Arun’s Blog

Google has released Picasa 2.7 beta for Linux. Important among the new features is the option to upload photos to web. I wanted this feature in Linux since the time it was available in Windows. I installed the Windows version of the Picasa, but the upload option didn’t work. It just hung. I’m happy that it’s available for Linux. I installed it and successfully uploaded my photos to web. Hooray!!!

Here are some of the new features in Picasa 2.7:

• Upload to Picasa Web Albums
• Save edits to disk - Save edits, undo saves, and revert to the original file with ease.
• Folder hierarchy views - Browse through folders Explorer-style.
• Improvements to Import - Import into an existing folder
• Better RAW support
• Larger thumbnails, better caption editing, ability to configure the row of buttons, special “Starred Photos” album, search by ISO and focal length.

Here are the list of known issues:

• The system tray does not close with loss of focus (if you bring up the media detector menu, you have to either start picasa or stop the media detector to get the menu to go away)
• Picasa notices don’t stay on a given desktop. Picasa pops up notices to let you know it’s found new photos or has added photos to its library. These notices come on the current desktop; some users would rather they stayed on the same desktop that Picasa itself was on.
• Several BlogThis! features do not work properly with Picasa’s embedded browser window, such as spell check, the palette selector, and new account URL tester.
• Music playback during slideshow doesn’t work.
• If you have an NFS mounted home directory, the performance may be poor. Picasa relies heavily on a lot of files in the ~/.picasa directory, and if the home directory is slow, then Picasa will be slow. You can work around this by making a directory in /var/opt/picasa/$USERNAME/ that corresponds to your username. You have to have full rights to that directory.
• A few print providers (namely Photobox) do not work correctly.
• On multi-monitor displays, some interface elements do not display correctly. We currently do not have full Xinerama support.
• Album uploaded as ‘Public’ album without selecting any of ‘Public/Unlisted’ radio buttons in Picasa Web Album dialog.
• Slideshow and Timeline do not show full-screen images when running on a 24-bit depth X server, even if that setting is checked in the Options dialog.

To install Picasa 2.7 beta in Ubuntu, open a terminal, type sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list and add

# Google testing repository
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ testing non-free

and save. Download the GPG key from here. Import the key (I used synaptic to import). Once you import, install Picasa by searching in Synaptic or by issuing sudo apt-get install picasa in the terminal.

Souce: Picasa

(Picasa web browser integration)

(Picasa web upload window)

(Picasa 2.7)

(Uploading to the web, though it says download)

Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 3:53 pm.
Filed under Announcement.
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