However, one online area that Google has never really been at the forefront of is online photo sharing. Picasa Web Albums, the search engine's offering for online photo storage, has never really seen the sort of take-up enjoyed by the likes of Yahoo!'s Flickr or Fox Interactive Media's Photobucket, as a quick comparison on Google Trends shows.
Now, Google is adding some valuable features to Picasa Web Albums, in a bid to shore up its edge against its competitors in the online photos field. Its first new addition is "name tags", a feature that aims to make tagging photos easier by grouping similar faces together. The use of facial recognition technology when tagging images has already been made popular by the likes of Facebook, but Picasa Web Albums's new tool aims to take away the time consuming nature of tagging people in photos. So in a set of 100 photos, for example, a face that appears in more than one photo will be recognised instantly, and can be tagged in all the photos in which they appear in one go.In addition, Picasa Web Albums sports a new "Explore" feature, in which users can view "Recent Photos", an almost real time view of public photos as they are uploaded.
Though these features are certain to please avid Picasa Web Albums users, they don't seem quite substantial enough to cause an exodus from Flickr or Photobucket. However, Google has also announced a new beta version of Picasa 3 - the simple photo editing software that is cleanly integrated with Picasa Web Albums.
Downloading Picasa has always enabled users to create photo albums quickly and easily on their PC. But Picasa 3 takes this simplicity a step further, allowing users to sync their album creation to the web. So if a photo album is created on your PC or changes are made to an existing album, those alterations are automatically uploaded to Picasa Web Albums as well.
Other Picasa 3 features include:
- Red eye detection
- Retouch and restoration tools
- Revamped collage and slideshow applications
- Ability to add text to your images
- A new movie-maker that lets users blend photos and videos, and upload to YouTube with ease
The new additions to Picasa and Picasa Web Albums are certainly wide-reaching, clearly aiming to make it a more attractive online image storage and manipulation tool. Feedback has been largely positive so far, though some analysts - like Steven Shankland at CNET - have encountered some early problems with the facial recognition feature. Still, it's a bold move that could bolster Picasa's performance against Flickr, Photobucket and its other main competitors and has the potential to revolutionise online image tagging - Facebook may soon be following in its footsteps.
