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Google Acquires Picasa, Improves Blogging Tools
clandestine writes "It appears that our lovable search engine has again expanded its horizons - the internet wasn't enough; now you can search and organize your own pictures. I don't know about you, but I use Google for nearly everything; heck, I found links about their acquisition of Picasa through Google News! Any slashdotters going to benefit from this tech, or already do? And yes, the addition of Picasa to their arsenal is a couple of days old, but they just started linking them on the homepage today."
Seems like Google is expanding to more areas of our internet lives... Would this be another Microsoft coming?
Yet a faster way to find pr0n... thanks google!
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
This might be awesome, or it might not. I'm not overly impressed with Google's web picture search, so I'm not gonna hold my breath on this one. Their forte is search of text, and sure, you can put a million keywords or a clever description on each picture, but that doesn't really help me. I want to be able to sketch a rough version of the picture and have the system find all images which match it. Or how about identification of individual people? So that I can outline a section of a given picture and it'll find all other pictures which contain a similar section (AKA a given person).
Then I'll get excited...
~i = an imaginary being~
When microsoft "expands" we all bitch and whine, but then google goes out and devours companies and services, and its suddenly "cute".
Can anybody tell me why on this page I get the link to Picassa, but on this one, I get nothing.
A: When they go public. :-/
How many of you (probably would have to be not-so-wet behind the ears) have joined a truly excellent company, gotten your hopes up that "This is the company to last the rest of my career!" -- it's that good -- only to watch it go psycho when the board decides to take it public?
No, the madness doesn't happen overnight. You slowly begin hearing about the symptoms as the pressure begins... "But it's the end of the month! This (shit) has to ship!", etc.
Sad, but true and (by my experience) inevitable. I wish there were no rules which forced a company to commit what is essentially "fiscal lobotomy".
The user interface, while being modern and a bit playful is still very clear. The performance is quite good. What I am missing are many many keyboard shortcuts though.
I think its a classic example of building your business around your strength - the searching capability.
It shouldnt come across as a surprise that google wants to build components/lines of business around their core strength - be it news, images, blogs or whatever else.
Though what they do need to watch out for is the acceptance, usability and and value provided by these tools in the long run (~5 years). We have all seen numerous examples of companies that had a killer product, but failed to replicate that success elsewhere.
Like someone else mentioned, their image searching capabilities aren't as desirable currently. I haven't been so impressed with google groups yet (though I've heard that's going to be revamped as well). And then there's news and email in beta... so yes, they do have a lot on their plate, and given the poor run of tech industry at the stock market, all eyes will be on them!
http://efil.blogspot.com/
Has anyone downloaded and installed Picasa? As part of the install I get a ZoneAlarm alert saying sp7zFh5.exe is trying to use Picasa to access the internet.
I think it is questionable coding practice to have obscurely named subprocesses running around wanting to get to the net.
(This sig intentionally left blank)
nt
-- Boycott Shell
With this new version has google removed the adware and spyware that Picasa use to be known for?
They also use to be a big spammer mainly doing it on usenet, go ridance to that part of them.
"With the IPO, Google will have huge pockets. This could put Google in the market to buy a much larger player, such as AskJeeves or even AOL," he said.
I don't think the person who wrote this really understands Google's business. Google for the most part has been buying up innovative technologies which require relativley low overhead to run or integrate. I don't view AskJeeves as innovative, and don't view AOL as low overhead by any means.
I know this is nitpicking a small relativly not important part of the article, but it lept out at me as a "huh?" section.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
6. Google is free.
Google became a great company by sticking to its business plan; back linked search rankings with a simple interface.
Then came GIS, which still focuses on the main business, then came the toolbar which starts encroaching on the PC/ browser, then came IRC search... can you see where I'm heading
Which other company can we think of who add more and more functionality to an existing product... as long as this doesnt effect Googles core business, no problem, but this is very rarely the case.
