One of the most popular features requests for Picasa Web Albums is to show the number of views. It's difficult to know if your photos are popular and the number of views is a simple way to measure popularity. Now you can find this number below each photo.
Picasa Web Albums started as a service that helped you share photos with your friends and family, but it gradually added features from community-oriented services like Flickr: search, tags, Creative Commons licensing, comment moderation.
The service was launched as an online extension of the popular photo organizer Picasa, but this was an important factor that limited its development: it's difficult to upload multiple photos if you don't use Picasa, there's no photo editing feature and the name isn't very attractive. In addition to the integration with Picasa, Google's service offers only 1 GB of free storage, a great semi-automatic face recognition feature, a simple way to geotag photos, embeddable slideshows and some nice keyboard shortcuts that save time when you browse through photos. How would you improve Picasa Web Albums?
google, Picasa
google, images, Picasa
Picasa Web Albums added some new features for managing your favorites and your fans. As you probably know, you can add any Picasa Web user as a favorite to get notified when he uploads new pictures. When you add him as a favorite user, you'll be included in his list of fans and he'll receive an email notification.
Until now, you couldn't remove users from the list of fans, but Google changed this: if the list of fans includes spammers, you can block them. Users "will be blocked from commenting on your photos and adding you as favorite. Blocking someone cannot be undone," mentions a warning. You can also block users who post offensive comments.
Picasa Web Albums added a list of "suggested favorites", which includes all your contacts that use Google's photo sharing service. It's a good opportunity to find interesting photos uploaded by your contacts and to add them to your favorites.
But if you can add users to a list of favorites, why is there no option to favorite images? Picasa Web added a link below each photo: "I like this" and the number of likes, but you can't keep track of the photos you like.