Google Photography Prize: Looking for the photography stars of the future

Google+ is only a few months old, but the photography community is already thriving on it. Take a look at the profiles of Scott Jarvie, Thomas Hawk, Colby Brown or Claire Grigaut to see just a few of the inspiring photographers on Google+. More than 3.4 billion photos have been uploaded to the platform in the first 100 days.

We’re really excited about this, and think great art deserves great exposure. So we’re teaming up with Saatchi Gallery, London for the Google Photography Prize, a chance for students around the world to showcase their photos on Google+ and have their work exhibited at a major art institution.

The contest is open to students around the world (some exceptions apply, see google.com/photographyprize for more details). From far-away places to up-close faces, there are 10 different categories to spark your imagination. And there are some great prizes to be won: 10 finalists chosen by a jury of renowned photographers will show their work at Saatchi Gallery, London for two months in 2012 alongside Out of Focus, a major photography exhibition, and win a trip to London to attend the exhibition opening event with a friend. One winner will go on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to an amazing destination with a professional photography coach.

It’s easy to enter: After you pick a category, upload your photos to Google+ and share them with the world as a public post, then visit the submission form on google.com/photographyprize by January 31, 2012 to enter.

Saatchi Gallery, London will share updates on their Google+ page for the contest, so add it to your circles if you want to see the great work that’s being submitted.

We can’t wait to see your photos!

Update Nov 14: We've had a few questions and comments about who can enter. The contest is open to all students in higher education, including but not limited to those studying photography. Please have a look at the eligibility criteria on the contest website.

Posted by Obi Felten, Director of Consumer Marketing, Google EMEA

Google moms share tech tips for your family

As a Googler I often take my work home with me—in a good way. With two young boys at home, life is always busy, so my husband and I are always looking for ways to save time, get organized and enrich our lives in simple ways. Because the products I beta test and use in the office have become an integral part of my own family life, for Mother’s Day this weekend I’d like to share some favorite tips, including a few from other Googler parents.

Capturing and sharing memories

• Instead of keeping 500 crayon masterpieces, store digital photos of all your kids’ artwork in Picasa Web Albums
• Collect trip or party photos in one place by letting all of your paparazzi upload their snapshots to a collaborative online album
• Tag friends and family in Picasa photos so you can easily create and share personalized collages, gift CDs/DVDs or movie slideshows
• Use Picnik to edit your Picasa Web Albums photos. Use the “Create” tab to add text, stickers, frames and other effects to your photos—your kids can help, and you can email them as digital cards to distant relatives
• Safely share home videos with family by inviting them to view a private YouTube video
• Keep a running family history by encouraging relatives around the world to contribute stories and biographies in a shared Google doc or blog

Communicating and entertaining

• Video chat through Gmail for free with long-distance grandparents and friends—this is also great for connecting kids with their parents when traveling
• Entertain kids on the run with kid-friendly YouTube channels—like Sesame Street and School House Rock—Android apps or your own photos and videos on your mobile phone (kids love watching themselves!)
• Have your kids help you create a video card or a cartoon on YouTube
• Explore the world from the couch—fly around Google Earth on your mobile phone or tablet
• On camping trips, use Sky Map to explore and name constellations. You can even travel back in time to show your kids what the sky looked like on the day they were born
• Read the classics—like Anne of Green Gables, The Wind in the Willows and Grimm’s Fairy Tales—for free from Google eBooks; for older kids, many books that are required reading for school are also free. Google eBooks are accessible and readable on devices your family probably already has—like laptops or smartphones