Will we even recognise Google in 5 years time (or less)
.........and thought of downloading it, what stopped me was that i thought this company does not charge for there software, how do they make money. Are they making money buy selling info about what we are looking at on our hardrives. If this isn't the case then what motivated the purchase of this company, that doesn't haven't revenue streams that I can see of. Or are Google interested in the technology from this company.
- When I Google my name, I can see most of what I've been doing publicly on the net for the last 10+ years.
http://www.jamesbest.com/
We've seen google expand into other areas, generally involving search or adding search technology to something else.
This is understandable, they've saturated the search engine market, a company has to grow if it is to survive, with the market saturated, where *can* they grow?
I like and use google but have to wonder if they are (or will be) a threat in terms of making it difficult for companies to conduct business on the internet by hiding or "tweaking" the search results. Will the internet "sense this as damange and route around it" or, will people not even realize the results have been adjusted?
Right now, they don't seem threatening, it would appear anyone could compete with them since the internet is open standards based. As a company, they appear remarkably ethical (which can change as new managers appear..) the 64k question is, are they or will they become a monopoly?
Is that kneejerk sarcasm because you work there? Or do you have blind faith in all things Google? Or do you think all innovation comes from "warehouses full of Ph.D's"?
Sorry, but that's the kind of attitude I would expect from someone working for a software company in Redmond.
I happen to agree with the grandparent-post. The image search could be enhanced by taking it beyond surrounding-word analysis, perhaps by using a wavelet-decomposition index or other method of indexing by actual image contents. Perhaps you could refine your search by seeing your picture in the center of a block of nine similar pictures, where choosing one on the perimeter will move it to the center and you repeat until you find what you want. If you've ever used Photoshop's "Variations" tool you know what I'm talking about. This is just one hastily conceived example. There are a myriad other ways it could be improved.
bp
Shouldn't call someone lame and lazy for overlooking something if you spell Picasa "Picaso".
From the screenshots and description it sort of looks like iPhoto for Winodws, no?
Okay, so I love Google like the rest of you. They are privately held, seem to actually have a sense of ethics, and tend to do things 'the right way'.
That said, Google is starting to get big. Really big.
As in big enough to throw it's weight around big. I'm not opposed to this, in fact I'd be first in line (or rather as close to the front as I could get) for a Google IPO, but at what point does the whole competition getting squashed thing become a concern?
I'll say it again, I love Google.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
when will google start providing content similar to slash based sites?
After using GMail and deciding it's not for you and you delete all your mail, empty your trash, and delete your account does Google keep all that data in its index?
Well, when a website goes 404, can you keep using the Google cache?
'nuff said...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Can you post the pix of your secretary? Thanks.
Microsoft has plenty of ressources and offerings that Google isn't giving. For example MS can leverage their browser, they can package any picture software they want into their next OS or Service Pack, they have an IM which tells users when they receive an email from someone.
:
What Google needs to do is extend what it is offering and blow MS out of the water. If more companies join then MS will have to start playing fair or die.
Google, please
1. package Firefox 1.0 with added features as the GoogleFox browser
2. make Picasa run on Linux and Mac
3. offer an IM ala Jabber that allows us to get email notification like MSN Messenger does.
4. extend your Gmail offering to other people than the limited bunch currently seen
Then and only then will Google's offerings be competing with MS. All of this can be done very cheaply and unless Google get's moving MS will crush them with Marketing power and their market power.
From what I can tell, no that I've looked into very carefully or anything, but this Picasa seems to be a program you download and keep you on your hard drive. I'm not sure if its something that will be searchable via a google internet search, probably only locally. But, i'm just making shit up, of course.
Am I the only one who uses Google as a quick spellchecker?
--- Ban humanity.
Exactly!
What I was getting at in my original post was that everyone seems to think that as soon as Google touches something, it's immediately made amazing. Not true! They ruined Deja News for a _loooong time_ (Have you seen their latest beta for groups? Still needs work).
