Unfortunately, due to legal restrictions, I am unable to say any more, but trust me when I say that most of my friends will have immediate use for this site!

Check back tomorrow for the details!!

Updated: For those who missed it, April Fools!

Picasa is tightly bound to Picasa Web Albums, the first 1GB of which is also free, in contrast with Apple’s MobileMe, which runs $99/year.  In addition, in my experience, Picasa Web, while it has its drawbacks to be certain, worked pretty much everywhere, whereas I’ve had problems getting MobileMe’s photo gallery to work properly.  

I’ve chronicled my wish for Picasa for Mac for about 3 years now.  As you can see, the post continues to receive comments and remains, to this day, one of the most visited entries on my site. Clearly, there is demand for this product.

What I believe makes Picasa such a successful product is just how powerful it is. Although iPhoto works very well on the Mac and the iLife integration across applications is priceless, the fact remains that for serious editing and effects, the Mac user must venture outside of iPhoto. Picasa, on the other hand, has an entire suite of tools for photo finishing. Furthermore, Picasa features Google’s search tool, a bevy of organization tools, a plugin system using “buttons,” out-of-the-box integration with Gmail, Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, and the ability to make collages, movies, and more. In fact, there is little doubt that Picasa is a much more robust application that iPhoto.

There are some missing features in this beta: Geotagging didn’t make the cut, nor did webcam capture, screen capture, and screensaver. Also missing are the ability to order prints, an HTML export, and the fantastic Picasa Photo Viewer. Most of these features are certainly tied tighter into the OS, and while they will be missed, they are by no means deal-breakers.

I noticed the menus in Picasa for Mac are very “Windows-y.”  The menu bar still has a “File/Edit/View/Tools” bar across the top, which is decidedly “un-Mac-like,” although the preferences window does use the current Mac look and feel.  

What remains to be seen is whether or not Picasa is stable, whether or not it’s fast, and whether or not it can handle large photo libraries. I know people with well over 15,000 photos in their iPhoto collection, and the application is solid. Since Picasa doesn’t store it’s own library, but rather, merely catalogs photos elsewhere on your disk, we’ll have to see whether this translates into a performance advantage or disadvantage. It remains to be seen if Picasa for Mac can go toe-to-toe with more mature, native solutions. That said, count me in as one of the many waiting to find out.

Most recently, I realized that it simply stopped updating certain feeds.  One, in particular, was TUAW.  I later found that TUAW had moved their feed to Google, and were 301 redirecting requests to their RSS URL, http://tuaw.com/rss.xml.  Bloglines is supposed to follow 301s, but in this case, it just stopped updating the feed.  Other feeds has items that were clearly missing.  All of this came to a head yesterday when I was having regular troubles just getting into Bloglines at all. 

The lack of any sort of Sync API and the lack of tools being developed around Bloglines forced me to make a decision: am I going to stick to Bloglines, which has worked well for me for a long time now, or jump ship? 

Suffice it to say, I’m back on Google Reader.  The things that really annoyed me are mostly fixed: the site is much faster and smoother than before.  My only gripe is that when I click on a feed, the items must be scrolled past in order to be marked read.  I preferred the Bloglines “classic” way, which was clicking on a feed immediately marked all items as “read.”  

Anyway, we’ll see how things go with Google Reader.  You can be certain I’ll report back on the situation.

Picasa Web Albums, even with their incredible face-recognizing people tagger, is so sub-par compared to every other photo album out there. Its feature-poor interface lacks so much that it makes using it a chore for me. I’ve tackled this before: Picasa Web just ain’t cuttin it.

Google is sometimes seen as the company who can do no wrong. Well, they’re human, and it’s time to hire someone to do your administrative work, boys.

Google has a lot going for it. For one, it seems everyone who uses it raves about it. Also, the iPhone interface is integrated with all the other Google services I use, Picasa Web, Gmail, etc.

This all came about because I wanted to use a desktop RSS reader at home and sync it with my web interface for work and iPhone, but that doesn’t exist unless I use Newsgator. Bloglines and Google both appear to have a sync API, but neither Vienna nor NetNewsWire (nor any other client I could find) actually syncs back to them.