My son Kai chatting with his dad while on a business trip

Organizing and planning

• Plan a group trip by creating a shared Google document or site with proposed dates and activities. Navigate around traffic and find the nearest pit stop with Google Maps for mobile
• Using My Maps, get family and friends to help you collect ideas for activities in your area that are family-friendly
• Schedule family events, playdates and birthdays on a shared Google Calendar
• Track everything from infant feeding schedules, holiday gifts and thank-you notes to travel packing lists and family budgets with Google spreadsheets; look at the Template Gallery to customize yours
• Use forms in Google spreadsheets to send invitations to birthday parties and collect RSVPs (there are templates for these, too)
• Use the ingredient filter in Recipe View to find recipes that exclude ingredients your kids won’t eat—like [meatballs without onions]—or use the time filter to find easy recipes your children can help prepare like chocolate chip cookies that take under 30 minutes
• Share a shopping list on Google Docs—whomever goes to the store can easily access it from the new Google Docs app on Android

I hope these tips inspire moms (and dads) to celebrate your family this weekend. Here’s hoping you can save time and energy to focus on having fun with your kids!

Posted by Cathy Cheng, Webmaster Manager and proud mom of Kai (3 years) and Jin (10 months)

More “I do”s, less “to-do”s: wedding planning simplified

(Cross-posted on the Google Docs Blog and the Google Photos Blog)

For many, your wedding day is one of the biggest, most momentous days of your life. The perfect dress, the right tuxedo, the proper shade of blue, the three-tier cake with chocolate fondant, and all of your closest family and friends—these are just a few of the many things you might think about for your special day. Although there’s much to consider and a lot of work to do, the payoff is great: it’s one of the happiest days of your life.

To help you plan this important day we’ve created wedding-specific templates in Google Sites, Google Docs and Picnik, and gathered tips and tricks for using these and other Google products at google.com/weddings. From wedding websites to save-the-date cards, these tools simplify wedding planning, letting you focus your time on the fun things—like tasting cakes!

We teamed up with renowned wedding planner Michelle Rago, who provided her insight and creativity to guide the designs you’ll find on this new site. Michelle also shared her experience to provide tips and advice to keep your guests comfortable and you sane.

We’re also hosting a wedding sweepstakes, so if you’re getting married in the next year you can enter for a chance to win $25,000 towards your dream wedding (see Official Rules). Plus, Michelle Rago and her team will advise the winning couple on location, flowers, food and other design elements to create a day that is uniquely their own. (Update March 29, 2011: The Google Dream Wedding Sweepstakes is closed and is no longer taking entries. Thanks for your interest.)

Visit google.com/weddings to start planning, or share the site with your favorite betrothed couple and help them on their way to wedded bliss.

Posted by Lisa Conquergood, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Announcing the Panoramio Photo Contest

(Cross-posted from the Lat Long Blog)

The Panoramio community enables you to share your photos and explore them on Google Earth, Google Maps and other places. If you’ve never geo-tagged a photo, watch this video to learn how easy it is to add photos to the Panoramio layer in Google Earth.

Now you can add some excitement to your photo project and enter your photos to the monthly Panoramio Geotagged Photo Contest! Starting this month, we’ll be giving away the new Casio Hybrid-GPS camera EX-H20G to the winner of each category (Scenery, Heritage, Travel and Unusual Location). The Panoramio community reviews all of the submissions and votes for what they consider to be the best each month.


Casio’s new Hybrid-GPS camera combines a GPS engine with autonomic positioning made possible by a motion sensor. This makes geotagging easy—both outdoors and indoors.


If you haven’t joined the Panoramio community yet, try it out and don’t forget to participate in our monthly contest. To enter your photo, click on “Submit to the contest” and choose a category. Good luck and we can’t wait to see your photos!

Posted by Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Things that go bump in the night

On the Picnik team, Halloween is one of our favorite times of year. We get a bit giddy anticipating our braaaaainstorm session for this holiday. We love dreaming up ghouls and ghosts that bring spooky effects to your photos.


This October, we brought back mob favorites, like Vampire and Zombie, Lightning and Ghostify. And we’ve introduced new effects like eeriness with one click, unearthly textures and heaps of new stickers.