In addition, we, as users, need to keep asking for new features and creating a _DEMAND_ for good products. I send in bugfixes & feature requests several times per week on Gmail. I think that Gmail is far and away _the best_ webmail product out there, but I still get irritated and fire off suggestions about portions of it which don't make sense (what's the point of being able to create a labeling filter that only applies one label? The whole point of labels is to be able to apply several!!!).
So to sum it up, I'm interested, but just not immediately a Picassa zelot just because Google grabbed it...
~i = an imaginary being~
Checking out the Picasa site looks like it only supports MS-Windows. No Linux or MacOS X support. Oh well.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I don't get paid for accuracy, timeliness, and relevancy on Slashdot. I do it gratis.
Aye, and you get what you pay for.
>> After using GMail and deciding it's not for you and you delete all your mail, empty your trash, and delete your account does Google keep all that data in its index?
Well, when a website goes 404, can you keep using the Google cache?
'nuff said...
I don't see how this applies to your email. The google cache is caching public data, whereas your email is private. Naturally Google has the technical ability to cache your private email (since it's on their servers) but I'm not sure they'd be on solid legal ground. They have the same legal responsibilities as any other email provider and if Hotmail or Yahoo or your ISP doesn't make your email public there's no reason to believe that Google would.
I mean, it's searching your local files... have you really gone to that much trouble to organize and classify all of your porn?
I'm guessing that at least some people won't, for fear that someone might find the kiddle porn folder, which you then can't claim 'I don't know how that got there'.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
With longhorn comming out and it's "uber" organization and searching abilities (please note sarcasm). I wonder if it would be possible through future webservices to have the exact same functionality provided by google but for the desktop? For example document storage and such through them. Based on a per user basis, or per group etc. I'd love to do all my backup through google, or store documents there that I can then get from home or on the road. Address books and calendaring would also be cool.
The difference between them an MS in this case being that I trust google, and I trust them to get it right.
No. They don't guarantee that your e-mail will be deleted from all their caches and backups the instant you delete it, but they do guarantee that it will get wipped as those things are updated.
The same thing is true of pretty much any webmail service, though.
(No.) Here are the minimum system requirements for Picasa: Personal computer with 300MHz Pentium® processor and MMX® technology. 64 MB RAM (128MB recommended). 50 MB available hard disk space. 800 x 600 pixels, 16 bit color monitor. Microsoft® Windows 98, Microsoft® Windows Me, Microsoft® Windows 2000, or Microsoft® Windows XP. Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5.01 (6.0 recommended). If at any time you get an "unable to authenticate" error, you should upgrade to IE 6.0. Microsoft® DirectX 7.0 or higher (8.1 ships with XP, 9.0b recommended). Optional: 56K Internet connection speed (for access to any online services and picture sharing via Hello). Works with JPEG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PSD, AVI, MPG, ASF, and WMV files No, it doesn't run on Linux, nor on Macs, nor my old 486sx running windows 3.1 that I still keep half my photos on (early digital camera adopter).
One of Google's primary strengths is its software, no doubt they're trying to capitalize on that. Do I see Google becoming the Apple within Microsoft? Isn't their other product a search application that you download and run within windows, effectively competing with Microsoft's explorer? Now this program, which reminds me of iPhoto (download from the camera easily, print, organize, etc). This is a competitor to Windows XP's built-in photo management.
Google is competing with Microsoft, and using their own operating system against them!
hopefully they will note the massive number of linux clients hittin' it and decide to release the source so we can port it.
I don't see how this applies to your email. The google cache is caching public data, whereas your email is private. Naturally Google has the technical ability to cache your private email (since it's on their servers) but I'm not sure they'd be on solid legal ground.
Well of course, your email is private (although that's debatable), and Google isn't supposed to index any of it. But all the same, I don't like the concentration of easily cross-referenceable data into the hands of one company, as good as it appears to be, for various good reasons.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I took at look at their website and FAQ's but i can't seem to find any information on how much space you get? Does it cost anything?
tnx.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
how wrong you are. :) I've been using Google now for a while and I love it! :) The only thing I dislike about it compared to Hotmail is that I don't get email notifications. I think this is a big plus for Microsoft and it is the only thing that I find missing from the otherwise superior webmail.