But it appears Vienna is working on one for Google’s reader, and with the Bloglines beta looming, it seemed like a good enough time to make the jump. So I did.

Google’s Reader is awfully attractive, but it’s really keyboard driven. Not only that, but there’s no way to have it mark all items as read as you click a feed. You must begin the tedious task of scrolling through every single item, or hitting “j”, “j”, “j”. And YouTube embeds don’t go away – at least in Opera 9.22 – they just wait at the top of the reading pane, obstructing text, until I click a new feed.

Did I mention that Google Reader is slow slow slow? I can click a link and watch it “Loading…” for several seconds. Opera is a second class citizen in Google-land, which is why all new Gmail features don’t work (v2, label colors, AIM) and Picasa support is flaky, but I think Reader fits in that boat too. It’s painful.

So, after 4 full days, I bailed. I’m back to Bloglines classic. I’d love to tweak the stylesheet a little, but it works and it’s so much faster. I’m pretty pleased with Bloglines, especially now that I’ve had a chance to experience something else.

1. How easy is it to do batch uploads?
2. Are there decent Mac and Windows upload tools?
3. Does it work in all major browsers (Opera and Safari are both important)
4. Will the default display scale to upwards of 2500 photos?
5. How fast does each page load?
6. Is the image scaled down? If so, is the original available?
7. Is it a fly-by-night startup that I can count on to be around?
8. How much does it cost for a pro membership, if anything? What are the benefits?
9. What are my storage requirements?
10. What is my traffic/bandwidth limit, if any?
11. Are there integrated ads?
12. How easy is it for others to access my photos?
13. Is there any sort of privacy?
14. What type of tools exist for me to manage my photos once they are online?
15. Is there some sort of embed/slideshow for my webpages?

I’ve tested the following services: Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Zoto, Zooomr, SmugMug, Photobucket, Facebook, and MySpace. Read on for my initial results.

PicasaWeb
Picasa Web Albums (hereafter Picasa), obviously, is not fully sufficient for me, which is why I’m looking at other solutions. My problems, although chronicled in exhausting detail on firsttube.com in the past, are numerous. Firstly, and most importantly, no “sub-albums,” which means the number of albums on my page gets uncontrollable very quickly. Secondly, no real privacy: each album can be made “private” which simply gives it a unique key in the URL… in short, security by obscurity. Lastly, the tagging mechanism sucks. Want to tag all photos in an album? Ya can’t! One by one is all they offer, and since I had well over 1300 photos upload when they introduced tags, it was a no-go from the get-go. In addition, Picasa Web doesn’t offer a view count, or a way to mark a photo a “favorite.” Oh yeah, and Google wants to charge me $25 for the same thing that everyone else pays $20 for.

I have had problems getting Picasa to run flawlessly in Opera. It does run properly in Gecko, Webkit, and IE based browsers, however, in Opera, I’ve had issues where the photo refuses to advance after a few clicks. Of course, the entire interface is extremely AJAX heavy, which means that when it does work, at the photo level, at least, it’s about as responsive as you could ask for.

That said, Picasa is far from bad. They have cross platform upload tools. 6GB of space now costs $20, and you know there will not be downtime and your photos won’t go up in smoke because the funding dries up. There are no ads and it’s very easy to find and navigate your albums, even for someone who has never seen Picasa. There is a photo embed and a slideshow embed, the ability to upload video, and even geographical information. Also, you can access the photo’s EXIF data, if it exists.

Picasa also has a great mobile interface, and works like a charm on the iPhone. Google is a great company with fantastic web products, and I do believe that eventually, this app will be a powerhouse, but for now, it’s nice, but far from perfect.

Flickr
Flickr is the original daddy of online photos, and owned by Yahoo!, which means, like Picasa, your photos aren’t going anywhere. That is, unless Flickr decides to censor your photos. Actually, Flickr is generally very reliable and very heavily used. As a result, Flickr has a large and vibrant community. Flickr’s Groups are as varied as the Internet itself – there are groups for almost anything. Flickr, unlike Picasa, offers a very robust tagging system, and three levels of photo privacy tied to specific access levels which are very easy to manage. Flickr offers batch upload tools outside the web browser, and a complete API is available. As such, there are scores of apps out there that work extremely well. Sadly, the best Flickr/iPhoto plugin is shareware, but it’s hard to hold that against Yahoo!. Free members can store up to 200 photos and now get 100MB of upload bandwidth (5MB per photo) per month. While the images are resized, the full sized originals are only available for subscribers.

