Google's Picasa - Doing Sophisticated Things with Photos

A quick visit to the Picasa site reveals some stunning photos of bridges, sunsets, and ocean waves. Many talented photographers post their photos on Picasa.

The Picasa Web albums Data API also features a community forum where questions can be asked; it also features a help forum created for the same reason.

Developers have created other web applications to upload photos, incorporating Picasa into the new application. Developers have created blogs that upload photos, incorporating Picasa into the new blog. For software developers who are creating applications that incorporate Picasa, a Knowledge Base is available as is a Documentation section.

The discussion board for the Picasa API has thousands of messages, so it must be a hot topic. The Google Group for the Picasa Web albums API includes 1107 members, so there are plenty of experts.

Anyone who wants to develop an application that utilizes Picasa Web Albums functionality should use the Picasa Web Albums Data API. The following are examples of sites that use Picasa Web Albums Data API: Picnik (photo editing); Blurb (book making); and Shozu (photo uploading via camera phone).

By using iGoogle, people can view Picasa Web Albums public photos from their home page. Photos of various formats can be uploaded using Picasa. They are bmp, gif, jpeg and png photos. Photos can be no larger than 20 MB.

The Google Data API Tips Blog is recommended for assistance with using the client libraries. There is also a Sample Code Page. There are Picasa Community Videos for those who need help. Picasa also has a YouTube channel.

Picasa provides 1 Gigabyte of free storage.

The program has a clever game for those who are bored at work. The game is called "Where in the World". The computer shows a picture, and the user must pick a place on a world map as a guess of where the picture was taken. The closer the guess, the more points the user receives.

Picasa has a Data API that allows developers to integrate the Picasa software into other websites and programs.

Picasa Web Albums is the online application that allows people to share photos. Picasa itself is actually the application program used for photo editing; it's available for free download.

What follows is a list of articles that are listed on Google Data APIs Blog (the reader may find these helpful if engaged in software development): "Import Scans or Go Multilingual"; "New Data API for Google Sites!"; "PDFs, Revisions, Folder Sharing in the DocList API"; "New Contacts Data API features are here!"; "OAuth Playground: Open-sourced"; "Google Analytics Data Export API has Launched!"; "Friends, Activities and You - Become a Socialite the .NET Way". A wealth of information is available to developers who want to develop applications that incorporate Picasa.