Picasa Web and you

Well "everyone" knows about Flickr but to paraphrase the adverts for the Radio Times other photo sharing sites are available! Of course there are dozens of such sites and unless you want to spend all day just uploading photos you can't use them all but one you should look into is Picasa, Google's image sharing site. Because it's Google you can't really ignore it.

Picasa Web Albums is the photo sharing site behind the Picasa image management software Google have developed, it is quite a nice piece of software - on a PC anyway, i've never tried it on a Mac. You don't need to use Picasa to upload to Picasa Web, you can use a web form but Picasa does integrate nicely with the website. One interesting aspect of Picasa Web is, as it is a Google product, there is a degree of integration with Google's other web services. If you have uploaded images to a Blogger blog for example then those images you will find already in your Picasa Web Albums area. It interestingly retains photographs even if you delete the blog they once belonged to, which is useful if you ever forget to back anything up. Not that you should ever forget of course being a professional, but you will.

As for the images themselves you can do the usual value-adding manipulation you would expect. You can add tags, captions and geotag the images though the actual tools are not as advanced or as extensive as Flickr's. Ironically you cannot easily blog an image like you can in Flickr where i often insert images automatically into my Blogger blogs directly from Flickr. You do not seem to be able to do the same from Picasa Web. To what extent tagging images in your Picasa Web helps them appear in Google searches is something that could be worth exploring.

Its probably worth, even if you are wedded to Flickr, to keep an eye on Picasa Web as well. Maybe maintain a selection of your images or even just a mirror copy. Photobucket is another popular site, what others would readers recommend?