Picasa Web Albums is an online photo sharing service. With this web application, your
photo collections can be uploaded to your own private web album. From there
your photos can be shared with your friends, family or the rest of the world.
The Google created product allows photos, albums, videos, and slideshows to be
shared on the web and can be tagged geographically to enhance the viewing
experience. We noted in this report that, commercial establishments such as
tourist locations can benefit from Picasa Web Albums, as well as the
possibility to share news stories on a global level. Picasa is a perfect example of a fun and effective
geospatial web application, as it combines data (photos, videos) on a
geographic database (Google maps, Google Earth) on the web, making it easy for
individuals to use.
There
are many online photo-sharing sites, but two take the lead when it comes to
mapping out photos - Flickr and Picasa.
The advantage of Picasa Web Albums over other photo sharing sites such
as Flickr, is the option to manually
specify the latitude and longitude (in decimal degree format). Where Flickr on the other hand, only
allows you to specify a location on a map by selection; which could lead to a
large discrepancy of the actual location. With any of your photos or albums,
Picasa can lay out the photographs on a map for a geospatial experience. Photos
of road trips will be able to tell a story, show the route on the map and you
will never have to remember, ‘where in the world was this photo taken’!
