Picasa recently added two new capabilities to its online photo sharing site: 1) the ability to map your photos, and 2) web albums accessible by mobile phone. I still have not evolved to the point of web-surfing on my cell phone, so I have no concern for the second new feature. The first, however, is something I have been waiting for (quite expectantly, really) since I first started using Picasa.
For those who are not familiar with it, Picasa is Google’s free software for viewing and organizing photos. With Picasa (or using your web browser) you can upload your photos to Picasa Web Albums for sharing with family, friends, and the entire Picasa community, if you so choose. I’ve posted on Picasa twice before, here and here.
With Google Earth/Google Maps, it was only a matter of time before Google added the photo mapping functionality to Picasa Web Albums. Picasa (the downloadable computer program) has for some time been able to map photos using Google Earth, and I could never figure out why such a feature was not available on Picasa Web Albums. I was able to forgive them, however, when I witnessed how wonderfully the mapping feature works.
The Picasa Team provides a sample album to showoff the new feature. The link takes you to a page with a map of Las Vegas containing several small thumbnail images. To the left is a sidebar with slightly larger thumbnails of those images. By clicking on a thumbnail either on the map or the sidebar, a pop-up balloon emerges from the thumbnail on the map revealing a larger version of the image. You can then click through each photograph in a slideshow manner, with the balloon moving to the location of each successive photograph.
This was all very good, but I think what I love most is how easy it is to navigate around the map. You can click and drag on the map to scroll around, or use the scroll wheel on your mouse to easily and quickly zoom in and out. It is all very quick and responsive.
Also, you can look at the regular Album View which looks much as it always has, but with one change: a small, unobtrusive map in the lower corner with “thumbtacks” (instead of thumbnail images) showing the locations of various pictures. This mini-map can also be navigated by clicking-and-dragging or zooming in and out.
There is also a map on any user’s public gallery page showing the locations of all albums. You can see mine here. Note: at the time of this post, not all of my photos are mapped.
One complaint is that I at first had some trouble figuring out how to “map” all of my pictures that were already online. One option was easy enough to figure out: in any one album there is a button which says “Map Photos” which allows you to drag photos to particular points on the map. This would have been very time consuming since I already have a lot of pictures online. Plus, I had already used Picasa (the computer-based program, not Picasa Web Albums) and Google Earth to map most of these photos on my hard drive, and I did not want to go through the same thing again.
Since I “mapped” many of these photos on my computer after I had already uploaded them to my Web Albums, it occurred to me that re-uploading my photos might make them appear on the map. Alas, this did not work.
It was only after I bothered looking at my settings that I realized you can specify whether you want your photos’ location information to be shared (called “Exif location information”, it’s that latitude and longitude stored with each photo file that tells Google Maps where to map the photo). I guess this is a good feature if you don’t want people to see where you took certain pictures. But it would have been nice if the folks from Picasa had drawn a little more attention to the fact that this needed to be enabled.
Alternatively, you can remove specific pictures from maps once they are online so that not all of your photos are mapped. Another alternative is to simply type the city and state names into your Album Properties and the map will show the city in which the pictures were taken rather than the exact locations of each photo.
Been listening to this one a lot, pretty much the whole way through.
This novel was published after the Chilean-Mexican author's death, and I'm not even sure if it was entirely finished or not. It is broken up into five parts which, while connected, stand pretty much on there own. I have not yet made it to the grim part about the murders of hundreds of women in Mexico, so I have so far found it enjoyable and even funny despite some dark underpinnings. It's had a ton of critical praise, and I like it much more than my last foray into the violent novel genre: Blood Meridian.
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You can map on flickr, too. Not sure that it gets down to street detials though… i tried to map some from Neuschwanstein, but just kind of approximated into some green area…
I remembered seeing that on Flickr before. I think that is why I wanted it on Picasa. I haven’t used the Flickr one much, though, or can’t remember much about it.