Google adds search to Picasa Web Albums

Google has gone and added three major updates to Picasa Web Albums. First, any photos you upload to a blog using Blogger will automatically be added to your personal web album. This sort of integration makes a lot of sense, making it much easier to search for and find photos you've previously used on your blog. Of course, Google could have just included an image search feature in the "search this blog" box on blogger.

The other announcements are probably much bigger news for anyone who doesn't use Blogger. The storage capacity for web albums has been bumped up to 1GB. And while yesterday, you could only search for images in your own web album. Today, you can do a "community search," allowing you to search for images across all web albums. It'll be interesting to see if Google eventually ads these images to Google Images search results.

If you'd rather not share your photos with the whole world, you can set your web albums to "unlisted." Not might be a good time to go do that if you weren't aware that your baby photos were suddenly going to be made available to the whole world. Might have been nice if Google had sent out an email to give users a heads up.

Does this mean Google's trying to take on Flickr? It's too early to say. On the one hand, you can easily search for images and view users shared galleries. On the other hand, Picasa Web Albums don't allow users to assign Creative Commons licenses to their images. That means if you're looking for images you can use and/or edit, you're still probably better off searching Flickr.

Tags: community search, CommunitySearch, google images, GoogleImages, image search, ImageSearch, picasa, picasa web albums, PicasaWebAlbums, search