Google Picasa on the iPhone
I have finally entered the “modern” era of digital photo sharing. With all the services out there like Flickr and Picasa, I’ve yet to get beyond the oh-so-90’s habit of simply dumping my photos onto my hard drive and leaving them there.
The upside to my old habit is privacy. I don’t care to share my life with everybody else on the web. The downsides are more plentiful. 1) If my hard drive crashes, I lose all our family photos, including holidays and pictures of the kids. 2) I can only access the images while at home, at the computer. 3) how do I share multiple photos with friends/family who aren’t in front of my PC? Image sizes being what they are today, emailing several 5 megapixel images in one message can present problems.
So I finally signed up for a Google Picasa account. I’ll start piddling around with it. The free 1GB account space should be enough for a while. We’ll see how I adapt to this new paradigm.
Luckily, there is now an iPhone web interface for Picasa. It doesn’t yet allow for uploading images from your phone, but it at least allows you gallery access on your phone. So, if you’re at grandma’s and you want to show her pictures of the kid’s birthday party, you just whip out your phone (probably using 3G since g’ma probably doesn’t have wifi).
The perfect solution would be a Google-created native app, available through the iTunes App Store, which would allow for a full featured Picasa experience on the iPhone (including uploads).
Just go to picasaweb.google.com from your iphone to try it now.
Update:
While googling “iphone and picasa” I came across this tutorial which demonstrates a backdoor way to upload images from the iPhone to Picasa using your Blogger account as an intermediary. You essentially email photos to your blog, which are then automatically added to Picasa. I don’t have or want a Blogger account, so I think I’ll wait for a native app solution.