Halloween Effects: Feeling beastly? Our mad scientists created tools to turn you into a zombie, vampire or other creature of the night, and many other effects to give your photo a mysterious cast.
Halloween Stickers: We went up to the attic and dusted off trunks full of stickers, so you can add everything from witch hats, ghosts and jack-o-lanterns to fangs, lesions and tombstones.
Halloween Fonts: We unearthed some of the spookiest fonts around so you can add text to your photo written in skeletons, ghosts or other treacherous text.

To find these fiendish delights, go to picnik.com/halloween. This Halloween, you can dress up your photos without even putting on a costume.
Posted by Lisa Conquergood, Picnik team

Google welcomes Picnik

(Cross-posted from the Google Photos Blog)

More than ever before, people are sharing and storing their photos online. But until recently, you had to edit your photos using client software on your computer. Today, we're excited to announce that Google has acquired Picnik, one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud. Using Picnik, you can crop, do touch-ups and add cool effects to your photos, all without leaving your web browser.


We're not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we'll be working hard on integration and new features. As well, we'd like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks.

We're very impressed with the Picnik team and the product they've created, and we're excited to welcome them to Google. We're looking forward to collaborating closely with them to improve the online photo editing experience on the web. In the meantime, we encourage you to head to Picnik, import some of your photos from Picasa Web Albums, Flickr or Facebook and try your hand at photo editing in the cloud!

Posted by Brian Axe, Product Management Director

Happy holidays from Picasa Web Albums and Eye-Fi

(Cross-posted from the Google Photos Blog)

I used to take a lot of photos with the best intentions of sharing them with friends and family. But most of the time they just sat on my camera's memory card, never quite making it to my computer, let alone to my friends and family.

Three weeks ago we made extra storage more affordable for Picasa Web Albums and Gmail, and now we're making it easier to get your photos in the cloud and share them, right in time for holiday picture snapping. We've partnered with Eye-Fi, makers of WiFi-enabled memory cards that make it easy to upload photos directly from your camera to Picasa Web Albums — no cables required. For a limited time, when you buy 200 GB of Google paid storage for $50 you'll get a free 4GB SDHC Eye-Fi card (a $95 value). The Eye-Fi card lets you wirelessly upload photos and videos directly to Picasa Web Albums or to your computer. It even includes automatic geotagging, so you'll know exactly where your pictures were taken. And you won't need to worry about running out of space — 200 GB is enough storage for a hundred thousand original resolution photos. Visit picasa.google.com/eyefi.html to get yours today.

By using Eye-Fi and Picasa Web Albums together, you can automate your photo sharing: photos are wirelessly uploaded and shared with the people that matter. Based on my experience as an avid Eye-Fi user, here's some tips on setting it up:

• Configure the Eye-Fi card to send photos to an active album (in my case, "Axe Family 2009 Lifestream")
• After the first photo posts to the album, share this album with individuals or a group (I created a "Family" group)
• Whenever the Eye-Fi card uploads photos to Picasa Web Albums, the people on the album's shared list are automatically notified via a daily digest email.
• Advanced tip: If you add yourself to the group, you'll get the digest email as well to remind yourself to curate your photos (delete bad pics, add captions, etc).

Eye-Fi can even make the holidays more fun: With nearly instant access to photos of her grandkids, my mother-in-law felt like she was with us this Thanksgiving, even though she was two thousand miles away!

Posted by Brian Axe, Product Manager

Show me the pictures: better format for image results

I love when I get images back in my Google search results. There's no better way to quickly understand the difference between an ocelot and a clouded leopard. But sometimes I want to see more images to really make sure I've identified the right jungle cat.

Over the next twenty-four hours we're rolling out a new format for image universal results. When we're confident that we have great image results, we'll now show a larger image and additional smaller images alongside. With this new layout we're able to show you more pictures than before, so you have more to choose from. As always, you can click on an image to see it full size in the original webpage.


We hope this new layout makes finding the images that you're searching for even easier.