Flickr eschews the concept of albums in favor of “sets,” which, like Gmail’s labels, are essentially groups, of which a photo can be a member of more than one. While this is most flexible, it’s also more confusing for the novice and for non-technical folks. Another drawback is that it’s nearly impossible to have a linear view of photos without going through them one at a time, since all photos aren’t necessarily part of a set, and sets may include the same photos as other sets. Another limitation is that free members are limited to 3 sets. This organization is the main reason I left Flickr some time ago, because those unfamiliar with this very modern paradigm (namely, my parents) were perplexed by it.

Flickr also provides the “Organizr,” which is a powerful flash-based photo manager that allows you to perform incredible bulk operations from re-ordering to re-tagging to re-grouping to removing. I also never spotted another service that focused so much on your ability to place a license on each photo.

Overall, Flickr is a great system, and as it has matured, features have become easier to use and tools have become plentiful, and it seems as though everyone I know has a Flickr account. It’s easy to look favorably upon Flickr as their system has proven to work and stand the test of time (well… internet time). Flickr works flawlessly in all browsers and provides numerous access points, making it an excellent all around site.

Zoto
Zoto is an interesting system that has a few years experience under its belt now. Zoto offers something unique: a fully dynamic interface. The entire site: colors and all, is widget based, and the experience utilizes modern technologies. As incredibly cool as the site is, it’s also pretty confusing.

Zoto has opted to integrate a lightbox-like effect for their photo viewing. When you visit a user’s page, clicking on a photo creates a javascript layered pop-up that shows the photo and some basic details, along with the ability to move forward or backward in the photostream. Click on the photo will bring you to that photo’s detail page, which allows you to navigate through the detail pages, but not back to the lightbox view. Confused? It’s not actually as scary in practice, but it does take some getting used to and as you click through, you are viewing URLs like this:

http://www.zoto.com/site/#USR.sethadam1::PAG.lightbox::ORD.date_uploaded::DIR.desc::OFF.0

These URLs don’t link to the same thing you’re viewing, making permalinks a little confusing too.

Zoto offers multi-platform upload tools, however, in practice, the uploads ran very slowly, and via my 4MB/sec broadband, it took me in excess of an hour to get my 32 photos uploaded.

While Zoto has a lot of stickles about it, it also has some really cool positives. Firstly, like the above, Zoto has an open API, and there are third party tools that utilize it. Secondly, for the tech-savvy, the lightbox views and the complex navigation are pretty snazzy, and allow you rapid access to lots of photos with a modern browser. The experience mostly worked for me in all browsers tested – although page refreshing when the Javascript stalls is painful, and virtually every time meant reloading back to my user page and re-tracing my steps.

Zoto’s membership is less than $20 a year, and for that, you get unlimited storage, an ad-free, spam-free, experience, plus some other fun features. Zoto can export to your Flickr account, making it an interesting companion app if Flickr is your secondary or public photo store. Zoto offers “albums” and “album sets,” and even allows you to apply different template themes on a per album basis. Bulk editing tools are present, as are an awesome array of actual photo editing tools, as seen below. Zoto also included the most granular permissions seen to date: by group or by user.

Click picture for a larger view

Zoto is definitely something special, although it’s not ready — for me — to go primetime for my photos. It’s still too slow to load on some screens. To clarify, the page loads very quickly, and then you wait for the “Loading stuff…” message at the top to populate the widgets with content. It’s worth noting that Zoto worked, for me at least, about 3-5 times faster in IE7 than it did in Opera 9.2.

Zooomr
Zooomr — yes, with three o’s — is another neat photo site comparable, more than anything else, to Flickr. The site was founded by Kristopher Tate, but it’s mostly known for its CEO, Thomas Hawk, a San Francisco based blogger and photographer. Hawk had a very public falling-out with Flickr, which may or may not have been staged, he landed at Zooomr. Hawk and Tate orchestrated a major new version of Zooomr, and within minutes of launch – POOF! – server dead. An internet plea went out, and Zoho and Sun Microsystems stepped in to save the day. So I tend to believe that Zooomr is safe, since there are some major players behind them now.

