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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Over at Berryreview.com, they've had a chance to scope out the new Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Blackberry. While the older "version" of Picasa for Blackberry was just a glorified landing page, this new application has plans to do a lot more:
Add any picture to the correct album, add tags, or adjust its size prior to uploading
Upload any picture to Picasa Web Albums
If you're using a BlackBerry smartphone with GPS capabilities you can also geotag images so that people who look at your pictures can tell where they're taken. (Of course, it will only list the location at which the photo was uploaded, so if you upload a picture of that alien aircraft you snapped at Area 51 after you get home to Kennebunkport, your friends will think your photo is a fraud). To properly geotag an image (and avoid disbelief), you should complete the uploading process from the same location the picture was taken.
No release date as of yet, but if you want to be the first to know, you can become a member of the Blackberry Owners Lounge, and they'll let you know as soon as Picasa for Blackberry is available.
If you're an iPhoto user and want an easy way to upload your pictures from iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums (Google Photos), then check out Google's Picasa Web Albums Exporter iPhoto plug-in. The plug-in is available as part of a package from Google's Mac tools site (if you don't use iPhoto, you can use the standalone Web Albums Uploader program to upload your pictures to your Picasa albums). Once installed, open iPhoto and either select an album or specific photos you want to upload. Then click File -> Export and choose the "Picasa Web" tab. The plug-in lets you upload the selected photos to a new album, which it will then create for you with a title and description that you can specify, or to one of your existing albums.
The plug-in makes short work of sharing your iPhoto pictures via your Google account. It even allows you to choose how to scale your photos during the upload (better quality, faster upload, actual size) which is helpful if you're on a slow Internet connection. The plug-in will also add any keywords or descriptions you've added in iPhoto to your Picasa Web Album!
Google has released a new beta version of Picasa for Linux. Like earlier Linux releases, Picasa 2.7 Beta requires WINE to run, which would indicate that this isn't a 100% native Linux port of Google's popular photo organizing tool. But it does work well with your Linux desktop, seeking out all the photos stored on your PC and allowing you to sort them by albums or folders.
Here are a few of the new features in Picasa 2.7 for Linux:
While Google doesn't offer online storage space for backing up your files or sharing media (other than photos and videos) with your friends, the company does provide users with a fair bit of online storage space. Gmail users get close to 3GB of data, while Picasa web users have 1GB of photo storage to play with.
Now Google has launched a new paid service to let you beef up your online storage for those two services. $1 a year will snag you 6GB of shared storage space that can be used for Picasa or Gmail. Or if you've got a ton of e-mail to save, you can try out these plans:
25GB for $75/year
100GB for $250/year
250GB for $500/year
If you've done the math, you probably realize that you can just sign up for 100 separate Google accounts and get 600GB for $100 a year, so the pricing seems a bit out of whack. But we'll just chalk that up to promotional pricing and the fact that there are plenty of other services out there providing 2-6GB of online storage space for free.
Odds are in the future we'll see other Google services added to this shared plan, including Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
Update: It looks like Google has updated their pricing, and 6GB of online storage will cost you $20/year, not $1. We don't know if the initial pricing was a typo or a promotion that only lasted a few hours. But if you don't believe us, there is evidence that the price was originally $1.
Showing off pictures on your mobile device just got a whole lot easier with Picasa Web Albums, and care of the innovative team at Google.
Google has just announced that they have launched the first version of Picasa Web Albums for mobile devices. When in the mobile Picasa, photo albums are tiled across your screen, clicking on them expands into the set, broken down into chunks of 12 (auto resized to your screen - 12 were shown on a Blackberry) that can then be expanded and saved to your device. You can also keep track of your friend's photos by selecting "My Favorites" from the home screen. You can also post a comment on their photos
The website can be accessed on your mobile device through a web browser by visiting http://photos.google.com and entering in your credentials.
No more forgetting where you took that picture on your vacation, Google has now made it possible for users to pinpoint the exact places they took their photos by mapping photos.
A new feature called "Map My Photos" was released on Tuesday in Picasa Web Albums, lets users show exactly where on a map pictures were taken. When creating an album, fill out the Place Taken field, or drag and drop individual photos straight onto a map. It's that simple.
You can then share these maps with friends either through Picasa Web Albums or through Google Earth (by clicking on the "View in Google Earth" button on the top right). Google has set up a test gallery you can take a peek at.
The name of this download says it all - if you're looking for the most absolutely simple way to upload your photos to Flickr, and you use Picasa to manage your photos locaily, look no further. Picasa2Flicker adds a simple button to the Picasa interface that looks like it belongs, and lets you upload your selected photos with one simple click.
Hopefully in the next iteration, the actual uploading interface can be made to look like it belongs in Flickr as well; while the current interface is functional, its appearance is definitely jarring.
Picasa Webalbums Assistant is a free Java tool that enables you to preview and download photos and entire albums from Picasa Web Albums. 
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.
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.
Over at Berryreview.com, they've had a chance to scope out the new Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Blackberry. While the older "version" of Picasa for Blackberry was just a glorified landing page, this new application has plans to do a lot more:
If you're an iPhoto user and want an easy way to upload your pictures from iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums (Google Photos), then check out Google's Picasa Web Albums Exporter iPhoto plug-in. The plug-in is available as part of a package from Google's Mac tools site (if you don't use iPhoto, you can use the standalone Web Albums Uploader program to upload your pictures to your Picasa albums). Once installed, open iPhoto and either select an album or specific photos you want to upload. Then click File -> Export and choose the "Picasa Web" tab. The plug-in lets you upload the selected photos to a new album, which it will then create for you with a title and description that you can specify, or to one of your existing albums.
While Google doesn't offer online storage space for backing up your files or sharing media (other than photos and videos) with your friends, the company does provide users with a fair bit of online storage space. Gmail users get close to 3GB of data, while Picasa web users have 1GB of photo storage to play with.
Showing off pictures on your mobile device just got a whole lot easier with Picasa Web Albums, and care of the innovative team at Google.
The name of this download says it all - if you're looking for the most absolutely simple way to upload your photos to Flickr, and you use Picasa to manage your photos locaily, look no further. Picasa2Flicker adds a simple button to the Picasa interface that looks like it belongs, and lets you upload your selected photos with one simple click. 
