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!

A more picturesque Google profile

Posted by Dave Cohen, Engineer Google Photos

Recently we updated Google Profiles to help you decide what the world sees when it searches for you. Your profile and scrapbook photos already make it easier for people to get to know you, but we want to do more to help you showcase your favorite pics.

Now you can add Picasa Web Albums to your Google profiles. By choosing to show the “PicasaWeb” tab, you will enable visitors to see your public albums. Private albums will remain visible to only the people you’ve shared them with directly.

Add Picasa Web Albums to your profile now by visiting profiles.google.com. We hope you enjoy this change, and be sure to let us know what you think in our forum. Happy posting!

More storage, more photos, more fun

Posted by Matt Steiner, Engineering Lead-Photos Team

With Picasa Web Albums, you automatically get one gigabyte of free storage. As some of you may have noticed, we recently changed the way storage works so you can continue to share and store images even after you fill up that free gig.

In the past, each image and video you uploaded counted toward your free 1GB. Now, uploaded images that are 800 pixels or smaller and videos that are 15 minutes or less in length no longer count against your free storage limit. This means you can upload and store unlimited photos and videos at the above sizes -- for free!

800-pixels is a good size for sharing pictures on the web, but if you prefer uploading your images at a larger size for better quality (archival or print), and you are nearing the 1GB limit, you can always purchase additional storage for as little as $5/year. To check your available storage amount scroll to the bottom of your home page or view your settings.

For those of you who’ve already purchased additional storage, any existing 800-pixel images or videos shorter than 15 minutes will no longer count toward your storage limit, so enjoy the extra space and post away!

We hope you enjoy the change, and we’d love to hear what you think.