Notes about the Picasa Web Albums (Italy Pictures) and other Google thoughts (from Tom)

Tom again…. A couple notes about our Google Picasa Web Albums (see: links below and at sidebar)

Upon clicking and going to a Picasa Album screen (I hope), thumbnails ought to start being generated. Julie’s “Italy Trip” Album has over 200 photos, so it can take some time to make the thumbnails depending upon your internet connection & computer. I’d suggest immediately clicking the “Small Thumbnails” icon at the top/right of the thumbnails (below the "Search Photos" button). This is especially true with dial-up connections.

There are three “sizes” per picture in Picasa Web Albums: Thumbnail (small, quick), Viewing (upon clicking the thumbnail or viewing a slideshow: medium, somewhat slow), and Download (the “Italy Trip” Album has the full size jpg’s taken with our 7mp camera, 1 to 2MB each. Large, somewhat slow on broadband, snails-pace to impossible with dial-up)

The Slideshow is neat. Try it then press F11 in your browser. This should produce a full screen view. Press F11 again to toggle back to regular screen. IE7 goes to “full” full screen. Autohide the taskbar and there is nothing but the picture. Firefox full screen still leaves a couple menu bars. There is a free download from the firefox website called “fullerscreen” that takes care of the problem. Pictures aside, “Full Screen” is a neat way to do much of your Web viewing.

I’m impressed with what Google (gmail, Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, etc) has to offer, mostly for free. Picasa Web Albums has a decent interface, 1GB free storage and no major file size limit on photo uploading/downloading. I’m contemplating upping my free 1GB Picasa quotient to their 7GB for $25/year. I could store all my pictures there for backup & access. I know, I could open several free 1GB accounts and link to them from one place, but besides the complication, that doesn’t seem fair!

Oh, by the way, If you should get a Picasa Web Album account: Google suggests, urges you and might even leave the impression you “need” to have their free Picasa photo album/edit program on the computer. Now, I’m not knocking the Desktop Picasa, especially at the price. The idea is you get a good organizer & editor for free and a seamless computer/web integration. And it probably meets these goals. But it doesn’t seem to be my cup of tea. I have other organizers/editors that I’m used to and are more robust. And it isn’t necessary (or even desirable, see below) to have the Desktop Picasa to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums. Thus Picasa seems a redundancy for me, taking up my computer resources.

Notes on uploading to Picasa Web Albums:

Part of my souring on Desktop Picasa is that I was unsuccessful in uploading full sized files to Picasa Web Albums. I found 3 options, the largest file size being “1600”, which resulted in my uploads being a fifth their original size. Maybe someone knows another way?

I was, however, able to upload the full size files via the on-site Picasa Web Albums uploader by choosing “largest size”. Note: the standard Web Albums site uploader is weak, especially for any larger number of files. As explained on the website, a free IE pluging gives a much better uploader (called Upload Control). I have IE7 and it works well, but the website doesn’t specify having to have this latest version. try this link for info http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=39499&query=upload+Internet+explorer+plug-in&topic=&type= or search for Internet Explorer upload control in Web Picasa Help.