So instead of installing 1 piece of software all you have to do is install 2 packages, restart Firefox, manually add some options to a download dialog box and Presto!, you've downloaded an album without all the fuss.

Brilliant!

Excellent news for those of us who use linux!

Alternatively you can use a small tool I wrote a while back called PicasaWebDownloader. I've been told that it runs under Linux with Mono (Windows users can just go ahead and run it though).

Couldn't you just install picasa for linux and be done with it... (http://picasa.google.com/linux/)

Or you could use the Fireuploader firefox extension, http://www.fireuploader.com/
which allows you to upload and download from Picasa, along with other sites such as Facebook, Youtube, Flickr

Take a look at www.picasa2html.com

Also usable service for photo extraction.

Let's see:
@Bill: Well, Greasemonkey and DownThemAll are very useful add-ons (they're probably in the top 10 of the best Firefox extensions). They also work cross-platform. What I was trying to say is that Google should let you choose how you want to download the photos and not force you to install an application (even if Picasa is free and easy to use).

@Tomer Gabel: It's a command line tool, so it would be nice to have an interface closely integrated with the browser.

@Anonymous: No, Picasa for Linux doesn't support Picasa Web Albums (it was more like an experiment).

@Matt: Fireuploader is great to upload/download photos from your account, but you can't use it download other public albums.

@Alex: That's useful if you want to embed thumbnails in a page, not to download the original photos.

I think a better idea would be to create a service that uses the API and lets you download everything as a ZIP.

As ionut said, the best way woud be to code a webservice that uses the Picasa Web Albums Data API and lets you download the entire album as a zip, but.... You have to code it!
The post explains a great combination of usefull (and already coded) add-ons that let you download the entire album, no matter wih OS you are running. This is possible as long as you can install any mozilla browser.

;) Peregrino

I was never one for browser integration, but at the very least it's good to have all the options together in one place...

What I'm looking for is a program to upload pictures to Picasa Web Albums without using Picasa. (some kind of program like the uploader for Mac)

Try the Fireuploader extension for Firefox.

All these tools you recomend allow to download the images at their original sizes?

@Tranquilita:
Yes, the original size of the photos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums.

1) I installed DownThemAll and tried to download an entire Picasa album but what I got weren't the images in their original size. They were smaller.

2) Tried with Netease and got the same result: smaller images.

Do I have to make an adjustment in some configuration?

I don't think so. You probably didn't add the Greasemonkey script or you didn't click on "Init Download Links". You can download the photos at their original size. I've just downloaded 2288×1520 photos from this album.

To get the full size images, make sure to download from the "links" tab in DownThemAll (with the filter listed above) instead of the "pictures & embedded" tab. I was having the same problem until I did that, now it's downloading the full images without any problems.

Seems to work perfectly! Thanks.

Wow you are a genius! Thanks a lot for this! :)

I'm running Linux Ubuntu and this is just a miracle!

Is there a way to download ALL ALBUMS at one time instead of one album at a time? I always synced up to Web Albums and need the albums on another computer now.

Great tool. Even I have Picassa installed on my system but its unable to connect to Web Picassa, so I required to use this tool. Thanks for Post.

be sure to select the medium size thumb view, i was having problems until i read the greasemonkey script and found that it only works with that view. To be sure, if after pressing the "init download links" the images don't have a "download image" link on them, then the script is failing.

My name is Bradley Beach, I am
currently going through college to become a computer programmer. My
dad has a Mac and I use Picasa to share photo's, he was frustrated
with not being able to download a whole album at once so I wrote this
Java app that will do it.

It has a GUI, and you can select which photo's you would like to download (with thumbnails)

Here is the link for it on
download.com:
Picasa
Webalbums Assistant on Download.com

(or just do a search for picasa)
Here is the link for the home page:
Picasa
Webalbums Assistant Home

It is free, you just need java 5.5 or
later to run it.

enjoy!
-brad
(picasawebalbumsassistant@gmail.com)

Bradley Beach, are you a f...g genious, mate!
God bless your name.
sell it or at least reive donations
You have my $5
Z

Very good work Bradley! But I have one question - it seems to not download the full resolution versions of the pictures (3008x2000 according to Picasa becomes 1600x1064), am I doing something wrong?!

So nice BB! Just the tool I needed in my toolbox, thx a lot dude!

well it seems that I have a bug in my code then!! I never uploaded anything that large so I didn't know it wasn't downloading full resolution... I'll take a look at it. Can't promise anything soon as school has taken enough of a toll on my lack of sleep.

So no it's not you, ;). I'm glad you all found the program, my e-mail is picasawebalbumsassistant @ gmail . com if you have any questions.

also if you could please post a review of it on download.com, Having as much feed back as possible will be nice in the future if I plan on using this as part of a scholarship application or something.

Thank you all! have a great night.

Great tool Bradley! I have also been writing a little program, using Python Picasa API, with a simple gtk GUI interface. At the moment it let you download albums from a given user with some options. I am preparing a new and improved release in the next days :)
You can take a look to it too!
Check PycasaDownload project
It is nice to know there are alternatives to get photos from Picasa!

The Greasemonkey script is wonderfull. Thanks.