. You can either make an album public, or you can make an album private. If the album is public, everyone can see it, and if it is private, you can still see the album if you know the album's secret Web address. You can click on the Share this album button to send the URL of either private or public albums.

This is security by obscurity, and it isn't very effective. Other comparable photo services, such as Flickr, offer password protected albums. It is really a pity Google doesn't do the same for Web Albums, since you can password protect photos on Picasa. At the very least, there should be a way to share photos with only registered users.

Blogging Photos

If you'd like to post your photos in your blog or Web site, Picasa Web Albums will give you the HTML code to link or embed both photos and albums.

There is no direct method to post something to a Blogger or other blog account. This is less intuitive than many other Google products, such as Google Docs.

Slide Shows

You can turn albums into Web slide shows, by pressing the Slideshow button. This is a nice feature, but it isn't remarkably different from similar slide shows that can be generated from other Web photo albums.

Socialize and Share

You can create a friends network of other Web Albums users and link to their photos. You can select photos as favorites, and you can comment on those photos. When someone comments on your photo, Google sends you an email alert. You can also subscribe to a feed of photos from other users with RSS. Learn more about RSS from the About Guide to Web search.

This is an area where Google could really shine, but right now it just falls flat. The features it offers are perfunctory, and there weren't any that stood out from the social networking tools built into Flickr.

Storage Space

Picasa Web Albums gives each user 1 gig of storage space. This is better than the previous offering of 250 megs, but still less than Gmail users get for email storage. You can upgrade to a full six gigs of storage space for $25 per year. The same price will buy you unlimited storage on Flickr.

Picasa Web Albums does let you know how close you are to your storage limits, both from the Web interface and from Picasa's upload tool, so running out of storage won't take you by surprise.

The Bottom Line

If you are already using Picasa, Picasa Web Albums is an easy way to upload small collections of photos to the Internet. It is free for small collections of photos, and it has a relatively simple and clean interface.

There are no annoying banner ads to distract from your photos, and you don't have to know Web design to create an album. Albums and pictures are given a straight-forward URL rather than an odd search string with punctuation.

However, Picasa Web Albums lacks features that would make it stand out. It offers relatively little storage space. There's no way to exclude access by password or to certain log-in IDs.

The market is glutted with places where you can park your photos for free. In order to persuade people to use this service, Google has to offer more.

• Picasa Web Albums can be found on the Web at picasaweb.google.com.
• Use Picasa as part of many Google tools for digital photographers
• Learn how to upload photos from Picasa to Picasa Web Albums.