How to easily share photos online (and 52 other things you might want to teach your parents)

Posted by Adrian Soghoian, Product Marketing

My mom recently made a commitment to start photographing things – all sorts of things, to be exact. Everything from my cat’s latest napping spot, my recent college graduation, to my father’s 70th birthday has been captured by my mom’s (recently purchased) digital camera. My four older siblings and I have certainly been grateful to know that we have a designated family photographer taking pictures back home, except with all of us spread out around the country, it’s been difficult to keep track of and share these priceless photos.

I doubt that my family is the only one that has unshared photos lying around. With the holidays coming up, I think there’s no better time to show my mom how easy it can be to share photos online, through services such as Picasa Web Albums.

That’s where TeachParentsTech.org comes in.  A handful of us at Google decided to create a site where “kids” can select basic how-to videos to send to their moms, dads, uncles-- whomever.  Here’s a video I did that shows how to share photos with Picasa Web Albums:

For more videos or to send videos to your loved ones, visit TeachParentsTech.org. Happy holidays!

HD quality videos in Picasa Web Albums

Posted by Detlev Schwabe, Software Engineer - Photos
 
More and more, people are capturing videos (and increasingly high-definition videos) with their cameras and phones. Understandably, we’ve been hearing from a number of you who want to upload high quality videos to your Picasa Web Albums, so your photos and videos are organized in one convenient place. We’re happy to now support uploading high-definition (HD) videos, up to 720p1080p, from Picasa to Picasa Web Albums. Whereas before you could upload, store, and share videos shot in 240 or 360p, now you can do the same for your 480p, and 720p, and 1080p (HD) videos too. 

Just like with photos, more pixels means a sharper video picture and a better viewing experience. Clarity and sharpness continue to improve as you move from 240p up to 720p or 1080p.

Now your photos and HD videos can all be stored, organized and shared in one convenient place. To upload your videos make sure to use Picasa, if you don’t have Picasa you can download it from here. We’d love to hear what you think. 

Update 12/13/2010:  Now Picasa Web Albums supports HD videos up to 1080p.

Panoramio Stats: Where are my photos viewed?

Posted by Gyuri Dorko, Software Engineer

Panoramio is a community photo-sharing site for geo-located images. Photos uploaded to Panoramio show up on its website, as well as other places such as Google Earth and Google Maps.

We’re excited to announce that detailed statistics are now available to users directly within their Panoramio account. Think of Panoramio Stats as a photo-specific version of Google Analytics for Panoramio - in other words, a powerful web analytics tool that helps you measure the performance of your photos. With this new feature, you can track the sites from which your photos have been viewed in visually appealing and intuitive reports.

These statistics are available for every photographer and surface granular information about each photo. For example, a reports for the last 30 days can be broken down by referral domain so photographers can see how many times their photos were viewed within Panoramio, on Google Earth, Google Maps, and through Panoramio’s Widget API.

Additionally, Panoramio Stats helps you identify your most recently viewed and most popular photos, and lets you know about new referral sites so you can track the latest online activity around your photos and figure out what types, styles or genres of your photos generate the most interest and help you improve your craft.

As always we’d love to hear your thoughts on this cool new feature, so feel free to leave us your comments in the Panoramio Forum.

Things that go bump in the night

Posted by Lisa Conquergood, Picnik Team
(Cross-posted on the Google Blog)


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

This October we brought back mob favorites; like Vampire and Zombie, Lightning and Ghostify. And we've introduced new effects to add 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 dark. Plus, many other effects to give your photo a mysterious cast.

Halloween Stickers: We crawled 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 tombstones, fangs, lesions and bats.

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..