Might we see a expire in so many days tag in the future if search engines get to powerfull? On the flip side I can see a lot of people complaining saying if you did not want it viewed by the public don't put it their. I can't see any easy answers. It's not like putting information up on a public bulletin board in real life where the paper gets taking down or fades to blank.
But not the companies that are suggested here. What Google could look to do is aim at the "traditional" companies that are currently under-valued to provide it with a solid non-search engine base.
Basically what AOL did when they merged with TimeWarner... who got the best in that deal ?
Hell, buy Ford and turn them round as a hobby.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
that google is not a convicted monopolist.
feh. stuff.
Don't forget your tin foil cap. They already use Google search technology on gmail. But it's limited to your access rights to your email. Nobody else can search your email.
00101010
the link to google.com shows that the newly integrated service is posted on the front page. Unkike yahoo or slashdot placing an item on the google front page is a 'big deal', they rarely add anything to it. Granted it's a common link, but 'links are our friends'.
Google's usefulness is also being expanded by third party developers using their APIs to develop kitschy hits such as Google Fight and Googlism. But there are useful apps too... A recent release is Copyscape which uses Google to find people who have plagiarized your web content. It's from the same guys as Google Alert and works like magic. I reckon it won't be long (after the IPO?) before Google expand their APIs a lot further, to make image, news and group searching available to third party apps. Then things will get really interesting.
That was a cleverly crafted anti-GPL troll.
Clever, yes. Still a troll, though.
feh. stuff.
When I Google my name, I can see most of what I've been doing publicly on the net for the last 10+ years
Sure, there's lots to see when you were a character in a hit 70's TV show, Rosco.
I just tried it and couldn't find any spyware or ads. I ran AdAware and Spybot after installing and they didn't have any complaints. Didn't find any references to Picasa being spyware on Google Groups either.
Overall I like it. It's very similar to Adobe Album, except the interface is more minimalistic and cleaner. Compared to Album 2.0 Picasa is a real speed daemon on my older Athlon 800Mhz, 512MB RAM, machine. Album chugs in both the thumbnail view and viewing a single picture full-screen is atrociously slow, easily the slowest image viewing program I've seen in years. I mean you can see the damn thing loading the pictures progressively as if it was downloading the pictures. Adobe should buy the ACDSee viewing engine or something. Picasa is pretty slow at importing stuff but after that it's real speedy.
One thing I like is that you don't have to use the import feature in Picasa as you do in Adobe Album. You simply mark folders to be watched for changes and the program figures out new additions for itself. Album never does this for me, I have to manually run import every damn time I've imported new images with Photoshop or some other application.
What I don't really like is that Picasa uses your real folders on your HD for categorizing images, and it likes to place picasa.ini files all over the place. It's ok, but the Album way of attaching metadata, very rapidly attaching labels, and allowing a picture to be in multiple categories is in my opinion superior as you can perform very neat queries on the data. On the other hand, most users probably never use either categorizing feature and just dump everything in one place. Heck, I do too, I have about 6GB of uncategorized pictures at the moment and I'm not about to sort them anytime soon. In that sort of usage Picasa is probably better since the thumbnail view is much more responsive.
It's got some newbie friendly features like mailing (and automatically resizing the pictures to some predetermined max resolution, no more 10MB attachments from Mom) pictures that my parents might use. Unlike Adobe Album Picasa works perfectly with Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird. For some reason the slideshow feature looks like total ass. I'm guessing the interface is done in some fixed resolution and it's scaling it up (poorly) to my 1600x1200 resolution.
Overall I like it. The download is small and it doesn't try to hijack your system in any way. Unlike other software it didn't even want to associate itself with every picture extension known to man.
It's like deja vu all over again.
If you consider that picture to be private, then what are you doing sharing it with others ?
Especially on the internet.
Not to mention through a third party product that doesn't come with some reasonable expectation of privacy such as e-mail (in which case you would still have to trust that the recipient doesn't forward the information to others).
