September 30, 2010

Picasa Web Groups Google Buzz Albums

Picasa Web Albums is the central repository for all the photos uploaded to Google's services. If you upload photos to Blogger, Google Buzz, Orkut or upload a background image for Google's homepage, your photos are stored in Picasa Web Albums.

Unfortunately, Google creates many albums that clutter the interface. For example, Google Buzz creates a new album every time you upload one or more photos. Picasa Web addressed this issue by grouping all the Buzz albums in a special gallery called "Photos from posts".


Google Buzz is not the only service that adds unnecessary albums: Blogger creates albums to store the photos uploaded to your blogs. Picasa's albums aren't a good way to organize photos because they have limitations (the maximum number of albums has been recently increased to 10,000), you can't store the same photo in multiple albums and individual photos don't have privacy controls. Until Picasa Web Albums drops "Picasa" and "albums" from its name and becomes Google Photos, the service will be an online extension of a desktop software and will inherit Picasa's flaws and limitations.

{ via Adewale }

3 comments:

  1. really wish Google would do some serious work on Picasa Web Albums. they must be aware of the ways in which it falls behind Flickr and the like.

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  2. Two things I love about Picasa (besides the fact it comes from Google where I've invested a lot of time & energy) are that

    1) I can assign faces to people who are NOT on Google (unlike Flickr, all faces must belong to Flickr members)

    2) It integrates really well (not perfectly) with a desktop client (which is still the best way to manage large files like digital photos)

    If it were not for those two (three) things I would not be using Picasa Web.

    Things they need to do are:
    - increase storage (flickr is unlimited but bandwidth & resolution are limited)
    - increase categorization options and do away with strictly putting photos in albums (tags are great, but make them my primary view not a secondary view)
    - improve the integration with desktop software sync'ing photos, tags, faces/people, etc. is better
    - get printing agreements in more countries - we don't all live in the USA and (at least in Canada) a lot of the printing is handled by a couple companies (ex.: Costco & Walmart both use PNI for their internet printing system) so one or two agreements would cover a lot!

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  3. I too hope that Google does some serious work on Picasa web albums as they are just not upto the mark.

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