Posted by Alex Petcherski, Software Engineer

Picasa 3.5, now with name tags and more

Today, I'm happy to announce that we're releasing Picasa 3.5, a new version of our free photo editing software. This version gives you the ability to add name tags to your photos, using the same facial recognition technology that powers name tags on Picasa Web Albums. Name tags are designed to help you organize your photos by what matters most: the people in them. Picasa identifies similar faces and puts these into an "Unnamed People" album. From there, you can easily add a name tag by clicking "Add a name" and typing the person's name. After you've added name tags to some photos, you can use your tags to do creative things, like quickly find all the photos with the same two people in them, make a face collage with just one click or upload and share people albums with friends.

In addition to name tags, Picasa 3.5 has integrated Google Maps, so you can easily geotag your photos or view the locations of already-tagged photos on a map. And using our totally redesigned import process, you can now import photos from your camera and upload the photos to Picasa Web Albums in one easy step.



Picasa 3.5 is available for both PC and Mac, in English for now. You can download and try it today at picasa.google.com.

Posted by Todd Bogdan, Software Engineer

We have a winner for the Google Photography Prize

Huge congratulations to Daniel Halasz from Hungary, who was awarded the Google Photography Prize this week. This was a global student competition to create themes for iGoogle. More than 3,600 students from across the world entered, and a couple of weeks ago we asked you to vote on the shortlist. The six finalists who got the most public votes were Amelia Ortúzar (Chile), Fahad AlDaajani (Saudi Arabia), Matjaz Tancic (U.K.), Mikhail Simin (U.S.) and Vesna Stojakovic (Serbia) — congratulations to all of them! From that group, a jury of respected art critics and artists chose Daniel as the winner. They also gave a special commendation prize to Aliyah Hussain from the U.K.

You can see the work Daniel and the other finalists submitted at the Saatchi Gallery in London until Sunday, June 28th. Come by if you're in town, or have a look at their photographs on google.com/photographyprize, where you can also add them to your iGoogle homepage.

Posted by Posted by Louise Rigby, Consumer Marketing Team

Voting for iGoogle photo themes now open

A few weeks ago we launched the Google Photography Prize, a global student competition for students to create themes for iGoogle. Our goal was to find talented student photographers and give them unprecedented online and offline exposure. It may seem a little brave to unleash student art on our homepage, but we've been hugely impressed the number and quality of entries we received.

From among the thousands of entries from around the world, we've just announced the shortlist of 36 finalists. Now they're up for your vote - the most popular six you choose will make it to the finals. The 6 finalists will be exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in London and have the chance to win the first prize of £5,000 ($7,500), plus an invitation to spend the day with the internationally renowned photographer Martin Parr.

On the voting page you can also add your favourite as a theme to your iGoogle homepage. Millions of people have already chosen to adorn their iGoogle page with images, with everything from seascapes to original art. Now you can have some fantastic photography from some of the best up-and-coming photographic talent out there right on your homepage.

So take a look, enjoy the photographs, and please vote — the deadline is June 17th. And if you are in London this month, come see the exhibit of the winners at the Saatchi Gallery, starting the 24th and running for a week.

Posted by Posted by Louise Rigby, Consumer Marketing Team

Picasa Web Albums stays big, gets faster

I use Picasa to manage the photos on my computer in part because it's the fastest way to manage all of the pictures I take. When I started working on Picasa Web Albums, the speed and responsiveness of the desktop program were a tough act to follow. Typically, when you move your photos from the desktop to the web, you have to choose between viewing high resolution photos that take forever to download, and tiny photos that lack any detail. For Picasa Web Albums, we thought we could do better.

We chose to show large images, the very biggest we can fit into your browser window. If you open up a slideshow or full-screen view, we can fill your entire monitor. But it wasn't snappy enough for us, so we had a choice to make: either use smaller images, make the Internet faster, or make our code smarter. We think large images are important, because seeing a photo's little details can make a big difference, and as much as we wanted to, making the whole Internet faster was a little impractical in the short term. So we went deep into the code and gave it a thorough tune-up.