I think rather than getting 'scared' of Google, perhaps getting scared of your own actions would be the proper recourse. If you realize that you made some pretty stupid posts in the past, then in the future you may think twice before posting, and post anonymously if in doubt.
In the end, that information is out there. Google is just making it easier to find.
Well of course, your email is private (although that's debatable), and Google isn't supposed to index any of it. But all the same, I don't like the concentration of easily cross-referenceable data into the hands of one company, as good as it appears to be, for various good reasons.
You won't get any arguments from me about the (U.S.) Government's attempts to pry into people's lives but I don't see how Google is any more of a danger than any other major email provider (like Yahoo or Hotmail). Google's caching of regular pages seems irrelevant.
I suppose the best bet is to use encryption. Sure if the Government focuses on you personally they'll simply throw you in jail until you give up your keys but encrypting your mail will keep it from being indexed and searched, whoever your provider is. Is GMail only accessible through a web interface or can you use pop or imap to retrieve the messages? Encrypting would be pretty pointless if you had to turn it into cleartext on their systems before you could read it.
This is not insightful - it's a total troll. How is it Google's fault that things you've said show up in searches for your name? That's the point of a search engine. If you say stupid things on the Internet, they're going to be visible whether Google is there or not. The only solution is not being stupid.
- Google has indexed 20 years worth of newsgroups. Again, I can't say I'm too pleased with some of the stuff I posted once (think "alt.binary."). But okay... So did Deja. And if you have Usenet access you could do this yourself.
- Google now "offers" 1G worth of email storage, and warns that they "may" use their searching technology on it. Now they don't even make the effort of ferreting info about you anymore, they plain and simply lure you into giving it to them
- And now the personal information releasing trap widens with this new photo storage thing. hmmm...
What next? in 5 years maybe I'll be able to google my name and see a private mail of mine saying "hey look at that d!rty picture of the secretary on my picasa account! (don't tell anyone about this, hey...)" with a nice link to my private picasa pic? Thanks but no thanks.
Whoa, what a total non sequitur. Google uses their search engine to let you search through your mail and lets you store pictures, so the obvious next step is that Gogole will index your e-mail for public searching?
Give it a rest.
Does it concern anyone else that Google is going the way of Yahoo? Trying to become the end-all-be-all of web services seems a sure way to make all your offerings mediocre at best.
Back in 1997, Yahoo was the cool kid on the block, and was both buying and building every feature under the sun. People lapped it up, and thought it was wonderful to have all their internet needs under one umbrella. Then, reality set it. Yahoo stopped enhancing and in some cases (Yahoo Groups) even maintaining the services. Quality has deteriorated, and the once proud Yahoo brand had withered and crumbled into what is now the K-Mart of the internet.
I guess Google wants to be the Wal-Mart.
Please bid on this Karmann Ghia! Please pleas
I tried Picasa out, and was underwhelmed by it's functionality.
I wound up buying iMatch for categorizing/organizing my photos. It's an awesome tool. If you're a windows user on Slashdot, and want to organize your photos, it's probably the software for you.
I literally tried dozens of programs over the span of a week or so, and found fault with each one - until I found iMatch. I was so impressed with it's abilities, I bought it less than a day into my 30 day trial.
I do IT in an art gallery, so this could potentially be really cool. Useful to me would be the ability to store captions (dimensions, title, materials etc.) along with the artwork. I'll definitely be checking it out.
I don't know how much of a monopoly Google may become, but I worry about what will happen after the IPO.
Remember Netscape? When that company started up, it's employees described it as a cool place to work, at the forefront of Browser development, fighting goliath (and winning). It didn't take long for it to become corporatized, lose it's luster, and get bought/sold out to AOL, where it became an aging, neglected, and evetually abandoned stepchild, with real development from Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird/Camino.
Regardless of how useful Google becomes or remains in the future, with Google aquiring other companies and steaming towards an IPO, I wonder if it will lose the responsiveness, humor (www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html) and uniqueness (www.google.com/intl/xx-bork/) that typcally comes from a privately held controlled by a small number of individual entrepneurs or a family.
