Google Acquires Picasa

- a digital photo management company

[Chndru]

"Picasa enables users to easily manage and share digital photographs, and its technologies complement Google's ongoing mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president, Product Management. "Picasa is an innovator in the field of digital photography, and we're excited that the Picasa team is joining Google."

Picasa was used for photo-blogging, a recent feature in blogger.com

Business Wire [home.businesswire.com]

[amznVibe]

More direct source: [google.com...]

[Teknorat]

Look forward to seeing an excellent service made better :)

[eitt]

wow, i found another shareware called Moderal Jukebox which is much similar to picasa, who is the next one interested in it?

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 2:37 pm (utc) on July 16, 2004]
[edit reason] URL deleted [/edit]

[mn1dbp]

I notice there is a 'Download Picasa' link from the Google homepage.

Free from Google. Organize and find pictures on your PC. Download Picasa

[Swash]

Instant pr9 or pr10 website. Isn't this a little 'evil'?

[Brett_Tabke]

[picasa.com...]

[mn1dbp]

They have also made it available free when it was $29 after your 15 day free trial.

See the Google cache:

[google.co.uk...]

[celerityfm]

Neat-- Picasa looks pretty darn slick so far. But I'm kinda scratching my head over this one.. I mean.. how does this tie into google.COM .. I mean, I suppose future versions of the software could integrate with Google's blogger service.. or perhaps picasa could integrate into Google's image search technology or SOMETHING.

There is always the obvious branding/goodwill stuff this will generate but as far as direct profit I fail to see the business model for this one here.

It will come in good time I suppose, but for now, neat stuff!

[dherman76]

Being someone who works in the industry (MyPhotoAlbum.com & FortuneCity), there are plenty of tie-ins that Google can use Picasa for, namely Blogger. Picasa will tie-into Blogger, as they have "Hello" already setup.

[rjohara]

Looked interesting, and I have a big collection of photos that badly need organizing, so I went to the download page.

Windows only.

Come on, Google.

[Stefan]

Noticed it on google.com this morning and didn't bother clicking. I use GIMP for images. Whatever Picasa is, I'm not interested.

[peter andreas]

This looks an excellent product and for us at least it wll help with our web site development as you can easily search for a picture to use. If Googles goal is to help improve web site quality I suppose this helps indirectly . No doubt it will fit into the Google Mastrplan even if its not apparent now.

[Stefan]

as you can easily search for a picture to use

As long as they're not my pictures that are being used. I've been thinking of banning the google image-bot for a while, as it is. I'd better click on this Picasa thing so I know what to watch out for.

[peter andreas]

I meant its scanning our OWN hard drive not the internet-we literally have 1000's of our OWN pictures stored in various folders throughout our Pc and mac and this thing is scanning our own hard drive so they can be viewed later. It looks like it will help us organise our own photos and images, thats what I meant-We never use any photos from the net only those either created or taken by us.

[Stefan]

Of course. My apologies.

[peter andreas]

No problem, sorry if I wasn't clear. At first glance I thought it was some kind of peer to peer kazza style thing too. It took a few hours to load all our pictures and organise them into albums but it seems first rate and a lot better tahn the other photo viewers wev'e tried-its free and you just have to register. It seems ok.

[danieljean]

This sets an interesting precedent. I wonder if Firefox will get a Google link when it hits 1.0?

[werty]

Think about this:
• Picassa allows users to organize their pictures on their computer.
• Users can add info to each picture, such as what it is a picture of and who is in it.
• Users can easily export these photos to albums ONLINE!
• More photos, with more data, plus the ability to post to blogger...

I am guessing Google will take this extra data into consideration when crawling the users photo albums and will result in Google having a better and bigger image search.

[bts111]

Congrats Picasa!

[cyberprosper]

This is how Google will get their software onto people's computers and compete with Microsoft in the future. They start small... toolbars.. photo-albums... next they will move into Word Processors, etc. Pretty soon, all you will need is a hard drive and cable connection to the Internet. Microsoft Windows/Office will no longer be necessary. You will be part of the Googlesphere.