The results, I hope, speak for themselves. Take a look at any album or slideshow on Picasa Web (here's one of mine) and you should notice that browsing photos is significantly faster. Give full-screen mode a try to see even bigger photos. If you've got a reasonable connection to the Internet, you should be able to hold down one of the arrow keys and zip through the entire album at a pretty good clip, flip-book style. Of course, while you could zoom past entire albums at ludicrous speed, we hope you'll enjoying spending your time looking at the photos themselves, rather than navigating between them.

Posted by Shawn Brenneman, Software Engineer

Introducing Picasa for Mac (at Macworld!)

Sometimes I find it hard to describe Picasa without sounding like a late-night infomercial for a multi-bladed thingamabob: "It's a photo organizer! A photo editor! A web-savvy photo sharing and management system in just one tiny package!"

We try hard to avoid hyperbole around here, but it's true that Picasa software, working together with Picasa Web Albums, can help with nearly every aspect of owning and operating a digital camera. And because many of us take pictures in order to share them, we try to make sure Picasa does a great job of getting your favorite photos online, where friends and family can enjoy them too. In Picasa 3, that means powerful new features like automatically syncing changes between the photos on your computer and what you're sharing online, useful privacy controls integrated into the software on your PC, easier notifications, and more.

And today, we're releasing Picasa for Mac. While we've previously offered both a standalone Picasa Web Albums uploader and an iPhoto plugin for Mac users, Picasa for Mac finally brings all of the advanced sharing and sync features of Picasa to the millions of Mac OS X users who use Picasa Web Albums. Not to mention the "it-slices-and-dices" feature list that covers everything from color balance to collages.


Picasa for Mac looks and works much like Picasa on other platforms, and offers trademark Picasa features — such as non-destructive editing, and the ability to keep track of photos anywhere on your hard drive, then automatically account for new images as you add them.

Right now, Picasa for Mac is still in Google Labs, but we very much wanted to get an early version out to folks attending Macworld (you can learn more about this beta release at the Google Photos blog). To run Picasa, you'll need an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 and above. We hope you'll give it a spin, and give us your feedback in person — members of the Picasa engineering team will be conducting demos at Google's Macworld booth all week (you can also check out the video tour below).



Posted by Susanna Leng, Software Engineer

Picasa 3 (and name tags) go global

A few months back, we announced some pretty big upgrades to Picasa and Picasa Web Albums for English-speaking users in the U.S. On the PC side, we rolled out a brand-new version of Picasa, with a slew of new tools like effortless web sync, movie editing, and photo-retouching capabilities. On the web, we launched "name tags," a new feature that automatically helps organize your photo collection based on who's in each of your pictures.

Today, just in time for your holiday snapshots, these changes (and more!) are available in all of the 38 languages we currently support. If you've been waiting to try the new photo-collage feature in Picasa, or been curious to see how clustering technology can automatically find similar faces across your photo collection, now's the time to download Picasa 3.1 or opt in to name tags on Picasa Web Albums.

Of course, having a truly global audience sharing and commenting on photos is one of the things that makes Picasa special. The people and places you'll spot on our Explore page attest to this, as do the multilingual comments users receive on their most popular public albums. That's why we just launched automatic comment translation on Picasa Web Albums, which harnesses Google Translate to make sure you know that "美麗的落日" means "Beautiful sunset!"

In fact, if you look closely, you'll see that we've recently rolled out a number of other small but meaningful changes across Picasa Web Albums, in all 38 languages -- ranging from improved sharing to better video playback. Swing by the Google Photos blog to learn more about what's new.

(Or, if you speak British or American English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian or European Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Danish , Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Tagolog, Thai, Vietnamese, or Ukrainian, just visit Picasa Web Albums and see for yourself!)



Posted by Jason Cook, Product Marketing Manager

LIFE Photo Archive available on Google Image Search

The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen. These are just some of the things you'll see in Google Image Search today.

We're excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We're digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.


It has been a thrill for us to explore this archive, filled with images captured by LIFE's famous photographers. See masters like Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White documenting pivotal world events, capturing the evolution of lifestyles and fashions, and opening windows into the lives of celebrities and everyday people.