In short, I think people feel a kind of affinity/warmth towards Google which may evaporate if it becomes too "corporate." Maybe this is inevitable, but hopefully not.
.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Where is a version for OS X? Oh, wait... we already have iPhoto. Forget it.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
---------------
---------------
-Adam
If anyone has looked at the program, you will see a component called hello. It is another part of the program that google now owns. One interesting thing about it is that there is instant messanging technology in it, so that you can send your pictures to other people. Is it only a little while till we have gim?
Sign 1 of the comming apocalypse ;)
Where is the improvement to Google's blogging tool? From what I can see (I haven't grabbed it yet) Picasa looks very similar to Apple's iPhoto or any other photo management software.
If Picasa includes the ability to create online photo galleries, linked to a user's Blogger account so he can publish them on his blog, then it would be quite neat. Otherwise, I don't see what this announcement has to do with blogging tools.
---- scrm
If you use Gmail, you'll see that every e-mail isn't shown as an e-mail, they're shown as conversations. So, if you're trying to click the checkbox next to a conversation then try to forward it, does that mean you want to forward the entire conversation, just the last sent e-mail, or one of the e-mails in between? It's ambiguous.
It makes more sense to open a conversation displaying each e-mail separately, then allow you to forward individual e-mails.
Maybe later, they will add functionality to not view your list as conversations and give checkbox forwardability. But, then again, maybe they'll just give us POP3 access.
How did this get modded insightful?
What google has indexed is stuff you have posted on the web or newsgroups for everyone to see. So what's your problem with that being seen by all? Are you planning to send cease and desist notices to all groups and mailing lists where you've posted lame stuff in the last 10 years?
How did you read "Google may use their search technology" to mean your private mails will be searchable by all. You really do post lame stuff.
Windoze only, eh? I guess I'm going to have to wait and see what Spotlight does for my iPhoto library.
Best read in good ol' Monaco 9 point.
I was smarter than that. I never once posted anywhere with my real info. I knew this stuff would be archived. Somebody always saves even the most inconsequential info. See, you can't run for president because they'll be dragging up your porn posts. Not me though. I can still run for President. Yeah. Cool.
What next? in 5 years maybe I'll be able to google my name and see a private mail of mine saying "hey look at that d!rty picture of the secretary on my picasa account! (don't tell anyone about this, hey...)" with a nice link to my private picasa pic? Thanks but no thanks.
Google does not let others search your email.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
I was going to mod you down but decided to respond instead.
Your comment is 100% FUD. Suddenly it's bad that Google is archiving newsgroups? It's not only Google's fault that you posted binaries in the first place, and that you were too dumb to use X-no-archive, but that you can't figure out how to follow their procedure for removing old posts?
And why do you put the word "offer" in scare quotes? Are you implying it's not really an offer, it's something else of unknown malevolence? Look. Google is, above all, a business, not a public service. Yes, they may do unknown, evil twisted things with your email. Poring through it with their grubby little computers, applying their sick, patented algorithms to search for phrases, using your most private thoughts for nefarious adword-enabling purposes. Those bastards!!11!! But hey, here's a clue. Don't sign up for GMail if that's your concern. End of story. There's no reason why their behavior should start to "really disquiet and annoy" you unless you have one of those psychological compulsions that prevents you from turning down free shit.
Maybe you shouldn't post here either. You might say something you regret in 20 years. Oh, too late!
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Wait, you say, you use google all the time, and dont pay?
Sure you do. But you arnt a customer. You are part of their product.
Google's customers are the people who pay for the advertisements, NOT the people who use the service. The service is merely there to generate the audience that google then sells.
YOU ARE PART OF GOOGLE'S PRODUCT.
no
One thing to note before rushing out to grab this thing: Picasa requires a mailing address and CC number to create an account (haven't looked into what the CC number is for, but I'm guessing the software is free but the service isn't). Since the address is no doubt meant to be a billing addr for the CC then you may not be able to just enter bogus values and according to their privacy policy they explicitly reserve the right to spam you (paper and electronic) and to sell your data to others. You can unsubscribe (link is in the priv policy) but it's strictly opt-out.
