I’m sure there’s more than one way to easily transfer your Facebook photos and albums to Google’s Picasa service (which will apparently be renamed Google Photos). If you know of a good method for moving from one to the other, do share it in a comment below, but I would like to highlight one that launched very recently.
The aptly named Move2Picasa.com website lets you connect to your Facebook account, after which all your Facebook photos and albums will automatically be migrated over to Google’s Picasa service. Note: sans captions, comments and whatnot. → Read More
Well, it’s not the mythical Google Drive, but it’s close. For a price. And assuming you only want to store pictures and emails.
Google tonight announced that it was drastically slashing prices while at the same time offering more storage pricing options for users of its services. Specifically, while Gmail users currently get about 7 gigabytes for free and Picasa users get about 1 gigabyte for free, both can now upgrade to 20 GB for just $5 a year. Previously, it cost $20 to get just 10 GB of additional service. → Read More
It took a whole year, but Google is finally adding the facial recognition features you can find in Picasa Web albums to its desktop app. With today’s release of Picasa 3.5, when you add a name tag, it scans your entire photo library and applies that name to every match. If it’s not sure it’s the same face, it gives you the option to apply the tag.
To help you tag people, Picasa auto-completes names from your Google contacts when you start typing a name. And you can also geo-tag a photo by marking a photo on Google Maps. → Read More
Image recognition is still one of those things that humans find easy to do but computers keep stumbling over. Some Google researchers published a paper describing progress they are making in teaching computers how to identify famous landmarks, which may eventually be applied more broadly to image search in general.
In a blog post, Jay Yagnik, the head of Cmputer Vision Research at Google, writes:
While we’ve gone a long way towards unlocking the information stored in text on the web, there’s still much work to be done unlocking the information stored in pixels.
Polar Rose, a photo tagging startup we wrote about during its private launch, has released a new version of its application that lets you name and tag people in your photos on your Flickr account using your Facebook contacts. Polar Rose will detect people in your photos, let you name the people using your Facebook contact list, and then suggest tags of other photos that include your Facebook contacts.
Polar Rose’s technology employs a browser plugin to allow users to tag people in photos anywhere on the web. The startup uses those photos to construct a 3D image of the person, and then make educated guesses as to who is in untagged photos. The new version of Polar Rose will notify that friend on Facebook who has been tagged in a Flickr photo that they’ve been named in your photos. Your friends can decide if they want their name in public or not (until they sign up and decide for themselves, Polar Rose keeps their identity them private). → Read More
Photo-sharing on the Web keeps getting more popular as people transfer more of their digital photos from their the black holes of their computer hard drives to social networks where their friends and family can actually see them. Although Facebook Photos has emerged as the largest photo-sharing service in terms of users and is one of the fastest-growing of any size, it is still not the largest by the sheer number of images that it stores.
That honor, for the moment, goes to ImageShack, which currently hosts 20 billion images, I’ve confirmed with the company (for more background on ImageShack, read this post). Facebook holds 15 billion photos, according to a spokesperson there. But it should catch up by the end of the year. Facebook users are adding photos at a rate of 850 million photos a month, compared to 100 million photos a month by ImageShack users. Good thing Facebook just fixed its storage architecture to be able to handle the bigger load. → Read More
If Facebook has one standout application it has to be Photos. Measured on its own, it is the largest photo site on the Web. A full 69 percent of Facebook’s monthly visitors worldwide either look at or upload photos, based on comScore data. And more than 10 billion photos have been uploaded to the site.
And it’s been pulling away from its competitors. As can be seen in the comScore chart above, as recently as last September the top three photo sites in the U.S. were running neck-and-neck, with Facebook Photos at 23.9 million unique visitors, followed by Photobucket at 21.3 million uniques, and Flickr at 19.5 million uniques. But by January, the number of monthly U.S. visitors going to Facebook Photos shot up 41 percent to 33.6 million. Meanwhile, Photobucket is up only 7 percent to 22.8 million, while Flickr is up 12 percent to 21.9 million. (Picasa is a distant fourth in the U.S. with 8.1 million).
