At work, I usually either use a drive imaging program to load the operating system and applications onto a machine. If I'm reformatting a customer's machine, I use WPI (Windows Post Installer) to silently install programs. At home, however, I'm a little less cautious when I reformat and often forget to back up my program installers.

That's when something like the Smart Installer Pack might come in handy. It's a pre-packed set of popular applications that you'd likely want to install on your own system (or a friend's) after a fresh format.

It includes a host of apps like Firefox, Chrome, OpenOffice, Winamp, Skype, Daemon Tools, Picasa, Winamp, Thunderbird, Adobe Reader and Flash, WinRar, Rocket Dock, CCleaner, and more. Everything downloads in a single file, so you won't be cluttering up your drive with a bunch of separate installers.

SIP has two drawbacks. First, the installers are interactive, not silent, so you'll have to click through manually. Second, there are a few apps I'd normally install instead - like 7zip and Sumatra PDF. Shortcomings aside, this is still a handy way to get a system up and running quickly with a solid group of commonly-used programs.

As much as long-time Mac users love to sing the praises of Apple's iPhoto application that comes with the Mac operating system, switchers coming from Windows are often heard lamenting the loss of their beloved Picasa from the Windows world. Rumors have occasionally leaked out of Google pointing to the possible eventual release of a Mac version of Picasa. I know that I for one chose not to believe them - just so I wouldn't be disappointed if it never materialized.

Well, for those people wishing for the Picasa experience on their Mac, today is a glorious day. Today Google released a beta version of Picasa for the Mac, and in typical Google fashion this beta release is solid enough for widespread use. I suppose I should insert a joke about how every Google product stays in beta for years, but I'm sure you can think of one funnier than whatever I might come up with. Or maybe you're just as tired as I am of that particular Google jab?

To try it out, download the beta from here.

Welcome to Googleholic, your sometimes weekly, often infrequent, fix of everything Google.

This week:

• OpenSocial API adds hooks for My Yahoo! and other popular languages
• Picasa 3.1 comes out swinging
• iPhone and Android get optimized search results
• Twitter connects to Google Friend Connect
• Port your Google Webtoolkit app to Facebook in 10 minutes
• YouTube goes HD
• Chromeaholic: Password security and RSS discovery

Online photo sharing sites like Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa Web Albums provide a great way to share a set of images with friends, family, or the whole world. But what happens when you only want a select group of people to be able to see your photos?

Many sites allow you to hide or block photos from anyone who you haven't explicitly granted access to. But up until recently, if you wanted to hide images uploaded to Picasa from the general public, the best you could do was mark them as "unlisted," which meant that they wouldn't show up in public searches of Picasa Web Albums. But anyone who had the correct URL could still access those images.

Now Google has added the ability to restrict access to the people you've chosen to share an album with. You can set the permissions for a web album either when you're uploading images or after you've already created an album. Just click the edit menu, select album properties, and scroll down to the bottom of the screen where you'll find an option to mark photos as public, unlisted, or "sign-in required."

[via Google Operating System]

Gladinet is a new Windows utility that aims to help bridge the divide between desktop and web-based applications and storage. Here's how it works. You install the free (at least while in Beta) Gladinet utility and select the web based services and applications that you want to access locally. For example, you can mount your Windows Live SkyDrive or Amazon S3 Storage as a local drive that you can access using Windows Explorer.

You can also mount your Google Picasa Web Albums and Google Docs folders as if they were local folders, allowing you to upload, download, and access documents and images stored on Google's servers as if they were on your desktop.

But the ability to mount remote storage as a local folder is just the tip of the iceberg. You can also use Gladinet to launch web based applications like Google Docs, Google Calendar, or ThinkFree Doc, XLS, or PPT viewers in a standalone window as if they were desktop apps.

Last, but certainly not least, you can use Gladinet to mount folders on remote computers as local folders.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Welcome to Googleholic, your weekly fix of everything Google!

In this, "Happy 10th anniversary, Google" edition:

• A decade of Google
• Germany hates Google Chrome
• Picasa and Picasa Web Albums get updated
• Gmail code base updated for IE 6
• Google tips for testing on all browsers
• Google launches its own satellite

Welcome to Googleholic, your weekly fix of everything Google.

In this edition:

• Olympic madness
• Google Translate comes to the iPhone
• New Google Earth API resources
• Directly link to Google Mapplets
• Get your Picasa prints at Walgreens

Welcome to Googleholic, your bi-weekly fix for everything Google!

In this edition:

• Google crawls Flash
• AdSense Referrals and AdWords pay-per-action retired
• Is Picasa being rebranded?
• Google teams up with Seth MacFarlane
• Google Mac Playground
• Farewell, Googlified

Welcome to Googleholic, your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!

