Entries from September 2008 ↓
September 29th, 2008 — Photos
Posted by Ella To, Test Engineer
One downside to revisiting old photos on your PC and editing them is that you have to remember to re-upload those photos to the web in order for your changes to be reflected online. Well… that used to be the case. With the new Sync functionality in Picasa 3 (beta), you can now sidestep that chore completely.
Picasa 3 allows you to effortlessly keep photos and videos you’ve uploaded up-to-date. With a click of a button, you can enable syncing of any album. This means that whenever you make a change to a photo or video in Picasa (that includes edits, captions, tags and geotags) your online copy of the album will be seamlessly updated as soon as you log in. If there are some photos that you’d rather not share, you can always suppress those photos from appearing in your album.
And here’s a power tip that can really speed things up: the sync feature also allows you to sync starred photos only — so if you use stars to single out the “cream of the crop” in your photo collection, this can make sharing your very best shots easy. Use the drop-down menu next to the ‘Sync to Web’ and ‘Share’ buttons to enable starred-photos-only syncing, or specify other sync preferences, such as upload resolution, etc.
September 25th, 2008 — Photos
Posted by Tara Morrison, Software QA engineer
With the release of Picasa 3, we made many updates; improvements to keywording and tagging are no exception. You probably knew about Tag button next to the Search field, but did you also know that CTRL – K, and CTRL – T bring up the tagging dialog? While editing photos, this keyboard shortcut is very convenient to help you add tags on the fly.
The blue status bar at the bottom of the screen now shows any tags applied to your pictures – this works on the single image, and the album level.
Tags are also a thumbnail caption option now! You can try it out in
View > Thumbnail Caption > Tags.
Multi-word tags are now supported. In Picasa 2, “happy birthday” would become “happy” and “birthday”. Now it works like you want it to 
Last, but certainly not least, bulk tagging is faster. Oh and, by the way, we also have auto-complete in the tags dialog, and in the Search bar.
September 25th, 2008 — Talk
Got a burning question about how to best use Google Talk? Today we launched a new Forum within Google Help that allows you to ask questions about Google Talk and have them answered by both Google employees and other Google Talk fans. We believe this new platform will make it even easier for you to find help, and for Google employees and fans to share their knowledge of the product.
Particularly great answers can be marked as a “Best Answer”, so people with a similar problem can find a solution quickly and easily. The Google Help Forum also keeps track of how active a user is in the Forum. For example, you can see who is a Google Employee, top contributor, seasoned poster, or new poster.
And don’t worry, we aren’t removing the ability to search and read our old Google Talk Help Group content, but we have closed it from any additional posts. So, if you do have a question regarding Google Talk, go ahead and ask it!
Dana Jermanis
Google Help Team
September 25th, 2008 — Reader
Post by Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing Manager
Today we added two more journalist contributors to the Power Readers in Politics project: Marc Ambinder (Associate Editor of The Atlantic) and Jerry Seib (Executive Washington Editor of The Wall Street Journal). There are now 10 journalists sharing and commenting on political news with Google Reader, who in total have shared over 300 news items since we launched. By visiting the Power Readers site and clicking on your favorite contributor, you can add any participant’s shared news feed to Google Reader so you won’t miss newly shared items.
As a quick refresher, we launched Power Readers in Politics in August so that people could see the news sites read by Barack Obama and John McCain, and discover political news articles being shared in Google Reader by both the presidential campaigns and leading political pundits.
If you are interested in Canadian politics, we launched Power Readers Canada yesterday that features shared news from the major party leaders and top Canadian journalists.
September 24th, 2008 — Custom Search
Posted by: Tom Duerig, Software Engineer
We love Google Site Search. And when working with our customers, we often discover new and interesting ways to apply our technologies to their business needs.
With Adobe’s latest launch of Creative Suite 4, (which includes some of their most popular desktop applications, such as Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash), we had the chance to work with their team to integrate Google Site Search into their product in a way that truly blurs the line between off-line and online content.
Adobe is using Google Site Search as part of Creative Suite 4’s Community Help to connect suite customers to Help content on and off Adobe.com, including tutorials, technical support, online product help, videos, articles, tips and techniques, blogs, examples and other resources.
In chatting with Adobe Product Manager, Mark Nichoson, we learned that Adobe chose Google Site Search for a variety of reasons. First, we learned that user experience and consistency are essential for Adobe customers. After several studies, the Adobe Creative Suite Team concluded that their customers would use Google Site Search to access information on their products.
At the same time, the nature of Adobe Community Help is to align, share and offer the best available information online. Google Site Search allowed this to happen by aggregating more than 4000 URLs coming from the active members of their customer base (bloggers, partners, developers, webmasters and others).
This is just one of the ways Google Site Search is connecting customers and their users with the information they need — whether they’re within their applications or on their websites. We can’t wait to see what unique Site Search implementations come up next!
September 23rd, 2008 — Reader
It’s Tuesday here, so the Reader team is happy to announce a bunch of new features: friends worldwide, tagging with note, alphabetical ordering, and even last-crawl-date. Fun!
Friends Everywhere
Now that our new and improved sharing features are available in the US, we have made sharing with friends available to Reader users in all supported languages. We are dedicating this to our teammate Steve Goldberg, who claims he can speak almost every language in which Reader is available.