Zooomr is pretty cool. They have the “zipline,” which is a great way to view someone’s photos or even everyone’s photos, if you’re so inclined. There are inline description editing tools, geotagging, and labeling. There is a place to specify details about selling prints of your photos, as well as per-person permissions, Zooomr user or not.

Click picture for a larger view

Zooomr does have ads, but their pro account removes them for $20 a year, but offers little else: you can view an extended zipline… that’s about it. Your photos are featured in more places, which isn’t really a feature, and you get “better support.” Says Zooomr: “While we help everyone as best we can, being a Pro will escalate your issues to the top of our lists.” I emailed Zooomr support about a few questions on Sept 26, over a week ago, and have yet to hear back.

Like some of the other sites, rather than can-belong-to-one-and-only-one albums, Zooomr offers “Smart Sets.” This novel approach allows you to dynamically add to sets. So, for example, I may have a set of all photos tagged “Food,” another set of all photos geo-tagged to one area, another that features my most-viewed photos, another that features a certain person, etc. This is one of the cooler ways to instantly organize.

Zooomr does not have any batch upload tools outside of the browser, and while it can do batch uploads in-browser, you still have to add them one-by-one to the uploader. Certainly, it would be impossible to upload in excess of 1000 photos this way without incredible patience, which makes it a non-starter for me. In short, Zooomr is working just to keep on par with Flickr, but is feature-light. Zooomr, for now, is most compelling as an alternative to the “big” photo companies, a small site managed by some cool contemporaries of ours. But it’s far from offering the best feature pack. Zooomr does offer an attractive and easy to use site, but lacks much of a community outside the “zipline.”

SmugMug
SmugMug is the real deal. Put simply – these guys have their ducks in a row and have built a gorgeous site that does what it should. However, they seem to know it, and unlike all of the other sites reviewed, there is *no* free account on smugmug. After your 14 day trial, it’s pay to play. And it’s not cheap: $40 a year minimum for the standard user, $60/yr for an upgraded “power user” plan, $160/yr for the premium “Pro” plan.

If you can swallow that price tag, SmugMug features everything you’d want to see in a photo-sharing site: a light AJAX-where-appropriate interface, photo rating, albums and sub-albums (called “galleries” and “albums”), per album theming, password protected albums, visibility/privacy without logging in or needing an account, and so much more.

Once you sign up, you can download one of a dozen or more tools for uploading. There are several Windows apps, several Mac apps, and even a Flickr migration tool. They also feature a simple uploader form and a standard form. Their standard in-browser uploader is Java based, so it’s drag and drop, and it uploads flawlessly and quickly. Once your photos are uploaded, you can view your album immediately and begin playing with the huge lists of photo modifications and tools available to you.

The array of configuration options available to the gallery owners is dizzying: password protection, public v. private, indexable by Google, should the gallery be in SmugMug’s site search, will you allow external links, can users view the full size original, should the page hide your name and navigation, can people rank your photos, can your friends and family edit captions, do you allow comments, can people share the photos – and much more, and that’s all PER ALBUM!

For your account, you can organize everything however you like – you can put galleries in any order, albums in any order, photos in any order. You have geotagging, groups, and, unlike most of the other sites, this one really caters to pros, allowing massive photo uploads (up to 12MB for Standard and Power users, 16MB per photo for Pro accounts), high-quality professional printing (none of that grainy Shutterbug nonsense), your own domain name, and individual guest passwords.

SmugMug uses Amazon S3 for a backend, so count your photos as safe. If you’re still nervous, you can have a CD or DVD backup delivered to your house (albeit for a very steep $11/650MB CD or $22/4GB DVD).

SmugMug is, by far and away, the most featureful, controllable, professional site for photo sharing I have experienced. The only problem — which is a biggie – is that for the hobbiest who just wants to store photos of his family events and pictures of his kids and dogs, it’s really expensive compared to the other alternatives. $40 per year is double what the other sites charge, and while you get many more features, that’s a pretty big yearly commitment for just hosting what I could otherwise do on my own website.

