Picasa 3.8: Face movies, Picnik integration, batch upload, and more

Posted by Jonathan Sposato, Product Management

Today, we released the latest version of Picasa with lots of cool new features but there’s one item that we’re particularly excited about.

Face movies create a movie based around one person both figuratively and literally. Instead of the usual transition from one photo to the next, the images align themselves to the face in the photo. This creates an extremely smooth viewing experience which allows the person in the photos to remain the focus rather than the transition effects themselves.

Words cannot adequately describe this feature, it’s better to see it for yourself:



Some more items in this release:

Picnik integration
A few weeks ago we announced the integration of Picnik, the powerful online photo editor, into Picasa Web Albums. We’re now excited to bring this same functionality to Picasa. You can now use Picnik’s rich editing tools and effects from right inside of Picasa and see where your creativity takes you.

Batch upload from Picasa to Picasa Web Albums
With this new version of Picasa we’re also fulfilling a popular request: batch upload from Picasa right to your Picasa Web Albums account. In addition to uploading multiple photos, you can now upload entire albums, all at the same time, plus remove albums from your Picasa Web account, change the upload size, visibility and sync state of photos that are already online.

Metadata updates
For those of us who enjoy the technical side of photography, we have some nice metadata (information stored inside of your image file) updates too, including support of Color Management. Picasa will now read the metadata from your photo and present the photo in the correct color space, thus improving the way your photo displays on your monitor or TV screen.

Picasa also has expanded support of XMP, which will be presented in an easy and accessible way alongside your image in the Properties panel. You can find people, places and tags in this space as well.

We’re also adding a few other under-the-hood updates such as improved support of external drives, increased efficiency of CPU usage, and improved settings when sharing with your Gmail contact groups.

This latest release is in English only for now, but we plan to roll out additional languages soon. Download Picasa today and, as always, feedback and questions are welcome in our forums.

Updated 10/20/2010. Now these features can be enjoyed around the world. Today, we launched Picasa 3.8 in all 38 (35 for Mac) supported languages.

Picnik is better with friends

Posted by Thomas Kang, Software Engineer

Picasa Web Albums has expanded the collaborative albums feature to support collaborative editing using Picnik. Now you can invite friends and family to contribute to an album either by uploading photos of their own or by editing any existing photos in that album.

Your original always stays safe and sound as your collaborators make edits to add funny speech bubbles, give you pointers on editing techniques, or pitch in to help you touch up your hundreds of vacation photos. If they edit one of your photos in Picnik and save the changes, it will save back to your album as a new image, and their name will show in the sidebar to give them credit for the new version.

To enable collaborative editing, simply share an album with your friends, and be sure to click on the checkbox to let the people you share with contribute to your album. Soon you’ll start seeing all the cool new images they create from your photos.

We're sure that there are many fun uses for this new feature, so if you discover something that was helpful to you, we'd love to hear about it. Happy editing!