Picasa Tip: Staying Posted on New Pics in a Snap!

I have a number of friends and family members who either want nothing to do with social networking sites like facebook, or just don’t like posting all of their pictures in separate online photo albums. The one I discuss on here is of course Picasa web albums.

Keeping up to date on everyone’s latest additions is time consuming. Before I know it, a few weeks have passed and my friend’s toddler has grown a few inches (and I missed it!) and my other friend has hopped across another few continents. The point is, I need a fast an easy way of keeping up to date on people’s latest additions to their online photo albums. On social networking sites this is rather easy, as soon as you log in you usually see who has uploaded new images. Within a click or two you are up to date and ready for the next batch. With Picasa though, you need to go to each friend’s individual album to see the latest news in photo-form.

The solution: Picasa’s RSS feeds

I’ll admit that I have seen it before, but never paid attention to it or realized quite how useful it could be: your picasa web album has an RSS feed! Yes, no kidding… I am willing to bet a good number of you is already aware of this but not making smart use of it like me.

Combining Picasa RSS with iGoogle to snap up the latest shots

I have now added a picasa RSS feed for each person who’s images I want to follow to my iGoogle website. I removed some duplicate junk from iGoogle (stuff I already read in Google Reader for example).

How to add Picasa’s RSS feeds to your iGoogle
It’s simple, and this is how you do it:

1. In your friend’s Picasa album, scroll to the very bottom of the page where all different albums are listed.
2. Note in the right bottom corner the link to “RSS”
3. Click on said link
4. Now you have the option of subscribing to the photo-feed using Google.
5. You can add it to either Google Reader, or iGoogle. I picked, obivously, iGoogle.
6. Clicking on “add to homepage” brings you, voila, to your iGoogle homepage with the new content freshly added

Are you using RSS to stay posted on freshly uploaded pictures?