Other than the price, SmugMug is the clear winner for features. Anyone could figure it out.

Photobucket
Photobucket is primary known in tech circles for two things: 1. that annoying image when someone has exceeded their bandwidth, and b) hosting all the bullshit sarcastic “look I’m witty!” graphics that pollute MySpace pages. Yet, they offer one of the best features seen yet: FTP upload access. Surprisingly, Photobucket has one of the more complete photo systems out there, and for $20/yr, a pro account not only grants you FTP upload access, it gives you ad-free, high-bandwidth galleries and sub-albums. My biggest complaint, visible immediately, was a deal-breaker right off the bat. My photos could be located at this URL:

http://s238.photobucket.com/albums/ff247/sethadam1/

That’s it. There’s no customization, not even a redirect from photobucket.com/sethadam1. Put simply, the gallery URL is a mess, impossible to remember, and unusable. I couldn’t seriously tell people to check out my photos at “ach tee tee pee colon slash slash ess two three eight dot photobucket dot com slash albums slash eff eff two four seven slash sethadam1.” It would be easier to drive home and burn them a custom photo DVD than to recite that three times.

That aside, photobucket allow pictures and video and accepts uploads via email as well, including your cell phone, which is handy. Photobucket not only allows you to create custom slideshows – a MySpace must – but also custom “remixes,” which are custom compilations created in a Flash environment which can even be set to audio.

There is no community in Photobucket, mostly because you’re side-to-side on the server with photos that say “Happy Hump Day!” in bright pink letters or “Thanks 4 the add, dood!” as a caption with a bunny with a pancake on its head, or something like that. Photobucket is primarily a hosting service for embedded photos, and while it can hold a huge number of pictures, in albums, by the way, it’s really aimed more for people who use pictures elsewhere on the web, not people who store their photo collection online.

Facebook
Facebook is a really cool site. With the addition of Facebook apps, it’s got a really thriving community. It hasn’t been ruined by a large company like Yahoo!, Microsoft, or Google yet, who shut off access, then integrate it with their accounts… yet. It has a great “face-tagging” feature that allows you to label each person, and the photo is dynamically available in their photos as “photos of X.”

While very cool, Facebook requires a login. That means you can’t view my photos at all unless you have a Facebook account. And while it’s nice for showing off some photos, it’s not an online photo album service… in fact, far from it. You can store lots of photos, but there are no photo-specific features and the management tools are non-existent. Surprisingly, there are several tools out there for integrating with Facebook, but don’t be fooled: this is not a real option for an online photo album.  Update: You can view Facebook photos without a login, however, like Picasa Web Albums, you need an obscure URL for each photo album. 

Privacy options are decent though: if someone isn’t logged in, nothing. If they have merely “limited” access to your profile, nothing. If they aren’t your friend, nothing, except if you tagged someone who is their friend, in which case, they can see that photo.

That’s it. Facebook is a non-starter for real photo sharing.

MySpace
MySpace is, aside from being the ugliest and least responsible site on the internet, worthless for photo sharing. Privacy options do include public and private, but all friends see all photos, which can be in albums, but that’s it. No management tools. Comments are allowed. And the site is dead ugly. Avoid using MySpace at all costs.

Seriously, again, MySpace is not a photo-sharing site. It’s just a site that allows you to upload some photos.

Conclusion
It’s very hard to pick a clear winner, so instead, I’ll award a few prizes here. Best of breed goes to SmugMug, and not by a little. SmugMug is everything a real photo hosting site should be, including a plethora of management and privacy tools. The cost is its only, but very legitimate, drawback.

Most accessible goes to Picasa Web Albums. It’s just drop dead simple, but at the expense of features. Tags are really a non-starter, privacy is non-existent, and there is no community around it. But if you just want a simple app — internet accessible photo albums with photos within them — Picasa Web Albums may be for you.

Lastly, the most powerful free experience is easily Flickr. At 200 photos, you’re barely able to show all of Aunt Mable’s 94th birthday, but with the huge, dedicated community there’s always “stuff to do,” and with an affordable yearly price-tag, Flickr may be the best choice for most of the tech-savvy, and even non-tech-savvy enthusiasts.

