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When introduced, it came with 250 MB of free space. Picasa Web Albums was first leaked on June 6, 2006. This allowance is perpetual and cannot be revoked by the owner of the photos. Additionally, the terms permit Google to allow other companies with which they are affiliated to use the uploaded pictures to provide syndicated services. The Terms of Service permit Google to use the uploaded photos to display on their website or via RSS feeds, and also for promoting Google services royalty-free. This makes the album viewable only to those with whom the album is explicitly shared.Īds are shown on the free Picasa Web Albums accounts. Another visibility option named "sign-in required to view" is available. The Picasa Help files say that private albums are not searchable by anyone except the user. This is done via an "authentication key" that must be appended to the URL for the album to be shown. This enables a user to email a private album's URL to anyone, and the recipient can view the album without having to create a user account. PWA uses an "unlisted number" approach for URLs for private photo albums. Picasa 3.6 added an option to preserve original JPEG quality. As JPEG is a "lossy" format, some picture information (and quality) is lost. In Picasa 3 versions of the software, using the 'original size' upload option, pixel size remains the same, but JPEG compression is increased significantly during upload to PWA.
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In both free and paid accounts, the actual resolution of the photo is maintained, even though a smaller resolution photo may be displayed by the web interface.
#GOOGLE PICASA ALBUM MAC OS#
Users may upload pictures through a variety of ways: via the PWA web interface on supported browsers, Picasa 2.5 or later on Microsoft Windows, using the Exporter for iPhoto, the Aperture to Picasa Web Albums plug-in, Uploader on Mac OS X, F-Spot on Linux, or through WAManager in the Amiga-like OS MorphOS. Existing users of the service were advised to use Google Photos, which already stores the photos in Picasa Web Albums and is a new place for viewing, downloading and deleting (but not editing or organizing) the albums along with their meta-data will be created in the future. Existing users of the application will still be able to use the application. On February 12, 2016, Google announced that the service as well as the application will be discontinued on and March 15, 2016, respectively. Once the storage is full, uploaded photos are automatically resized to fit the resolution for unlimited storage. Videos shorter than 15 minutes also don't count towards the limit. Storage was unlimited for photos of resolution less than 2048x2048 pixels for Google+ users, and for photos of resolution less than 800x800 for everyone else. It allowed users with a Google account to store and share photos in public albums with an initial free storage offering of 15 GB, that is shared with Gmail and Google Drive. It was discontinued in May 2016 and succeeded by Google Photos which does not support sharing photo albums on the public world wide web. The service links with Google's photo organizing desktop program Picasa. Picasa Web Albums ( PWA) was an image hosting and sharing web service from Google, often compared to Flickr and similar sites.
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