Google announced major improvements to Picasa Web Albums today. According to the official Google Blog:
A new Community Photos search feature helps you discover and explore the public web albums of others on the site. Free storage is now 1GB (and counting)—that’s room to post and share around 4,000 standard resolution photos. And we’ve made albums and photos easier to link to from any email, IM or website—simply copy and paste the code we show you.
After banging my head for 15 minutes on the web albums i was unable to locate the ’search box’ to search for public community photos. Google Operating System already shows search images. May be i am really dumb, or may be they have really hidden it well. Attached are snapshots of Picasa web albums. Try finding the community search box and if you do, send me a comment.
Philipp Lenssen asks what will we do with the photos once we find them ? and wonders if one day Google will include Picasa images in Google searches like it now does with Youtube videos.
Clearly Picasa Web Albums has a long way to go in order to catch up with the photo sharing phenomena that is Flickr. The Public Photos are hard to find (if findable at all), comments, tagging and other web 2.0 goodies are absent as well.
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Pretty meaningless ad, by all accounts.
I have had problems finding the search box for searching community photo’s as well, then I went into Picasa Settings and changed Language Preference to English (United States) and then it appeared at the Top Right of the screen.
Hope this helps everyone
Almoace.
Same here… Although I was intelligent enough to try the configuration you mentioned. But it worked for me when I signed in with another account. I thought may be people who are using picasa previously will not get this feature