Google Picasa Web Album Review / Test Drive

Just got the invitation of Google Picasa Web Album from Google. I was a little bit exciting, but I am a little bit disappoint after testing it. As a royal Google user, I have to believe that this Picasa web album will provide a better service later. Picasa is popular photo manage software.

When a user sees the shared/public photo album on Picasa Web Album, they see the list of albums. However, the empty album are there as well. This is annoying. I guess the user should upload the photos before they make the album public.


The icons on the top right corner allows user to list the photos in different thumb nail size. However, it's not always working. I guess Picasa web album pre-render the thumb nail images and cache them in the proxy server. The photos are not showing up even 10 minutes after I uploaded and shared the photos. There are some sort of the delay.


I can choose the small thumb nail image for preview.


Or I can pick the large one. If the image is ready, it actually loads fast. That make me believe Picasa Web album are using Proxy server.


When user view the image, there is a chance the image is larger than the screen size. So it allows user to zoom in the image and pan the image by draging it. It's a nice features.


If the user don't have Picasa photo album software running on their computer, they can still upload 5 images at one time. It allows user to uplod up to 250MB (1000 images). The user have choice to upgrade to 6GB unlimited bandwidth for US$25 per year.


Once nice feature is to allow user drag and drop the photo(s) to re-arrange the order of the image. It's fast, but not as robust as Flickr.


Overall, Picasa web album continue Google's quality works. However, I personally prefer Yahoo's photo service. I am currenlty waiting Yahoo's new photo service which includes umlimited disk space, original downloadable high resolution image, easy share photo features, AJAX GUI interface and other features. I can't wait to see it in few days.