At first glance, you might think to yourself – that’s nice of Google, warning you that they are about to charge your card, a service which they do automatically to prevent you from having to take any action or lose your data. Except if you see this:

Apparently, they want me to pay $25 for 6GB of space, but everyone else gets the same thing for $20? My reward for being an early Google adopter is that I get to pay a steeper fee?

Is Google the next “Boston Market,” expanding too fast to keep quality at the same level? Lately, it seems like Google’s apps are quirkier, their service flakier, and their support non-existent. Is it a mistake to continue to entrust all of our data to Google?

“That’s odd,” I thought. I have extended storage and about 5 GB free. But alas, it expired. In fact, my storage SHOULD have expired in August, but just did recently. So I tried to upgrade again. After all, Google’s been good to me on the whole. But my order was cancelled by Google. The reason: “Another order modified the user’s storage plan before this order was received“

What the heck? So I tried again. And once again: cancelled. So my storage has been cancelled for a few days now, no upgrade has been applied, no warning whatsoever from Google (at my account, which is a Gmail account!), and no way to upgrade!

Gmail has been a fantastic app for me, but I’m just not sure about extended Google services. I’ve heard way too many nightmare stories about people having stuff cancelled and there is just no recourse: Google provides no support, no assistance, no real time communication, nothing other than crappy, slow-to-respond Google groups from very unofficial people.

Google’s storage engine has been modified heavily lately, and this does not bode well. If it can expire without notice – will they delete my stuff? How long will they hold it, being as though I can’t upgrade? If Google deletes even one bit of my stuff, I am through with PicasaWeb and Google’s expanded storage for good.

Boo Google! Boo! It may be time migrate to smugmug, Zoto, or zooomr.com.

Here is the screenshot:

Google has always been a “release now, update frequently later” kind of company, and I respect that. It’s cooler, as a user, to get something today and slowly and unexpectedly watch features trickle in, but Picasa Web Albums is a disaster right now. Read more for the details.

Okay, maybe “a disaster” is a little extreme. But it has lots of major problems, and they are all over the place. The problems pervade the entire app, and make it really hard to use effectively. But mostly, you can boil it down to this: it doesn’t scale, period.

Let’s examine. I currently have 52 albums in my collection, and the front page now takes about 2 second to load just the front page, which would be a bear over dial up (which my father still uses). On top of that, it has to load at least 52 thumbnails just to go from album to album. That’s a pretty slow experience.

The second problem is organization, and a simple feature could fix the first problem as well – galleries. Or subfolders. Or albums within albums, whatever you want to call it. This simple, logical ability would make Picasaweb incredibly more usable because not only could I group the front page, but it would make much more sense! This has to happen soon! Really, it has to. Not ONE other major photo app displays a thumbnails from every album, gallery, set, etc on the user’s front page. Know why? Because it’s a bad, ineffcient idea, the page loads incredibly slowly, and it makes navigating your photostream clunky.

I get the “simple user interface reaches the largest crowd” thing. But a photo collection of any size becomes a pain in the neck with Picasaweb. Quickly.

Next is the incredibly weak let-down that is tagging. I love the concept. And Google did one thing right: tagging is non-obtrusive but searchable. Unfortunately, not only is the implemention [[http://firsttube.com/read/I-Found-a-Google-Bug|bug-ridden]], but it’s impossible and impractical to tag all of your photos, because they must be done one by one. Hey Googlers, if you’re going to give us a feature, at least make it worthwhile. Do yourselves a favor, go sign up for a Flickr account, upload 1000 photos, and check out the Organizr. You already have a nice little Ajax interface for adding comments to all the photos in an album. You’ve got the Gmail apply tags to multiple conversations thing down. You’ve gotta iron this out. Seriously. Tagging is both painful and useless as is.

After all the work Google has done in all of their apps to rid us of the concept of folders and favorites in favor of “starring,” how is it that we cannot “star” a photo yet to indicate its one of our favorites? Seriously, where is the consistency? I almost wonder if any of the dev team has ever used another Google app. Google makes their online apps incredibly consistent – from Docs and Spreadsheets to Gmail to Maps to Checkout to Groups it all feels the same. Picasaweb is mostly there, but lacks so much of what could be.

