Most Picasa Web Albums downloaders allow downloads only for photos from public web albums which is understandable as the user would need to be authenticated before downloading private photos from the photo hosting service.

The following list contains a review of several Google Picasa Web Albums download tools.

Google Picasa Downloader

This downloader is very easy to setup and use. All the user needs to do is to enter a Picasa username into the only form in the interface. The program will then pull all public web albums from that user and display them in list form. Some or all albums can then be selected and downloaded with a click on the download button.

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Photo Downloader

Photo Downloader can be used to download photos from Facebook or Picasa Web Albums. The Open Source software has not been updated for a while and some users have reported that it is not working for them anymore. It uses the same way of downloading photos from Picasa as the Google Picasa Downloader.

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Picasa Album Downloader

Picasa Downloader is an Open Source program. The difference to the two previous applications is the fact that it will display a thumbnail preview of each web album. It can on the other hand only be used to download one web album at a time.

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Down Them All for Firefox

The advantage of using this Firefox add-on is the fact that it is operating system independent. It uses the RSS feed of each Picasa Web Album. All that needs to be done is to display the RSS feed of the web album which can then be downloaded with Down Them all by right-clicking on that page and selecting the Down them All option from the context menu.

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But there are also extensions that are created by Google and Slideshow is one of them. Slideshow is an excellent extension for viewing image and photo slide shows on the Internet. The extension is currently compatible with the following four popular photo hosting websites: Flickr, Google Picasa, Facebook and Google Images.

The slide show extension will automatically recognize additional photos on pages on the supported websites and display those photos in a thumbnail bar at the bottom of the screen. A click on any of the thumbnails will load the photo in the slideshow view. This recognition process takes a while depending on the number of photos found on the website.

The photo slide show extension will also display a slideshow icon in the Google Chrome address bar that indicates that a slideshow can be opened that displays the photos hosted on that page.

The user viewing the slideshow can load new photos with the mouse by clicking on them in the thumbnail bar at the bottom of the screen. It is furthermore possible to use the left and right cursor keys on the computer keyboard to navigate in the slide show instead.

A click on the x icon next to the image name will close the slideshow and return the user to the page the slideshow was launched on. Slideshow is an interesting extension for the Google Chrome web browser, especially for users who regularly visit at least one of the supported websites. The photo slide show extension is comfortable to work with. Only the lack of supported photo hosting websites and the delay until the slideshow controls are displayed are something that Google should be working on.

Slideshow for Google Chrome is compatible with version 4 of the web browser. The extension can be downloaded from the Google Chrome website.

Update: The Chrome Photo Slide Show extension is no longer available on the official web site. A alternative is the Slideshow for Facebook, Flickr, Google Images extension which is also available at the web store.

Downloading photos manually from Picasa takes time and users who would like to download complete Picasa Web Albums can use the Picasa Downloader to do so to speed up the process tremendously. The program will display all public photo albums of a Picasa user in its interface with the option to download individual albums with all containing photos to the local hard drive.

The user id of each Picasa user that is sharing a public Picasa Web Album is visible in the url structure of the album url making it very easy to copy that user id into the application to retrieve all photo albums from that Picasa user.

A click on the list button will retrieve all the albums of the Picasa user id that has been entered by the computer user. The photo albums will be listed by the program with their album id and album title. A single or multiple web albums can be selected and a click on Download will start the download of all selected photo albums and photos to the hard drive.

Picasa Downloader requires the Microsoft .net Framework and is available at the Google Code project page.

Each can then be accessed like any other folder in the Windows operating system. Integrating Google Docs would for example display all documents that are stored in that service on the local computer desktop. Gladinet will automatically synchronize the folders whenever data is edited, added or removed from one of the installed data storage services.

New online storage services and applications are added by providing authentication information in a simple form, usually the username and password to access the service online. Some, like WebDav servers require an url, IP or additional information besides the basic authentication data.

Gladinet runs in the Windows system tray on the local computer system from where it can be accessed and configured. It only takes a few clicks to add a new online storage service in the software. The professional and premium editions of the service add new features to the software including:

• Advanced Task Scheduler/Manager (Run Once or Recurring with Pause, Resume and Reschedule Support)
• Incremental Backup to Mounted Cloud Storage (with File Type Filtering*)
• Advanced Download/Upload Acceleration Technology (Compression, Chunking, Parallel Uploads/Downloads, Bandwidth Throttling)
• Encrypted Local Profile and In-Memory-Only Profile for Better Security
• IIS/Apache Support (Avoid Port 80)

Users who regularly work with the previously mentioned cloud storage providers might want to give Gladinet a try.