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]

Look out Flickr, Picasa Web Albums just dropped a fancy new feature that makes it all too easy - and sexy - to share photo albums. Google's web-based photo sharing service has introduced an Embed Slideshow feature that offers a snippet of code one can easily use to display an album on their website or blog. It's pretty flexible too: five size options are available, ranging from Small 144px wide all the way up to Extra-extra Large at a whopping 800px wide. Captions can also be toggled on and off, and it's all wrapped up in a pretty Flash slideshow movie with controls that only pop up when you mouse over it.

This is a great feature that should definitely turn some heads towards Picasa (including Mac users, now that they offer a free iPhoto plugin), though their 1GB (and growing!) free storage limit is still a little too constricting. Sure, the service offers commercial upgrades with more yearly space, but those prices are a bit on the 'spensive side considering how far and fast storage costs are dropping as of late.

Google has gone and added three major updates to Picasa Web Albums. First, any photos you upload to a blog using Blogger will automatically be added to your personal web album. This sort of integration makes a lot of sense, making it much easier to search for and find photos you've previously used on your blog. Of course, Google could have just included an image search feature in the "search this blog" box on blogger.

The other announcements are probably much bigger news for anyone who doesn't use Blogger. The storage capacity for web albums has been bumped up to 1GB. And while yesterday, you could only search for images in your own web album. Today, you can do a "community search," allowing you to search for images across all web albums. It'll be interesting to see if Google eventually ads these images to Google Images search results.

If you'd rather not share your photos with the whole world, you can set your web albums to "unlisted." Not might be a good time to go do that if you weren't aware that your baby photos were suddenly going to be made available to the whole world. Might have been nice if Google had sent out an email to give users a heads up.

Does this mean Google's trying to take on Flickr? It's too early to say. On the one hand, you can easily search for images and view users shared galleries. On the other hand, Picasa Web Albums don't allow users to assign Creative Commons licenses to their images. That means if you're looking for images you can use and/or edit, you're still probably better off searching Flickr.

Google is sometimes a little slow at releasing Mac compatible applications. They are getting better, and have hired on some additional Mac guys and girls to do the development work. So, now its time to show off the fact that they really do support Mac's.

Google has put together a nice little page for Mac users, which shows their collection of software downloads specifically for Mac users. This list of software includes:

• Google Notifier
• Google Toolbar
• Google SketchUp
• Picasa Web Albums Uploader
• Google Earth
• Google Widgets

Software might take a little longer to develop for the Mac, so we can only hope that Google, and other companies shorten the dev time, and realize that Mac users have been patient long enough.