Online Photo Sharing with Google and Picasa

The competition in online photo sharing is getting absolutely fierce. Google has announced they will launch a photo sharing service using Picasa, a photo sharing technology that they purchased in 2004. Picasa is free downloadable software that lets people find and edit photos on a desktop computer and send them to others from a Goggle Mail account or publish them on a blog.

Initially, the new service will be available to a limited number of Google Mail subscribers.

The three big players will now go head-to-head in photo sharing. Google with Picasa, Yahoo with Yahoo Photos and recently acquired Flickr, and PhotoBucket. Each are adding featues and bells and whistles at a furious pace.

I used the Picasa application for some time about 18 months ago, and its simplicity was amazing. In the end, I needed more functionality and went with Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 Windows. For most photo sharers, though, Picasa offers the basic tools they need to get their pictures ready and on to the web.

Attracting users quickly in this market is important, because once you’ve loaded 3,000 high resolution digital photos to a service, created some links from them to your web page, and sent all your friends the web address for your pictures, moving to a new service is a daunting proposition.