In other words, Facebook increased the gap between its closest competitor (Photobucket in the U.S.) from 2.6 million monthly unique visitors to 10.8 million. On a worldwide basis, the gap between Facebook Photos and Flickr (which is the No. 2 site globally, and looks like it is about to pass Photobucket in the U.S.) went from 41.2 million unique monthly visitors in September to 87 million in December (the most recent data available, see chart below).
What accounts for Facebook’s advantage in the photo department? → Read More
Picasa, the popular free photo management software made by Google, has finally made its way to the Mac. The application has long been noticeably absent on the Macintosh – especially given the fact that it has been available for Linux (which typically lags behind Macs and Windows) since 2006. It’s also a direct competitor to Apple’s long running iPhoto product, which has come with all new Macs for years. So how does it stack up?
In my brief testing the application seems to be very snappy (much faster than iPhoto), though it lacks the sleek look of Apple’s products. Photos import quickly, effects are easy to find and apply, and most things are intuitive, though the folder browsing can be a little confusing. It might not be as pretty as iPhoto, but I won’t be surprised if power-users make the switch (or at least consider it). → Read More
Can you name Google’s top ten products? If you look at how Quantcast ranks Google’s subdomains, you can get a sense of which Google products are the most popular, since they each have their own subdomain. Google’s main search engine tops the list with an estimated 136.6 million unique visitors in the U.S. Then comes Google Maps (36 million), Image Search (31.7 million), and Gmail (10.5 million). Google Docs, Sites, and Knol are still too small to make the top-ten, but are all showing decent growth.
YouTube and Orkut are not included below because they are on their own domains, but YouTube would be second with 70 million unique visitors. Orkut is not popular in the U.S., so it would not be a factor in this particular list. And I took out sorry.google.com, the domain Google uses to try to catch bots and spyware. It would have ranked No. 8. → Read More
On the heels of a major upgrade earlier this week that added facial recognition and video-editing features to its Picasa photo management service, Google added a new Explore page today that shows off the most popular public photos uploaded by members. In addition to the featured photos, shown in a 3 X 4 grid, the Explore page also shows the most recent photos uploaded in a slide-show widget. Below, it offers a list of the most popular tags. For instance, here are pictures tagged “New York.”
The Picasa Explore page also has a Where In The World? game that is mashup opf geotagged photos and Google Maps. It shows you a photo and you have to guess where it was taken. If you guess wrong, it tells you how far off you are in kilometers. This is fun for outdoor photos, but when people upload geotagged photos of a generic apartment of a plate of food, it can become tricky. → Read More
In the anticipated release of Google’s new and improved Picasa, the company will offer facial recognition technology to help you identify friends and family in your pictures without requiring you to tag them by-hand each time you see them.
Launching at noon PDT today, Picasa’s facial recognition technology will ask you to identify people in your pictures that you haven’t tagged yet. Once you do and start uploading more pictures, Picasa starts suggesting tags for people based on the similarity between their face in the picture and the tags you already put in place for them. → Read More
Google’s Picasa photo management software is often regarded by many (particularly Windows users) to be the best basic image editing and management software on the market. Although a desktop app it’s crucially a conduit to Picasa Web Album’s, Google’s challenger to the Yahoo owned Flickr. I was struck this morning as to how prominent the Picasa logo on Google banners and employee T-Shirts was at Macworld, particularly given that there’s no Mac version of Picasa, although there is a stand alone image uploader. I asked if Picasa for Mac was coming, and as luck would have it I managed to pick the Google employee with the least amount of media training and immediately put her on the spot. Her response: Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year. She then tried back tracking and pointed me to the people who were suppose to answer these queries. After explaining that I’d been told by their colleague that Picasa for Mac was coming and all I wanted now was the release date, they said that they wouldn’t confirm or deny the fact, saying that the use of the logo was part of a promotion for Picasa Web Albums, but said all of this whilst smiling like Cheshire cats. They then put me in front of a camera and made me tell them how much I liked Google as punishment (after I told them I was writing the story anyway) and gave me a free pair of thongs (flip-flops). Sorry guys, the bribery needs to be better than that → Read More
