Google’s free Picasa Web Albums is designed to allow users to post and share their photos quickly and easily on the web. Picasa Web Albums is listed as beta and available by invitation. I applied for an account using my Google Mail account and was instantly granted access. This service has been available for awhile, what is new is the two free software solutions for OS X that now add another free service alternative to Apple’s .Mac.

Google’s Picasa Web Albums Uploaders beta for Mac OS X, are designed to ease the process of sharing photos with friends and family. These two tools for uploading photos which include a plug-in for uploading pictures from within iPhoto and a standalone application to upload photos via drag-and-drop on the desktop. The software offers one-click Web upload directly from Picasa while supporting scroll, rotation, and zoom functionality.

Picasa Web Albums Exporter for iPhoto
Picasa Web Albums Exporter lives right inside iPhoto, in the File menu (iPhoto 6 and iPhoto 4) or the Share menu (iPhoto 5). Exporter is a plug-in, rather than a separate application. Using Exporter, you can:

• Fill your Picasa Web Albums with photos.
• Drag and drop photos from iPhoto
• Create new albums and upload photos to them.
• See how much storage you have available for web albums.

Picasa Web Albums “standalone” Uploader
Picasa Web Albums Uploader is a separate application for uploading your photos. Because Uploader is a full application and has room to stretch out, it provides some features that Exporter doesn’t have:

• Add photos (or folders of photos) that aren’t in iPhoto.
• Add captions to your photos.
• Search your Mac for recently added photos.

Google’s free Picasa Web Albums offers a nice online photo album and slideshow that rivals what Apple offers with .Mac. See Jeremy Flint weblog for his test drive of the new software for Mac users.

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