I haven’t even touched on so much of what else should be there: password-protected albums, allowing others to “star” your photos and you to “star” others’ photos, a view count, a way to make some photos in an album private, and many more.

I have spent a lot of time moving from Flickr to Picasaweb, but these guys are going to have to kick it into high gear if they want to retain me as a customer in the future. Otherwise, I’m going back to Flickr or over to smugmug.

So I created a new tag D&psc=CONTACTS — and guess what? — it has some funny results. It searches all of your contacts’ photos for the letter D (which is common in default photo names, such as DSC001.jpg). Then I thought, “I wonder if I browse the JS source if I can find a command that is passed via URL GET variable that can be instantiated via an intentionally malcrafted tag?” I have posted on the Google USENET group and filed a bug through the standard complaint form. I consider this pretty big news, but I don’t want to submit it to digg or Slashdot or post on OSNews until someone has a chance to implement a fix, which is probably pretty trivial (URL encode the tag links) or fix it properly (validate tags on creation).

Anyway, I’m psyched, because I understand it’s pretty rare to find a bug in Google’s code.

Today I signed in and found — tags! and search! and moire storage! Hooray! So this is fantastic, it’s the start of bringing this beast up to “usable” for large photostreams.

Now that Picasa is evolving, they are letting you expand beyond 6GB to 25GB, 50GB, and even 100GB. I can’t image how clunky and weak it would be with that many albums, but I have to assume they’re working on it.

Unfortunately, what’s really missing is the ability to tag multiple photos at once. I’m not going to tag 3000+ photos one by one. But still, nice to see some progress.

I did find a bug. It let me create the tag “A+J,” which is linked on the front page of my photos, but not wrapped with urlencode(), so it throws an error. I found a google bug!

I’ve got close to 1GB of photos in my PicasaWeb account now, spread across 46 albums, and PicasaWeb is getting a little clunky now. So, Google, now that we’ve shipped and rolled out fairly well, it’s time to start talking about how to kick it up a notch.

PicasaWeb is in dire need of several features just to keep it usable. We all have our “this would be cool” features – mine is “public groups.” But there are some that are just plan necessary. Read on for more.

First and foremost, there simply has to be a way to create galleries into which you can put your albums. With 46 albums, the front page must load painfully slow on dial-up. Also, finding albums is getting hard. I would love to be able to set up a gallery called “Family” and put all of my family -related albums into that gallery. This is precisely how SmugMug works, and frankly, it’s superior to PicasaWeb. It’s going to very painful when I get to 100 albums to deliver a usable experience with the interface as is unless a step like this is taken.

Next, Google’s core competency is search. Google – listen to me – how hard can it be to add some arbitrary metadata and allow us to use tags? I mean, seriously, you already store a ton of EXIF data. Now, even assuming it’s just a big TEXT block in your database, there’s still room for data associated with a picture. We’ve got to be able to use tags to actually find photos. When I have 3000 photos across 50 albums, it will become very hard to find a particular photo. If I’m looking for a picture of someone, but I can’t remember when the picture was taken, it’s a LOT easier to search for their name than to scan all albums individually. Searching uploaded images that could conceivably have no associated data but a title of “IMG00449.jpg” is impossible without tags, and a service where we can’t use Google search is silly.

Lastly, another big one – we’ve got to be able to password protect directories. Maybe I have pictures I don’t want my grandmother to see. Simply making it “unlisted” is completely pointless. It’s hard to locate for friends and clumsy because anyone COULD stumble onto it. I’d much rather list it and require a password for entrance.

All three of these things are, in all likelihood, fairly simple to implement. The problem is more the interface for setting it up than the backend. Without these things, I’m afraid to say, PicasaWeb won’t scale. Certainly not for me. I figure with about 1 GB and 46 albums, I probably have about 6-9 months before the system becomes too clunky for me. And if Google can’t do something to make the PicasaWeb experience workable with large numbers of photos, I will be jumping ship for SmugMug.