How to use the new Map Your Photos feature in Picasa Web Albums

Posted on June 27, 2007 at 11:54 am

Make sure to read other posts from the Picasa Tips and Tricks series!

Google introduced a new feature today for Picasa called “Map Your Photos” which lets you show everyone where you took your pictures on a map. It’s a feature that’s been around in Flickr for ages, so it’s about time Picasa users don’t feel like lonely ducklings. The new feature is quite easy to use and adds a little bit of jazz to the site. Once you login into Picasa Web Albums, click on any album and click on the new button at the top called Map Photos.

You’ll be brought to a map of the world with a textbox where you can type in the location of the pictures. Click Go and you’ll be zoomed into that location. Now you can drag your photos from the left side bar onto the map. If you want to select all pictures at once, click the first picture, hold down the CNTRL key and select the last picture.

Click Done and go back to your album view. You’ll notice on the bottom left side bar, there is a new item called Photo Locations which will have a little red pin point on the place where you dragged your photos.

Now if someone wants to view your photos on the map, they can click on View map and they’ll be brought to the map version of your photos. The nice thing about Picasa’s implementation of this is that all of your photos are shown as thumbnails which you can click on to get a live preview.

You can click on View full size if you want to view the whole picture or click on Play at the top left if you want Picasa to go through all of the pictures on the map in a type of slide-show format. The cool thing about this is that Picasa will move around the map automatically wherever the pictures were dropped. So if you drop a few photos on one street and then a couple of more on another street, as the slideshow goes through the photos, the position on the map also changes to reflect the new location.

Overall, a nice new feature for those hardcore Picasa users! Apparently, you can also now use Picasa on your mobile phone to view photos, make comments, or just search for photos. I have not played around with this, but you can learn more about Picasa Mobile by click on the link.

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» Filed Under Google Software/Tips