First, Google+ surprised the world by being remarkably good. After a number of failed social networking projects there was a great deal of speculation around whether or not the company could actually produce a successful social site. While it’s too early to tell whether or not Google+ can make it in the long term, it is clear that it could prove to challenge Facebook in the coming weeks.

Then, just a few days ago, Mark Zuckerberg embarrassed Google by quickly becoming that most popular person on Google+, with almost 35,000 followers at the time of print. He has far more fans than any Google executive on the service, and while Zuckerberg in the flesh has still not commented on whether the profile actually belongs to him or not, his following is undeniably strong on Google.

Late last week Ghacks released an article about an online Facebook app that allows users to arrange their friends in “circles” that are supposed to be similar to Google+’s “circles.” While clearly a weak attempt to capture a bit of Google’s momentum, the move was just one more strike back at the new social network’s growing success.

Now Facebook is stepping up their war against defectors in preparation for an eventual spike in Google+ users. Facebook has successfully blocked a Chrome extension that allows you to export entire swaths of friend information away from the website. It was being used to archive content received and sent to friends via Facebook by those moving their account over to Google+, not wanting to see years of social networking going to waste in a brief moment.

Unfortunately, Facebook quickly swept in and put measures in place that circumvented the extension’s capabilities. Today Facebook Friend Exporter has been crippled by the social media giant to the point that it is nearly completely useless, although the developer of the extension is apparently working hard to find a way around Facebook’s moves.

While they may be staving off the attack from Facebook Friend Exporter, Facebook is not doing so well in protecting photo albums from migrating over to Google+. A new website called Move2Picasa.com is helping users all over the internet get their photos off of the old horse an onto the new one. While a slow working service, Move2Picasa can successfully migrate photos into Picasa, soon to be Google Photos, which Google+ can access. It cannot move data surrounding the photos like comments and friend inclusions, but it does a good job of getting your photos moved off of Facebook as simply as possible.

Things have gotten very hot between Facebook and Google, and Google+ has not even been in limited release for a week now. If things are already this exciting, seeing what happens in the coming months should be very exciting for those watching to see what happens from the grandstands.

Users who want to migrate usually want to take their photos hosted on another service to the new service. Flickr or Facebook users can make use of the excellent Fotobounce to do that. Melanie reviewed FotoBounce’s face recognition capabilities recently. The photo organizer is versatile and supports downloading of all photos hosted on either photo hosting service.

Please note that Adobe Air is required to install Fotobounce. Photographers who only want to migrate their accounts can install the program, download all their photos and uninstall it again when the migration completed successfully.

Options to log in to Facebook and Flickr are displayed on the left sidebar after application start. A click on login launches a new window where you are asked to enter your login credentials for the selected service and to allow the application access to it.

A click on the account name after authorization displays all albums of that user on the screen. It is alternatively possible to switch to a photo preview mode instead.

It is possible to download individual albums one after the other, or all photos at once. A right-click on an album or photos displays a context menu with options to download the selection to the local computer system.

There does not seem to be an option to download all photo albums on Flickr or Facebook at once. This could be problematic for users with many photo albums, especially if they want to retain the folder structure on Picasa.

Still, it is a one time operation and the downloading is fast and straightforward. Users who prefer a software that is able to download all photos in one go can take a look at the previously reviewed Downloadr that can backup Flickr account.

Fotobounce can be downloaded from the developer website. The software weights in at an astonishing 70 Megabytes. It is available for Windows and Mac computer systems (inspiration taken from Caschy)

Photo hosting is one of the most popular online services on today’s Internet. The most popular sites like Flickr, Google Picasa or Photobucket limited the free online space to a few Gigabytes at the most.

With the introduction of Google+ comes a change that could change the photo hosting landscape significantly. Google announced today that Picasa is now offering unlimited photo hosting for all of its users.

Here is how it looks:

• Google+ users: 1 GB of free storage space, photos of a maximum dimension of 2048×2048 do not count against the limit. This basically means that Google+ users can upload as many photos to Picasa as they want, as long as the photos do not exceed that resolution.
• Google users: Users without a Google+ account get the same free storage space but a lower maximum resolution that users can upload for free. The resolution that does not count against their photo hosting space if the maximum resolution is not larger than 800×800 pixels.

All photos that are uploaded to Google+ by the user are automatically resized to 2048×2048 on their longest edge. Both accounts have in common that videos of a playtime of 15 minutes or less do not count against the storage space as well.

Users who reach the storage limitation of their Picasa account will have their photos automatically resized so that they do not count against the storage limit.

Another interesting aspect is that this is not restricted solely to Picasa. All Google products and services that allow you to upload videos and photos benefit from the same rules. This includes blogger or Google Maps for instance.

The big question is this. Is the move towards unlimited photo hosting space a try to get Google account owners to switch to Google+, or is it less related? The thing that speaks against a promotional feature is the fact that users cannot simply sign up for a Google+ account at this point in time, as it is invite only. The thing that speaks for it is the close proximity to the Google+ launch, and the fact that Google needs to make their service attractive as possible to be able to compete with the heavyweight Facebook.

