Yesterday I blogged my impressions of Picasa Web Albums based on the preview pages. Now I can post based on the reality. Yup, got my invite yesterday afternoon while my modem was sleeping.
The new version of Picasa has some minor improvements, nothing earth shattering. Detail here.
I took some pictures from Emily’s recent birthday party to test the new uploading features.
To upload online, you select the folder or individual images and click the “Web Album” folder to get this:
As I suspected, photos are either public or not. No middle ground. And no tagging beyond what you can put in a description field.
Make no mistake, this is a helper for the Picasa desktop application. This is not an online photo sharing/storing service in and of itself. Not yet, at least. Not even close. There’s no “upload” button on the site. The only way to get photos to this thing is from Picasa…which means that Mac folks wanting to share their pictures through Google need not apply. (see comments)
I made this album public for the sake of this entry. Here it is.
Not much to configure. It is what it is.
I’m not sure I understand how the commenting works. It seems that only I can comment on my own photos? When I log in using a different Google account and go to the public page, I don’t see the option to add a comment. I’m not complaining that much. I was concerned that I wouldn’t have control over comments I didn’t want on public galleries.
My review: eh. If it were by any one other than Google no one would care. At least not yet. It’s simply a helper for a desktop application and I guess I expected Google to do more than that.
The impression I got yesterday is exactly what I’m feeling now. It’s just…there. Nothing that says, “wow, I gotta tell all my friends about this right now” (aside from blogging about it, of course, which doesn’t entirely count).
To me, I think it’s still worth the extra step of using the Flickr uploading tool rather than upload photos from Picasa to the Google version. Let’s see what Google has up their sleeve to improve this going forward.
Judi Sohn 
3 responses to “Picasa web albums: first look”
There is a photo upload option on the site.
Create an album using the PicasaWeb interface, and then simply click Upload Photos.
You then get the standard web file upload controls (browse button + text field) and can upload to your hearts content.
Thanks, Daniel. I’ve edited the entry. That’s what you get for trying to blog when you don’t have full ‘net access to check things out.
To be fair though, that’s not very intuitive. I would expect that you’d have the button to “upload” first, then you can select the album it goes to. What if I want to add photos to an already existing album? Doesn’t appear it can be done.
Picasa Web Albums – how can I create folders within an album so I can categorize the pictures say into decades.