Tagging while Sharing and Noting
Notes are great, but sometimes a note just isn’t enough. Notes occasionally need more color, more flavor, more organization. So, you can now add a tag while adding a note. This is especially useful if you use lots of tags to organize your posts, or if you have multiple public shared tags. We’d like to dedicate this to our newest teammate, Mike Knapp, who enjoys being user-facing.
Sort your Subscriptions
We’ve had countless hours of fun dragging n’ dropping our feeds to keep them organized, but that can get annoying. So, in a move to delight lexicographers everywhere, you can now choose between alphabetical ordering or drag n’ drop ordering for your subscription list, via an “Options” menu at the bottom-left of Reader’s interface. This feature is dedicated to Ben Darnell, whose name is near the start of the alphabet.
And, as a bonus, we’ve exposed the date we last crawled a feed in the “details” area, and made some iPhone speed improvements and bug fixes. Have a happy Tuesday, and, as always, let us know what you think of our new features.
September 22nd, 2008 — Photos
Posted by Tara Morrison, Software QA Engineer
In addition to some of the other cool new features in Picasa 3, we’re excited to announce that you can now add text to your photos. You may have already spent time captioning your photo collection, but now, with the Text Tool, your words can appear directly on the photos themselves.
The Text Tool allows you to create multiple areas of text, while easily customizing how your text looks. You can adjust the font or layout, re-size, adjust the angle, and drag it anywhere. You can also edit your text anytime, so have fun experimenting.
To get started with the Text Tool, check out these examples and read some of our tips:
- Using a color that already appears in the photo can be a nice complement for your text.
- Add the same text to multiple photos (a watermark, for example), using the Copy Text and Paste Text options under the Edit menu
- Create a more subtle looking caption using the Transparency slider
- Create interesting effects by layering text, especially using different transparency settings
September 17th, 2008 — Custom Search
Posted by: Kevin Gargoyle Lim, Technical Writer
We’ve updated the developer guide to include the more advanced Custom Search features, such as synonym expansion and integration with Subscribed Links. These features let you trick out your search engine and give your users a richer search experience. Synonym expansion lets you expand a user’s search term (such as “running”) to include its variants (such as “jogging” and “sprinting”), so users will not need to search for each variant. Subscribed Links enables you to directly answer your users’ questions by promoting a specific result at the top of the results page. You can create your own result text and define sets of queries that would trigger subscribed link results.
The developer guide may not be edge-of-your-seat material, but it does now come with a freebie glossary and a search gadget that you can add to your iGoogle page. We’re still tinkering with the documentation and bulking it up with more juicy tips, so keep coming back to check our progress.
Happy reading!
September 16th, 2008 — Photos
Posted by Clay Wood, Software Engineer
The new Photo Viewer that ships with Picasa 3 is quick and straightforward, so I’ll try to keep this blog post equally focused.
We designed Photo Viewer to be a better, faster image viewer. A quick double-click on any photo will give you a beautiful full-screen view (with Picasa edits applied) and puts a select few options at your fingertips: you can quickly rotate an image, star it, upload it to your Picasa Web Albums drop box, or play a slideshow with other photos from the same folder.
What else can it do? Tap the scroll wheel on your mouse to discover how nice it is to have a fast, smooth zoom at hand when reviewing your photos, or try the ‘More Options’ button to bounce an image to your printer, blog, or favorite photo editor.
Obviously, Picasa 3 (beta) can also do all these things, and more, but we know users don’t necessarily want to launch a photo manager or image editor every time they double-click a JPG. Most of the time, a lightweight viewer is all you need — we hope you’ll agree that our new Photo Viewer fills that need nicely.
A note on installation: You can add the photo viewer during the Picasa 3 install — it’s easy to revert to your previous image viewer later, if you’d like. If you’ve already installed Picasa 3, and originally chose not to use the viewer, but now want to give it a try, just go to “Tools / Configure Photo Viewer” in Picasa.
September 14th, 2008 — Photos
Posted by Mark Geller, Business Product Manager
We know that many photographers on Picasa Web Albums are interested in having their photos be seen by as large an audience as possible. We also know that some users–but by no means all–are happy allowing their photos to be re-used elsewhere, as long as proper credit is given.
Fortunately, there’s an organization called
Creative Commons (a separate non-profit group not affiliated with Google), which has created a set of usage rights known as Creative Commons licenses for just this purpose. CC licenses enable you, as a content owner, to allow for certain uses of your images by other people or companies, while still retaining ownership and control.
Now, with the new Creative Commons licensing option on Picasa Web Albums, you can change the usage terms on some or all of your images from “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved” and apply one of six CC licenses. For example, you might choose to allow others to use your images as long as they give you attribution, or you can enable use of your images as long as they’re not re-mixed into derivative works or used for commercial purposes.Of course, you still retain complete ownership and control over your own images–and if you do not want to allow any kind of re-use, you don’t have to. By default, we assume that photos you upload to Picasa Web Albums are “all rights reserved” by you (i.e., standard copyright). But if the idea of opting in to Creative Commons licensing sounds interesting, click here to learn more about all the licensing options available.