What’s your take on this?

Update: PhotoBucket got rid of photo hosting space restrictions exactly a month ago.

While individual photo downloads are less restricted on Picasa, it is still not comfortable to download multiple photos or even a gallery of photos from the photo service.

The free Windows software Photo Grabber has been designed to make the downloading of Picasa photo galleries as comfortable as possible.

All you need is a gallery’s RSS feed link to download all of its photos to your local Windows PC. RSS links are displayed on gallery pages and search pages on Picasa. The RSS links are either displayed on the right in a sidebar on photo album pages or at the bottom right on search pages.

You can start Picasa Grabber right away after you have downloaded the program from the developer website. The application has a size of 20 Kilobytes. Its interface is as minimalistic as possible. It consists of two form fields. Paste the Picasa album RSS feed url into the first, and select a local directory with a click on destination folder in the second.

A click on go parses the RSS feed and begins the photo download.

A download progress bar is shown on the screen. You can use Picasa Grabber to download all photos of a public Picasa photo album or search results page at a time. A queue to download multiple albums one after the other would have been handy.

Still, Picasa Grabber is a lightweight portable program for Windows users who like to download photo albums from Picasa. The program worked fine on a PC running a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional, it should run fine on other Windows systems as well. Download of the program is offered at Google Code.

Fortunately Google has made their Picasa 3 available for the Linux platform. This entry into the photo management tools should satisfy most users with plenty of bells and whistles. In this article I will show you how to install and begin using Google’s Picasa 3 in the Linux operating system.

Installation

Fortunately you will not have to use WINE or any other third-party application in order to install Picasa 3. All you have to do is download the file that works with your distribution and install it. I will show you how to install Picasa on both Ubuntu and Fedora. I will show you how to do this via the command line. You will find, however, that when you click on the associated file your browser will most likely offer you the option of installing this file with your installation tool. If that is the case, just let that auto-installer work its magic.

To download the files go to the Picasa 3 Linux download page and download the file you need for your distribution (they offer and .rpm for Fedora/Mandriva/OpenSuSE as well as a .deb for Ubuntu and Debian).

If, however, that is not the case, you can easily install Picasa 3 from the command line. Here’s how.

I will assume you have downloaded the file to ~/Downloads. With that being the case do the following for Ubuntu:

1. Open up a terminal.
2. Issue the command cd ~/Downloads.
3. Issue the command sudo dpkg -i picasa_3.0-current_i386.deb
4. Type your sudo password and hit Enter.
5. Watch the installation finish.
6. Close your terminal window.

Fedora users will follow these steps:

1. Open up a terminal.
2. Issue the command cd ~/Downloads.
3. Issue the command su to change to the root user.
4. Enter your root user password.
5. Issue the command rpm -ivh picasa_3.0-current.i386.rpm
6. Watch the installation complete.
7. Close your terminal window.

Usage

If you look in the Applications > Graphics menu you will find a sub-menu for Picasa 3. In this sub-menu you will see two entries:

• Picasa
• Picasa Font Settings

The former starts the application and the latter allows you to set up Font Linking, Screen Resolution, and Menu Font.

Figure 1

When you open up Picasa 3, anyone that has used the application in another platform will be instantly familiar with the interface (see Figure 1). When you first open Picasa 3 it will instantly check your ~/Pictures directory and immediately begin importing all of your images.

As you can see, from Figure 1, Picasa 3 for Linux offers all the same bells and whistles as does the version for the Windows platform. You shouldn’t miss a beat.

Final thoughts

Google has been outstanding in their support for the Linux platform and Picasa 3 only helps to prove that point. If you are in need of an easy to use, feature-rich photo management tool, give Picasa 3 a try.

Update: Picasa for Linux is no longer available on the official Picasa website.

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.

download link

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.

download link

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.

download link

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.

download link

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.

The solution for these users is to buy extra storage space for both Gmail and Picasa as these web services share the extra storage.

Gmail users can visit the purchase storage page to take a look at the pricing for extra storage. Prices start at $5 per year for a 20 Gigabyte increase in storage space, 200 Gigabytes are available for $50 per year and the maximum currently is a whooping 16 Terabytes for $4096 per year.

Another solution that is more cost effective is to transfer old emails from the Gmail account to a desktop email client to create a backup of the emails and attachments and to be able to delete the transferred emails afterwards in Gmail. While that is not always practicable it could be a solution for users who do not want to buy extra storage space.

How much storage space are you currently using in Gmail or Picasa?

The digital photo software will automatically recognize new digital photos that get added to monitored directories on the computer system. This is an excellent way of monitoring the default locations that photos from the digital camera get synced in. All photos will be displayed by default in the interface as thumbnails. It is possible to enter a full screen view mode for images by double-clicking them. Other options that are accessible from the interface are image rotation and deletion.