One of our favorites is this classic Eisenstaedt image of children watching a puppet show.



Alfred snapped this in 1963, at the climax of Guignol's "Saint George and the Dragon" in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. Just as the dragon is slain, some children cry out in a combination of horror and delight, while others are taken aback in shock. Every child is consumed with emotion, masterfully captured by Eisenstaedt's camera. These amazing photos are now blended into our Image Search results along with other images from across the web.

Once you are in the archive, you'll also notice that you can access a rich full-size, full-screen version of each image simply by clicking on the picture itself in the landing page. If you decide you really like one of these images, high-quality framed prints can be purchased from LIFE at the click of a button. Think of the holiday gift possibilities! It doesn't get much easier than that.

So please take a look for yourself and experience these great photos. Your exploration will be limited only by your imagination and your desire to keep on clicking. Be sure to check back often as more photos from the LIFE archive will be added regularly to Google Image Search. We hope that you enjoy them as much as we do!

Posted by Paco Galanes, Software Engineer

Introducing Picasa 3.0 (and big changes for Picasa Web Albums)

A little over two years ago, we launched Picasa Web Albums to make publishing photos online easy. Now Picasa Web Albums hosts billions of online photos from around the globe, with users adding millions of new snapshots every day. Each of these photos records a different moment, or a different perspective, but one thing they all have in common is that in each case, the person behind the camera wanted to share their experience with a friend, their extended family, or maybe the world.

Today, we're rolling out major technology upgrades to both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums. As you might have guessed, these are largely focused on how we share and enjoy our photos with others.

For starters, there's a brand-new feature called "name tags" in Picasa Web Albums that helps you quickly label all the people in your photos, so you can organize and share your photos based on who's in the picture. Name tags uses advanced technology to automatically group similar faces together. That way, you can quickly label all the people you care about in your photo collection. Once you've labeled your photos, it's then a snap to do things like create a slideshow with every picture of you and your best friend, or easily share party photos with everybody who appears in that photo album. This demo video shows you what you can do with name tags:



There's more to Picasa Web Albums. The site now has a fresh, clean look that makes photos look great, and a new "Explore" page that allows you to browse some of the most interesting public content on our site, including "Recent Photos," a near-real-time view of public photos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums. You can now also email photos directly to Picasa Web Albums.

Of course, Picasa Web Albums is only half the story. The great advantage of Picasa Web Albums has always been its integration with Picasa, Google's free photo management software for your PC. And today we're making public the beta version of Picasa 3 at picasa.google.com.

Sharing photos with Picasa has always been remarkably simple, but in Picasa 3, we've made sharing so simple you don't even have to lift a finger. A new 'sync to web' button allows you to sync specified albums on your PC to the web. If you edit or add photos to the album on your PC, those changes will be automatically reflected on Picasa Web Albums. You can even specify who you'd like to share your web albums with from the Picasa software itself.




We've packed many other new features into Picasa 3. There's a slew of powerful new editing tools to retouch and restore photos, automatically detect and fix red-eye, or attractively add text to your images. Plus, there's plenty of the fun stuff -- we completely overhauled things like photo collages and slideshows, giving you more creative freedom over composition and layout. Not to mention a brand-new movie maker that can blend photos, video, webcam capture, and music to create customized movies that you can easily share on YouTube.

You can learn more about Picasa 3 and the new Picasa Web Albums on the Google Photos blog, or by watching the overview video below. Please give both a try -- and give us feedback!



Posted by Mike Horowitz, Product Manager

Put your photos on a map, and Picasa on your phone

Posted by Ping Chen and Joel Onofrio, Software Engineers

If you've ever seen a great picture and wondered where it was, wished you could visit that exact spot yourself, or found yourself itching to share a great photo with somebody -- but you were away from a computer, we've got two new features on Picasa Web Albums to help you out. First, we're excited to let you know about 'Map My Photos' -- it lets you show exactly where you took your favorite snapshots. When you share an album with friends, they can see your best photos arrayed on a map (or even Google Earth). It's the perfect way to showcase a memorable road trip or a globe-trotting vacation.

