Search Engine Journal

Google’s free web album, Picasa introduces some great new features which were the top requests of Picasa Web Album users. Google’s Data API blog enumerated the new API features as follows:

• Community Search: Use the q query parameter to search through the photos of all public, searchable albums. Example: http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/all?q=penguin will find all penguin pictures
• Retrieving a user’s recently uploaded photos: You can retrieve the photos recently uploaded by a user. Example: http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/userID?kind=photo&max-results=25 will retrieve the 25 photos most recently uploaded by userID.
• Retrieving recently added comments for a particular user: You can retrieve the comments recently added to photos owned by a particular user. Example: http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/userID?kind=comment&max-results=25 will retrieve the 25 comments most recently added to photos owned by userID.
• Searching a user’s photos: You can search through all the photos belonging to a single user using the q query parameter. Example:

  http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/<em>userID</em>?kind=photo&amp;q=penguin

  will find all photos owned by user userID which contain the word ‘penguin’ in the title, caption or tag.

• Filtering by tag: You can filter photos in the album feed or user feed based upon tags using the new tag query parameter. Example: http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/userID?kind=photo&tag=dog will find all photos owned by the user userID which are tagged with ‘dog’.
• Uploading non-JPEG photos: You can now upload bmp, gif, jpeg, and png photos via the API.

Can anyone tell me if there are still some people who users Picasa Web Albums to store their personal photos? I had this impression that Flickr and Zooomr are the most used and visited online public albums right now.