When it comes to your digital photos, sharing has never been so competitive.
Scores of start-ups, backed by millions in venture capital funding, are straining to catch the eyes of digital shutterbugs. Meanwhile, Internet giants Google and Yahoo are sprucing up their photo-sharing offerings.
Google Inc. has launched “Web Albums,” an updated version of its Picasa photo-sharing software the company acquired in 2004. The new features will enable users to share their pictures with other people on the Internet.
The new functions bring Picasa into line with the highly successful Flickr photo sharing and community site owned by Yahoo!
The new feature will initially be available as a beta to a limited number of invited users of Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, on a first-come, first-served basis.
Posting or downloading a Web album through Picasa will be a one-click effort. Users can rotate and zoom photos, add comments, create slideshows, and receive notices when other people’s online albums have been updated.
Last week, Yahoo announced it was giving one of its two photo-sharing sites, Yahoo Photos, a face lift, too.
Americans are snapping digital photos with their camera phones and high-end Canons and Nikons like never before: They are expected to take nearly 22 billion digital snapshots this year, compared with about 9 billion film images, according to PMA Marketing Research.
The resulting "Picasa Web Album" is designed to enable people easily upload and store their photos on the Web. The new feature has the capability to post pictures directly from the Picasa application, to a Google-hosted Web album.
With the new feature, Picasa users will still be able to upload, manage and store their digital images in the same way as ever. However, they will now be able to upload the pictures into the web albums that will make them available to others. By the same token it is possible to download an entire album of photos from another person directly into Picasa with just a few clicks.
Google said it is planning to make Picasa’s Web feature more widely available "soon," although no date was given.
Free Up to 250 MB
Google’s trial Picasa Web Albums offers users a clean and quick way to scan and share photos. People can write captions and comment on the photos of their friends.
Picasa Web Albums come with 250MB of free storage, which can hold about 1,000 wallpaper sized photos. Users can upgrade to 6 gigabytes, or 25,000 photos, for a $25 annual fee. It includes an option to hide some photos, as long as no one can guess the Web address for the images.
Sharing also is a simplified matter. Clicking on the "share" button, the user enters the e-mail addresses to which a link for the online photos, album, or gallery will be sent.
Obviously, one can also just send the URL. Albums can be public for anyone who knows the corresponding Gmail account name, or they can be "unlisted" and available only through a link sent by the owner.
Yahoo Photos, launched in 2000, is a more private photo-sharing experience preferred by, say, parents who want limited access to images of their children, said Will Aldrich, product management of Yahoo Photos.
Yahoo Photos was the second-hottest photo site in April, attracting 7.7 million U.S. visitors, a 21 percent jump from April 2005, according to the most recent statistics from Nielsen/NetRatings. Photobucket.com was the top of the heap, with 7.8 million visitors. Flickr was fifth, drawing more than 4.8 million visitors. It was the fastest-growing photo-sharing site among the top five, soaring 346 percent year over year.
As is becoming increasingly common in Web applications, images are preloaded so scrolling with arrow controls is quicker. When viewed, photos are automatically resized to fill available screen space.
The goal was to “make it as easy as possible for the average user to use,” said Adrian Graham, Google’s Picasa product manager. “You do not have to navigate through complicated folder structures.”
Yahoo, which says it stores about 2 billion photo images on Yahoo Photos, has incorporated some of the features of its other photo-sharing site, Flickr, which it acquired last year.
Upgrades to Yahoo Photos include drag-and-drop organization, and sharing features, photo labeling for search and viewing and point-and-click tag and caption editing. The Sunnyvale Company is also opening up its technology in an effort to encourage third-party developers to create applications for the site, such as a way to create snazzy slide shows.
Opportunity for Metadata
The Internet is crowded with photo-sharing services, observed Phil Leigh, president of research firm Inside Digital Media. As Google and Yahoo flex their muscles in the photo-sharing business, it will become more and more difficult for smaller sites such as FilmLoop, Shutterfly and Snapfish to grab the attention of the photo-sharing masses.
“If some small company comes up with a good idea, and it really catches on, Google and Yahoo replicate it, he said.
Some industry observers are more impressed with what Picasa on the Web can become than what it is. "I’m not very impressed," said Bill Gassman, an analyst with Gartner. "There is nothing radically new here. But this is Google’s opportunity to combine search with photos."
Gassman sees the management of digital photos as the biggest issue and the biggest opportunity for Google and other businesses. He added that providing ways to search and sort photos according to more useful metadata could solve the problem.
There are lab-based applications to automatically read photo images and tag them, he said, but they are not yet commercially available.
Google said that Picasa’s Web albums will be a free feature of the already free Picasa application, although a new release of Picasa is required to obtain the Web capability.
Graham said that photos can be automatically re-sized to fit-the-screen, and that they carry no advertisements next to them. Images are pre-loaded for fast viewing; users can download entire albums at 1,600-pixels resolution that is large enough to make 4 x 6 inch prints.
However, no sooner has the new feature been announced, there are reports saying it is flawed. Apparently, photos once uploaded from Picasa to Web Albums have no link to show-for between them.
In order to use the new features, users will need a new version of Picasa. At the moment, the testing is limited but you can apply for an ‘invitation’ to join the pilot programme at the Picasa test site.