In this edition:

• Hello says 'goodbye'
• Protect roaming users with Google Web Security for Enterprise
• New features added to Custom Search Engine
• Cannes comes to YouTube
• Selective magnification added to Google Reader

Google has released Picasa version 2.7 for Linux, which promises many of the same improvements of the PC version, including (drum roll, please) uploading and downloading from Picasa Web Albums.

Further improvements include:

• Folder hierarchy views: Browse explorer-style through your photos
• Save edits to disk: Including batch saving
• Improvements to importing: You can now import into an existing folder.
• Better RAW support

And much more. So if you're still running version 2.2 of Picasa for Linux, head on over to Google and download the latest and greatest. Picasa should run on any x86-compatible Linux system.

So, with Linux getting some love, what does this mean for Mac users? Absolutely nothing. The Google camp remains mum about the possibility of Picasa for the Mac, and all we have to assure us is the over-enthusiastic promise of a t-shirt wearing publicist.

Picasa Webalbums Assistant is a free Java tool that enables you to preview and download photos and entire albums from Picasa Web Albums.

The free program, written by computer studies student Bradley Beach, was designed for Mac and Linux users who don't have the built-in convenience of one-click downloading from Picasa Web Albums.

Picasa Webalbums Assistant enables you to download from albums that are both public or private. If you need to download from a public album, enter in the username of the Google account, and Picasa Webalbums Assistant will find all public albums under that username. If you want to save photos from a private album, you'll need the invite link sent by the user.

Once the album is located, the Assistant will automatically load preview thumbnails of all the pictures in the album. You can choose to download all of the pictures or a selection.

While Mac users patiently await the arrival of Picasa for the Mac (which one ambitious Google employee promised was coming this year), and its built-in communication with Picasa Web Albums, tools like Picasa Webalbums Assistant (and the free Picasa Web Albums Uploader) make the wait a little more bearable.

[via Lifehacker]

Google has developed a version of Picasa Web Albums optimized for Windows Mobile 6 devices. The update packs many of the features you can find in the iPhone version of Picasa Web Albums, including slideshows, search, and full image views.

The Windows Mobile version also makes use of the recently released Google Gears for Mobile to enable offline viewing of your web albums. You'll need to download and install Google Gears for this feature to work.

You can also add a Picasa icon to your Windows Mobile programs fodler so that you can launch Picasa Web Albums without firing up your web browser first.

In order to access the new Picasa Web Albums interface, just visit picasaweb.google.com using the mobile version of Internet Explorer on any touchscreen Windows Mobile 6 device.

[via My Today Screen]

Photo management software for Windows makes us weep. For most people, photo management consists of loading the software (and drivers) that came from the camera manufacturer. So you've got a Nikon camera, and the photo management software is really different from your significant other's Kodak software.

It looks different. It acts different. It's easier to set up some ways, or more inflexible in others. It might even be installing extraneous applications on your machine you weren't expecting.

Linux, as you've probably guessed, handles cameras a little differently. Camera drivers -- many different camera drivers -- are handled by gphoto2 and its libraries. Your pictures are downloaded and organized through photo management software, which runs on top of the gphoto2 drivers. (As a side note, gphoto2 can also be used to download pictures from the command line.)

Your Nikon, your mom's Kodak, and your brother's Sony will all use the same photo management program on your Linux machine. Now that's a little less complicated.

Today we're taking a look at the F-Spot photo manager.

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!

This edition covers:

• Google Reader adds support for Google Presentations
• Picasa for Mac coming sometime later this year
• Google Notebook adds hAtom support
• An overview of the other Google stories we covered earlier this week

Social web browser Flock is planning to launch 3 major new features in about two weeks. Like its predecessors, Flock 1.1 beta is built on Firefox code but it has a ton of features that make it easier to keep in touch with your social networking services like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube.

Flock 1.1 adds:

• Web Mail Integration - Not only can you easily check your Gmail and Yahoo! Mail with the click of a button in the newest version of Flock, but you can also share web pages, images, and articles just by clicking the email icon in the URL bar.
• Friend Activity - Flock now aggregates your friends' activity from across all supported social networking services and displays it in chronological order. This could be the easiest way ever to find out which friends have updated their profiles, sent out tweets, or uploaded new media or blog posts.
• Picasa Integration - Flock has added support for Picasa Web Albums, allowing you to upload images from Flock, share images via email, or browse through images using the media bar. You can also send images to friends just by dragging an image from your media bar to a Facebook, Twitter, or other contact in the People Sidebar.

We got a chance to play with an early version of Flock 1.1 and we were pretty impressed with how well the new social features are integrated into the web browser. The Friend Activity screen and web mail checker don't check for updates quite as often as we'd like, but hopefully the Flock team will provide users with the ability to customize how frequently the browser checks for new email and friend activity in the future.

Flock is available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new beta version should be out before the end of January.