Two interesting additional features of the photo software are photo groups and the extensive filters that are offered. Photos can be added to groups by the user. Groups can be created freely by the user to add photos to them. Possibilities include parties, holidays and basically anything that the user can think of.

The extensive filter list makes it possible to filter the digital photos in various ways including time, orientation, photo content, dominant colors, textual filters or location based. The detailed view contains some additional features like Flickr, Picasa or SmugMug upload capabilities, setting images as wallpapers or printing photos. All in all a very clever great looking photo software.

The developer website is no longer working, we have taken the liberty to upload the software to our servers from where you can download Photology.

The upload limits are 250 Megabytes for video files and 50 Megabytes for mp3 and images. The user guide is still speaking of a 2 Gigabyte limit per user which contradicts the information on the homepage of the service most likely because the user guide has not been updated with the new information.

The options offered by Oosah surely look nice. Besides the storage capacities the service offered Flickr, Youtube, Facebook and Picasa integration, an iPhone client, playlists, galleries, slideshows, public and private sharing and a easy to use web interface.

A new announcement on the homepage and on the blog seem to suggest that the developers did not expect the popularity of the service: Uploads have been disabled temporarily and Flickr integration disabled.

That problem is homemade on the other hand. The Internet has seen multiple services that made a huge announcement and could not live up to their promises because of the massive media coverage and exponential user increase.

The insight from the situation should be to make sure that the important data is backed up properly before rushing to new services.

Well, all that is about to change. Digital Inspiration has come up with a way to embed or hide an mp3 file within a jpeg image uploaded to these photo-hosting sites. The process is quite simple and only requires a little bit of command-line work.

Firstly, copy your mp3 file and an image file to one folder. Next up, switch to the command-line interface. You can do this by going to Start > Run > Cmd. From here, navigate to the folder where the song and image are saved. Then, type in the following command:

‘copy /b mypicture.jpg + mysong.mp3 mynewpicture.jpg’

Replace ‘mypicture’ and ‘mysong’ with the actual file names. The resultant image ‘mynewpicture’ will contain your mp3 file in image format and can be uploaded directly to Flickr. When you want to save this song to your computer, open up the page containing the image, select ‘All sizes’ and download the original image size. Change the extension of the file to mp3 and you are good to go.

While I’ve used an mp3 as an example of embedding a file within an image, you can pretty much use the same method for any type of file. However, remember that you cannot hide file size so if you upload images that are 5MB and 10MB big, Flickr is obviously going to get suspicious. What do you think of this trick? Are you concerned about the potential for abuse? Let me know in the comments.

You need to create an account before you can start uploading photos. Only the United States can be picked as the country at the moment but there does not seem to be an IP check that prevents users from other countries to signup for an account. Once the account is verified the fun begins.

Adobe Photoshop Express has two main functions. The first is to function as a photo album and the second to edit the photos that you have uploaded. Each user gets 2 Gigabytes of storage space for his images which can be sorted into different albums. Images can be uploaded from the computer or imported from Facebook, Picasa or Photobucket.

Images can be shared with the outside world by dragging them into an album that is shared. Everyone can then access the images by loading the username.photoshop.com url of the user. The shared albums of other members of the website can be browsed as well.

I’m a bit disappointed about the image editing capabilities of Adobe Photoshop Express. Only 17 different tools are available to edit the image from rotation the image to changing the hue. This function of the website will be neglected by the majority of users in my opinion. Community features are missing, there is no way to comment on images for instance and no private messaging system.

This leaves us with another image hosting service with a slick interface, nothing more, nothing less.

I’m using Xnview to view the pictures that are already on my hard drive. I use it because it is fast and efficient. Other tools that have a similar functionality are Google Picasa and Irfanview. All three are way better than the solutions that come with Windows or using software suites like paintshop, gimp or photoshop to view images.

Every saved picture contains information which are saved at the same time the picture was taken. A tool like Exif-Viewer reveals those information. Exif means Exchangeable Image File Format and is used by most digital cameras.View-Exif is a plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
You can use either Smart Recovery from PC Inspector or Digital Photo Recovery from Art Plus Software to restore images that you deleted accidentally. You might want to try the Memory Card Safe Eraser before you sell your camera or the memory card.
Use Jalbum or Photo Meister to create photo albums form webpages or CDs. Photo Meister is able to do more than that though, it is able to do some basic image manipulation on your pictures and import them directly from your camera.

If it is effects that you want you should take a look at Photo Filter Studio which has some awesome filters for creating nice effects with your pictures, the website has some samples included. Autostich is capable of creating full panoramas of your pictures.

If you are looking for big image editors you might want to consider GIMP or Paint.net.

Last but not least we have some misc utilities that might be great for a smaller number of users, it always depends what you need your pictures for. Filter Sim simulates photo filters, Hello provides instant photo sharing with chat and can be used with picasa and neat image can be used for noise reduction either as standalone or as a plugin for photoshop.