Picasa Web's New Homepage

Picasa Web's homepage has been redesigned to highlight the photos recently uploaded by the people you're following. The homepage no longer displays all your albums, so you'll only be able to see the most fresh 8 albums.

"This new design centers around photos that are attractive to you. We wanted to give you faster access to the newest photos from your family and friends along with some great photos from the gifted Picasa community. When you log in to Picasa Web Albums, you will not only see your own albums, but albums that have been common with you, the latest public albums from people you follow, and featured photos from the Picasa community right on your home page," explains Google's Ping Chen.

While "recent activity" has always been a section on the homepage, now you can no ignore it. YouTube's homepage has lately switched to a feed view, a stream of actions popularized by Facebook.

If you don't like the new homepage, bookmark this URL: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos or click "My Photos" when visiting the homepage.

Picasa Web Albums Wish List

Picasa Web Albums is one of the Google services that has been unjustly abandoned by Google, even if it has a lot of flaws and many missing features. Probably the main flaw was the goal of the service: to be an online addition of Picasa, a popular photo management software. Picasa Web Albums innate Picasa's limitations and didn't add many useful features since they were obtainable in Picasa. Instead of focusing on civilizing the web app, Google developed Picasa for Mac, extra new features to Picasa and acquired Picnik, an online image editor.

Picasa Web Albums is somewhat comparable to Microsoft's Office Live, an online addition of a popular software, which is astonishing, allowing for that Google is a big proponent of cloud computing.

If you try to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums, you'll see that Google recommends to install Picasa. That's because you can only upload up to 5 photos at a time using the web app (unless you're using Internet Explorer: Google urbanized an ActiveX control for uploading photos).
Try to download an album and you won't be able to do that with no installing Picasa or using some workarounds.

To edit a photo, you require to use Picasa or Picnik, a unhurried Flash image editor. It would be much more helpful to have some basic editing options within Picasa Web Albums, so you can quickly touch up your photos.

Andrew Maxwell and François Beaufort shaped a long wish list for Picasa Web Albums (categorization albums by name, sub-albums, upload by drag and drop, multiple sign-in, offline mode) and many of their issues can be easily address by storing photos in Google Docs and transform Picasa Web Albums into a Google Docs app. This way, you'll use a single file storage space service, uploading and downloading multiple photos will be much easier, photos could be communal privately without revealing all the photos from an album, you might add photos to multiple folders and even create subfolders. Another advantage is that you'll be able to use a syncing software for all your files if Google decides to discharge a software like Dropbox or Windows Live Mesh.