An Un-Evil Web Photo Album

When I first saw Google's interface for search a few years ago it was like a breath of fresh air. It wasn't cluttered with crap like every other major search engine seemed to be at the time. Yahoo! and whatever other search engines were around back then took a portal approach and jammed as much stuff on the screen as they could fit, whereas Google's search tool was elegant in its simplicity. I'm sure this elegance is a major reason behind its ongoing success. That, and the fact that it would actually find what you wanted 99% of the time, and sites couldn't buy their way into the top rankings.

For much the same reason I've not been a big fan of web photo storage sites like Photobucket or even Flickr, because of the amount of clutter and crap that goes along with them. I have a Flickr account but rarely use it because it's just too, I dunno, inelegant...

So I was very pleased to have just discovered Google's Picasa Web Albums, a free photo storage and web album service that benefits from Google's same approach to simplicity and elegance. I've just been having a quick play with it, and it looks great. I especially like the way they have provided upload tools in the form of either a standalone application for uploading from your computer, or, my favourite, direct integration with iPhoto. Yep, just click on the photos you want to upload, choose Export from the File menu and you are presented with the Google upload dialog. A couple of clicks to choose quality settings, etc, and the job is done. You can make photos public or private, have large or small image views, get automatic slideshows, download individual photos, and it even comes complete with an RSS feed.

Full of useful features while still being easy and intuitive; just the way it should be.