Upload Picasa People Photos to Google Contacts

Picasa 3.8 makes it easier to upload pictures for your Google contacts. After scanning all the photos from your library and adding name tags to your photos, you can go to the Tools menu, select Upload and click on Upload People Thumbnails.

Picasa asks if "you want to upload and replace all the thumbnail photos from your People Albums to your Google Contacts". If you click on "Upload", Picasa saves the photos to Google Contacts and you can see them in Gmail or in any other application that synchronizes with Google Contacts (for example, Android's Contacts app or iPhone's Contacts app, if you use Google Sync).

If you don't want to upload photos for all your contacts, you can click on one of the people from Picasa's sidebar, right on a photo and select "Set as Google Contacts Thumbnail". You can also enable "Upload people album thumbnails to Google Contacts" from Tools/Options/Name Tags (or Picasa/Preferences/Name Tags on a Mac) to upload the new thumbnails you select in Picasa.

It's strange to see that Google didn't add this option to Picasa Web Albums and that the photos tagged in Picasa Web Albums aren't displayed in the Google Contacts. Google could at least offer the option to pick one of the photos tagged in the Picasa Web Albums when you add a picture to one of your contacts. Right now, you can only select a photo from your public albums. 

Gmail's Hidden Groups

In a previous post, I mentioned a trick that lets you to create a Gmail group for the people you to follow in the Google Buzz. The downside was that the group doesn't update when you follow other people in the Google Buzz.

It turns out that Gmail already has a built-in group for the Google Buzz contacts. The group doesn't have a name and it's not displayed in the Gmail's new contact manager, but you can find it in the old version of the Gmail: it's the only one without a name.

Since the group doesn't have a name and it's hidden in the interface, you can't use it to send email messages or to post the private Buzz messages, but you can select all the contacts and add them to another group.

There's also a hidden group for the Google Latitude friends, which includes the people that can see your location in the Google Latitude.

Another group lists all your Gmail Chat/Google Talk friends. Some of these people were automatically added by Google if you didn't disable "Automatically allow people I communicate with often to chat with me and see when I'm online" in the settings.

For those who miss the "all contacts" group in the new contact manager, here's the built-in group that includes both the people you've manually added ("my contacts") and the people automatically added by the Google ("other contacts").

Gmail's Streamlined Interface and Better Contact Manager

Google launched a slightly refreshed Gmail UI that hides unessential features and uses more screen estate to display your messages. Gmail's logo is smaller, the links to the mail, contacts and contacts are grouped in a collapsible panel, while the options that let you to select all the messages, starred or unread messages are available in a drop-down.

"Overall, there's now a smaller header area that puts the first message in your inbox about 16 pixels higher on the screen than before," explains Google.

Gmail's contacts section has also been redesigned to better integrate with the Gmail. The updated interface supports keyboard shortcuts, saves the changes automatically, adds structured the name fields and lets you sort contacts by last name. The notes field is now really big, but I don't think it deserves so much attention.

These features will be rolled out today to all the Gmail accounts. The new Gmail contact manager won't be available in the Google Apps right now, but it will be released in the near future.