Here's how to get started: when you create a new album, just fill in the optional 'Place Taken' field. You can even drag and drop individual photos directly onto a map, and use built-in Google Maps technology to pinpoint exactly where each was shot. For a quick peek at what the results look like, check out our test gallery.

But wait! There's more. We're also launching the first version of Picasa Web Albums built specifically for mobile devices. You already have a couple of pictures stuffed in your wallet, and maybe even a few wallpapers stored on your phone. But what about all those snapshots you can't carry around? With Picasa Web Albums for mobile devices, your favorite pictures are always with you. So next time you're at a loss for words when describing just how awesome, cute, or beautiful something really was, just grab your phone for visual backup.

Of course, the mobile version of Picasa Web Albums lets you keep track of photo updates from friends and family, too. Just click 'My Favorites' from the main screen to see the latest photo albums that your contacts have posted to Picasa Web Albums -- you can even post a quick comment on their photos, using your phone. Thumbnails and photos are automatically re-sized for your device's screen, so pictures look good and download fast. All you need to get started is a phone with a web browser and a data plan; learn more here.

As you enjoy your summer travels, remember to take plenty of snaps, and share the most beautiful places in the world (and don't forget to use your phone to show off pics from back home!).

Store and find even more photos on Picasa Web Albums

Posted by Mike Horowitz, Product Manager, Picasa

We have a few long-awaited improvements at Picasa Web Albums today. A new Community Photos search feature helps you discover and explore the public web albums of others on the site. Free storage is now 1GB (and counting)—that's room to post and share around 4,000 standard resolution photos. And we've made albums and photos easier to link to from any email, IM or website—simply copy and paste the code we show you.

Share your photos in more languages

Posted by Steve McKay, Software Engineer

Have you been waiting to share your photos on Picasa Web Albums in a language other than English? We don't want you waiting a minute longer, so today our team in Santa Monica is very happy to give you the ability to create web albums in 18 additional languages: English (UK), English (US), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Taiwanese, and Turkish. If you've already got a Picasa Web Albums account in English, click the "Settings" link to change your language.

For the fastest and easiest uploading to Picasa Web Albums, get Picasa. If you don't use Windows or you have another photo management tool, use your browser to upload your pix. Either way, your photos will be easy to arrange in a clean, uncluttered web gallery where you can add captions and share them. Take a look at our test gallery to see what it looks like.

Picasa goes online, gets new features too

Posted by Michael Herf, Picasa Engineer

I have 80,000 photos in Picasa, Google's free photo organizer, but most of my friends haven't had a chance to see them yet. That's why I'm so excited about the new version of Picasa that came out today. It has a feature called Picasa Web Albums that lets you post and share your photos online for free with just one click. You can show the world (or just your friends and family) what kinds of pictures you've been taking. And best of all, you can even download your friends' online photos right back to Picasa.

I run around at parties and take photos of people, and now my friends can see the pictures online as soon as I post them. Rather than bugging me all the time to email them around (which I'm too lazy to do), now they're asking to have the bad shots deleted instead. Some of them even add online comments right to the photos themselves.

We've also fixed a whole bunch of things in Picasa. Folders finally work as you'd expect, so people who've kept their photos meticulously organized in folders and subfolders can see them displayed the same way in Picasa. And we've added a shiny new feature to photo-editing: Save. Your Picasa edits can now be preserved when using other programs. The save feature is even undoable, so you never lose your original files.

And there's more -- you can import into any folder you like, make time-lapse sequences into movies, search by color, create a screensaver with beautiful visual effects, and even re-arrange Picasa's buttons. Oh, and we also made Picasa work with Google Earth, so you can put information about where you went on vacation into the photos themselves, and then, view your shots on a 3-D globe. Try it all out for yourself at picasa.google.com.