Getting Started with Picasa and Picasa Web Albums

When Yahoo! bought Flickr, many people saw the acquisition as a loss for Google. Flickr was one of the first darlings of the Web 2.0 world because of its excellent feature set, most especially the community features. Google had nothing to compete in the online photo storage and sharing space. Google probably realized this too late, but still worked hard to deliver its own online photo storage service last year in the form of Picasaweb, an online companion for Picasa – their desktop photo management application.

There are two ways to upload photos to picasaweb: One is to use their web interface and the second and more elegant way is through the Picasa desktop application.

To upload to Picasaweb using Picasa, simply select the photos that you want to upload. You can also select an existing album to upload from your album list. Using an existing album gives you the benefit of having the same album details for picasa desktop and the picasaweb.

When you’re done selecting the photos to upload, click the web album button at the bottom part of Picasa. The upload dialog will appear. You can choose to create a new web album for your upload or to append it to an existing web album. You can also add optional information about the album as well as configure upload settings.

In the upload setting menu you can choose from three configurations: optimized, medium or slowest. Picasa automatically resizes your photos before uploading them based on your upload setting. I usually find the medium setting a good balance between picture quality and picture size. For posting on the web, optimized is usually the best.

When everything is set, just click OK to start uploading your photos. Picasa will show you a nifty progress bar during upload.

By the way, you can also upload videos to your picasa web albums. Currently it supports the following video formats: MPG, AVI, ASF, WMV, MOV(quicktime) and 3gp (cameraphones).

Although the basic free package of picasaweb already offers you a whopping 1GB of photo storage, you can upgrade to their paid plans if you need more space.

Picasa and picasaweb are a great photo management and online photo storage combo. The seamless integration seems to be the advantage over other online-only services.