Picasa Web Albums

CNET editors' take

• Reviewed by:
  Rafe Needleman
• Reviewed on: 06/15/2006

Google's new Picasa Web Albums beta [see news story] now allows you to post pictures directly from the application to a Google-hosted Web album. It's about time. Picasa has become the PC-based photo manager for many people, and many of them had become frustrated that they needed a separate non-Google service to post photos online. I was one of those people. So I was looking forward to Picasa Web Albums and gave it a try as soon as I got access. View our Picasa Web Albums slide show for pictures of this work in progress.

At first blush, integration appears quite good. You create an album by first selecting photos from your Picasa library, then pressing the Web Album button in Picasa. It couldn't be simpler. Album titles and descriptions transfer over automatically, but you can easily change them if you want. The albums get nice, human-readable URLs, and sharing them is a snap. Other Picasa users can download images (if you allow it) into their own Picasa libraries. And the Web pages that Picasa Web Albums creates are very clean and easy to navigate.

But there are small snags. While albums on Picasa Web Albums can be made either public or unlisted, there's no way that I saw to password-protect them. And although Web Albums will display slide shows, captions that you attach to photos don't show up in them.

But I have a bigger issue with this service: it's one way. Once you upload photos from Picasa to Picasa Web Albums, there's no link between them. If you write a caption or delete a photo on your PC, nothing changes on your online album (or vice versa). I'm spoiled by the technology of Sharpcast and Phanfare, both of which feature live synchronization between media files on your PCs and your online albums. I think synchronization is the only way to go if you're going to have the same images online and on your PC. I'm disappointed that Google did not more tightly integrate its Picasa software and Web service.

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