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Google’s Picasa - The Camera Lovers Dream

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Picasa Web Albums has been the best free sharing enabled cloud storage I have ever used. With large amounts of features with complete editing capabilities, Picasa offers a huge advantage over the more popular Flickr. Though relatively unknown to date, I expect Picasa to be widely adopted with the introduction of Google+ and will likely be a popular and increasingly updated method of storage and sharing.

picasa_logoI have used almost every popular cloud storage solution with integrated sharing. One of the most well known services to date has been flickr which is a yahoo.com product and the reason is simple: free uploading and sharing of photographs and video. There are several reason to explore options such as this. The main reason is for backup as nothing stored locally is safe. There are a host of issues that could take your memories or business photographs and destroy them forever, no matter how many backups you have made. The second reason is sharing as many times the photographs we take are to be shared with others, though some may still be private. The third reason I love cloud storage is accessibility. The convenience of being able to show off a photo album on the go from any laptop, tablet or even cell phone is priceless in many cases. However, with the rise of Facebook in recent years, many of us have resorted to sharing our photographs in low quality directly on Facebook because of the convenience provided. Unfortunately, this option is a mistake in many cases and there are other means of accomplishing this goal.

Quality
This is one of my biggest caveats with sharing on Facebook. It is well known that Facebook reduced the size and quality of all photos you share to an unbelievably small (though recently increased) quality. This was again apparent a few weeks ago when my parents tried very unsuccessfully to print a photo of their grandchild from Facebook. While flickr does allow higher quality pictures than Facebook, they do limit the size to around 2000px and also limit how many pictures you can store on the free account. For $25 a year you can eliminate the size limitation though storage is still not unlimited. With the recent introduction of Google+, Google now offers UNLIMITED photo storage on its servers at a filesize of 2000px. In addition, they offer 2gb of space for full resolution photos and video with very inexpensive options for increasing. $5 per year allows 20gb of storage while $20/year ups the number to 80gb. This is enough for most JPEG backups for even frequent photographers at a price cheaper than all other competition. This service also allows others (though only those you allow) to download the full resolution pictures enabling a great way of sharing your photos with family & friends and allowing them to print pictures locally.

Sharing
Not all pictures are public, and not all public pictures should be seen by everyone. No matter your circumstance, you have likely had pictures you have wanted to share with a particular person or group that should not be viewed by others. This marked my second problem with facebook for photo sharing. Not only was I releasing pictures in low quality, I was releasing them to every one of my friends, many of whom would otherwise not deserve the title of friend. Picasa allows you to group photos into albums and share each album with a particular person or group of people. This was massive step in the right direction as it allowed me to separate family photos, from private photos, from business photos, all of which either needed to be shared with different groups, or shared with no one at all.

Convenience
Cloud storage offers a massive convenience factor as it allows all our files, pictures, videos or music to be with us wherever we are, no matter what device we use. Using Picasa allows photographs to be accessed from any Internet capable device. The process is simple and you simply have to log on using your google email and password. Photos are loaded quickly without any issues and you can even edit photos on the fly. Although Google is lacking an official android or iphone app, there are many gallery apps that allow you to access your Picasa pictures. In addition, you can use the standard mobile web browser to access files there.

Google+
Brand new to the world and currently only available to a limited amount of people, Google+ is looking to revolutionize social networking. It addresses some of the issues facebook has encountered as a part of its quick growth, and integrates well with your current web browsing experience. In addition, it also uses Picasa, likely soon to be renamed ‘Google Photos’ for quick sharing of your albums. This makes it even easier to quickly organize, edit, and share your photographs with any person or group (circle) that you would like. I am eagerly waiting to see the progress Google makes on the photo sharing side of Google+. Google+ also allows unlimited storage of 2000x2000 pixel photographs or up to 2gb of free full resolution photographs free. You can also easily increase this to 20GB for only $5 a year.

Picasa Web Albums has been the best free sharing enabled cloud storage I have ever used. With large amounts of features with complete editing capabilities, Picasa offers a huge advantage over the more popular Flickr. Though relatively unknown to date, I expect Picasa to be widely adopted with the introduction of Google+ and will likely be a popular and increasingly updated method of storage and sharing.


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