I'm a little disapointed in this as, despite all the hoopla about gmail and such, Google is usually good about at least not spamming and/or sharing the data they collect.
On that note, one more point: there've already been a couple of threads about Google/Gmail and the privacy armeggedon that some still seem to think they represent. I'd be interested in getting feedback on this piece that I wrote on the subject. Thanks.
Just checked, and yep, there's a "forward" link at the bottom of the message. Guess that arguement is shot...
Check their features status page for details on what they've been implementing since their initial release, and what they plan on implementing. It's very encouraging!
Cool. A better way to searching for Pictures.
Subzerorz
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It'd actually be very, very cool to click on a face in your album and have all similar faces in your collection located. In fact, I'd wager it'd be a killer app, massively suited to Google.
And it's not like this is unheard of technology, either. Face detection algorithms are extremely common.
--Dan
I was one of the original developers of Picasa (search, web export and other features). I've got to say, the former Kai Krause developers who work there really know their pixels. Even in the 1.0 incarnation you'll see a lot of attention to subtle details of animation, alpha blending and UI that is usually missing from commercial apps. Every last coder there has written notrivial Mac and Linux software, so it's up to Google to pull the strategic trigger for those ports, if any.
I'm pretty certain that those guys will be making iPhoto users jealous before long.
A click on the support link will take you to a Picasa FAQ, and within, you will find a page that lists a large number of keyboard shortcuts.
Enjoy, in moderation.
What were you expecting?
Well like the article title says, it's improve it's Blogging tools, but yet there is no mention of it. I acutally just noticed the update yesterday, becuase the old toolbar wasn't showing becuase I had way too many Windows open. Instead I refreshed and there was the new toolbar. It's pretty strange though that they've already accquired Picasa, when they just started offering the service on Blogger back in May, in a whole diffrent agreement, unless accquiring Picasa was part of it. Hmmm, maybe they might make a part of the Google Image search. Of course, for some reason, I can't access hello!, the Photo IM service that can be used to send photos to my blogs. Unless they're planning on rebranding it as Photoblogger.
In America, you spam computers In Soviet Russia, computers spam you!
Althought this app is interesting I am wondering how long it will be before getting ported away from IE requiremnents. Although I don't know how you would search the computer for files from the sandbox.
I am also wondering how long it will be before the tide changes and we see Mozilla and friends as the req browser?
Granted, I have a lot of pictures. Being a geek I've had a digital camera for the last 8 years, so it has to index a lot of pictures, but holy crap it's slow on my 2.4 ghz machine. And - I actually think my critisism is justified, because if this wasn't meant for people with many digital pictures, then who? If I only had a few pictures I wouldn't need an organizer tool.
Sorry guys, but this product isn't worthy of the Google brand just yet.
Picasa 2.0 was due out this summer. I wonder what will happen now? I use Picasa but am frustrated by some key features that were coming including archiving photos to CD/DVD.
Also, they've eliminated Picasa's user forums.
The article title says improves blogging tools. How? I missed it in the links.
When I click on the link in my competitor's ads at the top of my free blog that says "remove this ad" (which used to go to upgrade to blogger pro), I get 404 file not found.
It looks like I will be stuck advertising my competitors until/unless I shutdown my blog. Nice improvement.
It is funny how so many people on here love google without any critical judgement. Why? Their searches are not very good anymore. I get mostly linkfarms and very stale 1-page edu test pages for most of my google top results. Teoma is still better.
I can definatley forward from my gmail account, it's the link right next to reply?
There is an "Archive" button, hopefully at some point they would let you access the "arcive" in bulk.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All is well that ends well. Now all you have to do is get an account. ;)
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
lol I just downloaded and ran Picasa on someone else's computer and found tons of p0rn. He is only 14 and I'm debating whether or not to tell his parents. I probably shouldn't.
