In the past, Google already offered (and continues to offer) what they call “unlisted” albums, but those were troubled with privacy issues from time to time. For instance, in the beginning you could simply try guessing the album title (say, a title like “Private”) to get to the unlisted album. Recently, Google fixed a vulnerability with how outgoing links were potentially passing on the unlisted album URL’s authentication key to third-party sites due to the referrer field. Also, sometimes sharing just a single photo caused you to potentially share access to the whole album. In fact, this issue remains even for “sign-in” albums: when you select “Share Photo" for a single photo in a sign-in album, the recipient will be able to view your full album.

In other news, Google Picasa software product manager Mike Horowitz has left Google to join Fetch Technologies.

Comments

Pictures and text are visible on virtual pages, and these flip as if they were part of traditional, bound books.  Kristen Nicole notes, "There are group collaboration tools mixed in there, so multiple people can contribute to a single collection of images that focus on a particular event or place, or point in time."  User profiles act as an additional way for creators to reach out, and then comments and a 5-star rating system allow the community to give feedback on what it’s seen.

As you might suspect, Shutterfly Gallery doesn’t look ready to lead an artistic revolution – most of the scrapbooks fall along the lines of "we’re so in love" or "my cat is so cute" subjects.  Still, Shutterfly users seem to have picked up on idea quickly, and some of the creations are much better than others.

Also, Shutterfly Gallery isn’t bound to the main Shutterfly site.  A press release reveals, "To expand sharing beyond Shutterfly.com, photo books posted to the Shutterfly Gallery can also be embedded into a personal webpage or blog."

If anyone’s expecting Shutterfly to get a flood of new users out of this development, they’re liable to be disappointed.  A trickle’s not impossible, though, and existing users might grow a little more loyal.