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Friday, February 27, 2009

Send Your Photos To Your Picasa Web Album With An Email

Sent to you by Hemi via Google Reader:

Send Your Photos To Your Picasa Web Album With An Email

via MakeUseOf.com by Saikat Basu on 2/27/09

Picasa is a Google application for managing and editing digital photos. It has a rich assortment of tools like file importing, editing, tagging and tracking features. Get more of the lowdown from this earlier post - 10 Tips to Manage Photos Better using Google Picasa.

The Picasa desktop application is tightly integrated with Picasa Web Album. Similar to Flickr, the Picasa Web Album is an online photo sharing application which allows Google users to store and share up to 1 GB worth of photos (extra space is available through purchase).

Photos can be uploaded to Picasa Web Albums through -

The Picasa Web Album interface via a browser.
The Picasa desktop application in Windows.
The Picasa Web Albums Uploader for the Mac.
Using the F-Spot interface on Linux.

Now, Picasa gives the user another handy way to upload his collection of photos - using plain old email. As the site explains,

Uploading photos by email is particularly useful for mobile phones and devices with integrated cameras and email or MMS capabilities.

For the email option to work, the Picasa user needs to set some preferences in his Picasa account settings. The process starts off with…

Log in to your Picasa Web Albums account.
Click on Settings near the top right corner of the page.
Scroll to Upload Photos by Email.

As soon as you check Allow me to upload photos by email, a text field box opens up. Enter a unique word which will form the suffix of a special (but secret) email address. The email which appears with your entered word is your default address for sending the photos through email.
Save your settings and you are done.
Attach your photos to an email message, specify your special Picasa email address in the To field and click 'send'.

A Postscript:

To upload the photos into a specific (but pre-existing) folder, enter the name of the folder in the Subject line of the email. If the Subject line is empty or the folder name does not exist, the photos are uploaded into the default Drop Box of the Picasa Web Album.

Email upload for populating your web album is limited to 20MB per email. So, compress and resize your photos if required for faster and fatter upload. Formats supported are – JPG, PNG and GIF.
Last but not least. Don't share your secret Picasa Web Album address. For security's sake, keep it private.

Now, you don't really need a computer. Blessed with a MMS capable phone you can email and share your smiling moments in real time. Of course, do share your Picasa email address with the family then they too can 'collaborate' and add to your pictural memories.

I just used it to spring clean my mail folders of all photos by forwarding attached pictures to my own Picasa album. Email upload is a feature that Flickr also has. With the availability in Picasa too, it's makes sharing photos a bit more practicable.

Do you agree with the value of this feature? Give us some of your graphic views in the comments.

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