So instead of bothering to do that you manualy keep track of your conversations here? Well, getting a bit off topic here. I'll save the recruitment campaign for some other time. =)
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
Google is more than free. it saves countless time trying to find someting on yahoo or other search engines, like we did before google. thats money to me.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I started to get all excited about Adobe Album over the image-tagging and querying and stuff ("show me pictures with both me and my wife in the last month"), but then I realized there would be no way for me to get that information back out of the program again if I ever wanted to change to another picture manager -- it seems it's stuck in some proprietary internal DB. (Or am I wrong about that?) So I've held of, unsure about which way to go next.
Now, I got all excited because Google is putting out their own picture manager -- great, the search gurus will get it right! But...you're saying there's no image tagging at all? Arg. I hope they add it sometime soon. (And maintain it in some plain text file.)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
For what it is - a very fast and simple tool to keep track of your digital photos - Picasa is amazing. Even in its current 1.x state, it's faster and easier to use than prettymuch anything else out there on the market. Their target apparently was iPhoto on the mac which is notoriously slow. It is definitely photo management for the rest of them and i'd venture to say it does a darn good job at it.
Would it be possible/desirable/sensible to make/sell a Linux based thin client that used Google services for data storage? Wonder if Google would ever offer a branded thin client?
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
http://forums.picasa.com/
"and warns that they "may" use their searching technology on it. "
Actually, I noticed that the other day while using gmail. My cousin had mailed me a personal letter detailing a health problem my aunt has and how they had been to several doctors to figure out the problem... lo and behold, to the right of my email in gmail, there is a text advert for listings of doctors and other health-related adverts. Go figure.
Got me thinking about what really google will do with your emails.
Try not to let life get in the way of living.
Are you sure? My impression was that this technology is pretty good. Additionally, I know someone who did his thesis in college on facial recognition, and the impression he gave me is that this is a problem we have a pretty good handle on already.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
i would like to see more work on the google directory. make the directory open source, which would really help classifies thousands of sites and help people sift through the internet by category.
Am I right or am I right? Picasa looks like an iPhoto clone. Same look and feel pretty much. Not as pretty tho'
Why would anyone want to use a text editor that is not vi?
But you're right, I don't metamod overrated. I haven't metamodded in months so I wasn't even aware it didn't show up. ah well. This will only be the 4th time I've changed my sig in 2 days.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
3. offer an IM ala Jabber that allows us to get email notification like MSN Messenger does.
Picasa makes an IM called Hello. Unfortunately none of my friends use it, but Hello has one very useful feature: it lets you post images to your Blogger blog -- unlimited image hosting for your blog.
Both are freeware (Picasa and Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition). But you can tell Adobe has spent a lot more time on usability testing. Picasa won't let me sort newest to oldest, just oldest to newest. Also I noticed a confirmation dialog in Picasa -- something you won't see in Adobe.
I'm getting annoyed using Picasa -- I'm going to stick with Adobe until Google puts their usability gurus on the case.
Check out Google Watch Watch before believing anything Google Watch has to say. GW was started because the owner of the site disagreed with his site's pagerank. His obscure page about Donald Rumsfeld got a low PR, and he made a big deal out of it. Obviously, since it didn't give him the #1 spot, it's Google which is at fault, right?
Daniel Brandt (GW owner) has no credibility what so ever when it comes to Google. His site contanins several blatant lies about Google which I have pointed out in earlier Slashdot discussions. The purpose of the site is a personal vendetta against Google for not giving his useless and paranoid page a higher PR.
Watching big and powerful companies is a good thing. Spreading lies about them because you disagree with them is pathetic at best.
So no, I don't think Google Watch should be mentioned, as it is not a serious site. It is a pure joke, and the man who created it is a pathetic liar with a personal agenda.
Clever signature text goes here.
The automatic tool is nice, but I may not be able to use it, and I may have perfectly legit reasons to remove it. Why won't they even respond when I contact them?
Clever signature text goes here.