Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed.

Google launched Picasa Web Albums about 2 months ago. Unfortunately, the only way to upload images to the service if you were on a Mac was via the web interface. Today, Google released two tools for Mac users that make it easier to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums.

The tools that have been released is a stand-alone uploader application and a full-on iPhoto plugin (think FlickrExport) that lets you send photos directly from iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums. I decided to give them a little test drive and here are my thoughts.

The iPhoto plugin works well enough. You select which photo or photos you want upload, chose Export from the File menu and click on the Picasa Web tab. You can either upload the photo to an existing album or create a new album. It will also let you resize the image on upload or leave them alone.

Once it starts uploading, it shows you a progress window with how much time is remaining, how fast your are uploading and how much data you are transferring overall (3mb of 4mb, for example). Once the upload is complete, it gives you an option of opening the album in your browser.

The standalone uploader works very similar to the uploader tool that is bundled with Flock. You drag the photos you want to upload into the interface, where you can create a new album or add the photos to an existing album. You can also add a caption to the photos before uploading them. Aside from the drag and drop function to add the photos to the upload batch, it works in much the same way as the iPhoto plugin.

Both apps are listed as Beta (of course), and seem to be pretty stable. I just uploaded 2 photos using each method and ran into no problems. Will they sway me from using Flickr and FlickrExport? Probably not, but they are nice to have and at least if I DO want to upload images to my Picasa Web Album, I don’t have to use my web browser to do so. You can see more screenshots of various steps of the uploading process on my Flickrstream.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 at August 02,2006 @ 10:27 pm and is filed under Google, Linkage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.