Google wants your photos

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 15 June 2006 12:15

Your IT - Home IT

Google has launched the latest initiative in line with is stated mission of "making all the world's information universally accessible and useful", offering to host personal digital photo albums under a new service Picasa Web Albums.
The service is an enhancement to Picasa, free downloadable software that has been offered by Google since it acquired Picasa in mid 2004.

According to Google's web site, "Picasa is software that helps you "instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organised by date with folder names you will recognise."

Picasa Web Albums enables these collections to be uploaded to Google with one click and made available to other users. Each Picasa Web Albums account comes with 250MB of free storage space, or room to post and share approximately 1,000 wallpaper-sized photos (at 1600 pixels each). For $US25.00 per year, users can get a subscription to an additional 6GB of storage – room to post and share approximately 25,000 photos. There are no ads in Picasa or on Picasa Web Albums.

The software is presently in test, holders of gmail accounts can sign up to be invited to participate and invitations will be issued on a first-come first-served basis.

The move is part of a wider Google strategy to host a range of personal information, accidentally unveiled in March.

Back in March, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt let slip details of a still unannounced, long term plan by Google for what it called the GDrive.

Details about GDrive leaked onto the Web after Google accidentally posted notes online from a slide presentation given by executives during the company's analyst presentation day.

Bloggers quickly picked up on the notes, which stated that "with infinite storage, we can house all user files, including e-mails, Web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc., and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc.)." Google subsequently took the original presentation, and the notes, offline.