Your TiVo box added a wee bit o’ usefulness today with the inclusion of Photobucket and Picasa compatibility. You can view your own photos, other people’s photos that you’ve been given the ability to access, and you can also customize photo feeds and view photos that have been tagged with specific keywords. Anyone try this out yet? I’m gonna fire my TiVo up this afternoon and give it a whirl. TiVo gains Photobucket, Picasa photo streaming [Electronista] → Read More
Google rolled out two new features for its Picasa (think Flickr, only by Google) online photo sharing site yesterday, both of which are useful for showing your friends just how crazy and unpredictable your life is. The first allows you to tag your photos with the location of where they were taken. Then, when sharing the photo album online with your friends, they’ll see all the photos on a Google Map, just like this . Google has also launched a version of Picasa specifically designed for cellphones. This version adapts itself to the small screen and uses the phone’s built-in Web browser. Apparently, BlackBerry users, soulless beings that they are, may have to adjust their browser settings to get Picasa to display properly. Serves ‘em right. You know, as I type this, I’m using the whole gamut of Google apps: Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Reader. I’ll be testing out the Picasa client in just a bit, expecting it to be as solid as the rest of the company’s widgets. ‘Cause if it’s not… Put your photos on a map, and Picasa on your phone [Google Blog] → Read More
Google released a web uploader for the Mac tonight. This is not a Mac version of Picasa desktop software, which is still only available only for Windows and Linux machines, but it does allow Web users to upload photos from either iPhoto or from the Desktop to Picasa Web Albums. For most Mac users this will still not be enough to switch from Flickr or one of the other online photo options, but it is a sign that Google is taking the Mac more seriously and will hopefully release a full version of Picasa for the platform soon. This was created as a side project by an engineer on the search team named Ted Bonkenburg, with assistance from Greg Robbins and Mike Morton on the Picasa team. Besides the lack of Mac support, my biggest complaints of Picasa are the fact that there is no syncing between online and desktop photos, and that total online storage is limited to 250 MB. For $25 per year, users can upgrade to 6 GB of total Picasa online storage. I applaud this release, but creating a full Mac version of Picasa shouldn’t be a side project for a Google engineer – it should be a primary goal of the Picasa team along with photo syncing. → Read More
Google-love is getting out of hand. In fact, Google is getting out of hand. After I wrote about the launch of Google Spreadsheets this morning, one commenter said “Its very nice and sleak. Will be very useful for keeping track of money etc”, as if this was the first spreadsheet he’d ever seen. Some of the other comments were also overly effusive. Thankfully, another commenter noted that, in fact, the product isn’t exactly new: “spreadsheets have been around about as long as computers”. I agree – while Google released a very nice Ajax spreadsheet today, they didn’t exactly change the world. Now we are ending the day with a post by Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped – one of his readers noticed that Picasa, which Google acquired in mid-2004, will soon be adding albums (yes, albums) to their suite of photo products. Philipp describes Picasa thusly: “Picasa is Google’s desktop photo management software – something like Yahoo’s Flickr, except it’s not on the web.” Yeah, it’s just like Flickr, except without tagging, sharing, commenting and, of course, it isn’t a web service. Ryan at Cybernet is impressed, saying “[Google has] so many services that they could integrate with a photo service…so that people can create their own sites and add their photo albums. Oh the possibilities!” (Note: I like and read both of these blogs, so I’m just picking on the posts, not the blogs in general). What drives this kind of blind enthusiasm? When is the last time Google released a product that really changed our lives? For me, it was (and is) their core search engine. I grant that Google Maps pushed the envelope and forced the other big Internet guys to improve their own offerings (but today Microsoft and Yahoo are both significantly better than Google). And I do appreciate the POP access to Gmail (this was the one thing that converted me from hotmail for personal email). Everything since has been, well, somewhat underwhelming. Now, if Google actually announces their intention to eat Microsoft’s lunch by trying to kill their Office revenue with a full online office suite, that would be interesting. Or if they said they wanted to eat into Flickr’s growing market share by competing more aggresively in online photos, I’d have some respect for them. At least we’d have something to talk about besides online photo albums and all this blathering on about → Read More
