In a prior article, I made a reference to a few recent updates to a couple of Google Apps; namely Picasa Web Albums and Google Docs. I merely mentioned the addition of new features as I didn’t have time to investigate further.

After returning to Macon (where all my pictures reside), I decided to take a deeper look at Picasa Web Albums. I had never used the web albums feature of Picasa and was a little skeptical of the service (in all honesty, I wish that Google would also allow Picasa to upload photos directly to Facebook). I have accounts on Facebook (great for social photo sharing), Flickr (great for browsing images), and Zooomr (because it was new), but I really only use Facebook due to the large network of friends and the account limits imposed by the other services (however, it would be great if Facebook would store full-size images). Despite my prolonged use of other online photo sharing services, I have never geotagged a picture. For those of you not "in the know," geotagging is the process of adding location information to a picture.

Google makes the process very simple, but does require the use of Picasa to upload photos. I consider this a drawback, as the other services allow the addition of pictures using a globally available web based interface. Once the photos are loaded, a visit to web albums reveals the option to "Map your Photos." Clicking this link takes you to an interactive Google Map with thumbnails of all your photos. To tag a photo, drag and drop the picture over the desired location on the map. Simple as pie.

My only gripe is the size of the thumbnails. There were a few photos that looked similar in my sample album, and the thumbnails were not large enough to clearly differentiate between them. Implementing a mouse-over enlargement for the photos in the side bar would be a tremendous improvement in this area.

It would also seem that Google is now offering 1024 MB of free space for your photographs, so I recommend giving it a spin even if you don’t plan on using it often. I don’t know if I’ll upload many more pictures to my web album, but you can view the sample album here. Be sure and click on "view map" to see the geotagging in action!