Speaking of Syria, some of those software sanctions have been lifted. Google announced today that they are now able to offer Google Earth, Picasa and Chrome to the residents of Syria. I don’t know how much use they will have for it since they’re in the middle of a war.

Still, it’s nice to see that those not involved with the conflict can now gain access to what is arguably the world’s most popular Web browser. The addition of Google Earth could also probably help those who want to avoid the regions that are currently embroiled in conflict. I wonder if we’re going to see any pictures of the country on Picasa?

It would appear that Google has to fight the U.S. export controls to get this software into the hands of the people in these countries. As has been proven in many uprisings around the Middle East, the use of technology to communicate has been key in the numerous successes that we’ve seen. Google shares this sentiment by saying that they have to walk a thin line between complying with U.S. sanctions and offering people the tools they need to “communicate, find and create information.”

While we may have our own gripes with Google and their practices here in the U.S. over privacy and other issues, I think it’s only fair to give them this one. There doesn’t appear to be any ulterior motive except getting technology into the hands of people who actually need it. While we’re just sharing pictures of cats, access to technology is a matter of life and death in a country like Syria.

I don’t want this to devolve into one of those, “Think of the starving children in Africa” stories, but Google did good today. We need more people lobbying for the delivery of essential information technology to those fighting for independence the world over. Besides, it should help level the playing field since the government has been using technology against activists.

Using images uploaded by users through Picasa and Panoramio, the tours are composed of pictures stitched together to show you various angles and aspects of a location. According to the Lat Long Blog, the photo tours are available for over 15,000 places throughout the world, ranging from the personal mecca of Chicago Cubs fans, Wrigley Field, to Hofbräuhaus in Munich to La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Of course, almost all of these photo tours are located either in the continental United States and Central and Western Europe, so don’t get too excited about being able to see “the world.”

If you want to view the map of large areas to see what nearby locations might have a photo tour, you can toggle the appearance of the red dots and balloons that indicate the presence of a photo tour by using the drop-down menu in the upper-right corner of the window and check or uncheck the * option.

More, as you zoom around on different areas of the world, the side-panel on the left side of the screen that lists the available photo tours will automatically update so as to only present tours that are available in the section of the map that you are immediately viewing.

The tours auto-navigate so the amount of wondering around locations is going to be limited, but you can still pause the tour at any time if a particularly captivating image compels you to meditate a little while longer on a particular spot. Also, to take advantage of the tours, you will need to enable MapsGL.

“Over the last 5 years uploads have been increasing 20% year-over-year and we love hitting a milestone like this,” says Flickr’s Kay Kremerskothen. “It’s the ability to wander through the titles, tags, geotags, camera info, groups, comments, favs, and everything else associated with the photos that make the huge collection of photos on Flickr so unique. The more photos you upload, the more we all can explore.”

Here’s the six billionth photo. It is a nice one.

It was uploaded by user eon60 on Monday. I’m not sure why they waited until today to announce it.

6 billion is a lot of photos, and may seem impressive until you realize that Flickr’s been around since 2004. There’s an infographic from Pixable going around that claims Facebook is expected to have 100 billion photos by the end of the summer.

Not to turn the discussion away from Flickr and Yahoo, but I recently talked about how Google+ has made Picasa Web Albums cool again. If Google gets Instant Upload on the iPhone version, and keeps the growth of Google+ going strong, it will be interesting to see how it competes with Facebook in the photos category moving forward.

Before the reaction is addressed, Google explains the tagging feature quite clearly:

Tag approval
You’ll receive an email letting you know you’ve been tagged in a photo. By default, name tags by people in your circles are automatically approved. You can view or remove tags at any time on the photos homepage in Google+ as well as the Photos tab on your Google profile. You can also update your settings to manually approve every name tag. When a tag is approved, the tagged photo is posted to the Google+ stream.

Tag visibility
Name tags are visible to people that can view the album. Approved tags link to your Google profile. Unapproved tags are still visible on the photo, but they don’t link to your profile. In addition to appearing on the photo itself, photos of you with approved tags will be displayed on the Photos tab on your Google profile and the photos homepage in Google+.

Now, the fact that tagged photos automatically appear in a Google+ stream is what has people up in arms. Understandably so. Sharing is not something that should be standard. Users should be able to pick and choose what they share. Apparently, from Google’s eyes, when you add a tag, you are agreeing to share it. Nevertheless, people aren’t happy with this discovery. Over at the Picasa help forum, reaction isn’t kind:

Apparently I can no longer organize my web album without sharing it to the world!?
In this help doc http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=1306701 you say that “Tagging is sharing”, that means that if I choose to rganize my web album with tagging people in it I (by default and no option not to) share it to everyone I tag EVEN if I do not share it with a single soul! This is WRONG and a major PRIVACY concern!

And [sic]s are included:

I completely agree. This move goes against Google’s supposed philosophy of controlled sharing within circles. Like many others, I use PicasaWeb as a backup and for organising my photos, choosing exactly who I would like to see them. I pay for the extra storage and have been very happy with it. Why on Earth would I want everybody that I tag in my photos for organisational purposes to be emailed about it, and then able to share my album with whoever he or she pleases? I also do not want others to have control of the tagging of my photographs, which I organise so meticulously. PicasaWeb was not a social network, and forcing it into becoming one renders it useless to all of the people who have used it for so many years. I thought that Google were going about + the right way up until now, but this is a disgrace.

And one more:

Here’s a specific use case which highlights why this is completely unacceptable unless something is changed:
I import all my photos from my camera using picasa to a “photos” folder. This folder is “synced” – meaning any changes are updated live to the web album. Eventually, I like to reorganise those photos copied from the camera into separate folders… but this takes time. In the meantime, if “people” tab in picasa identifies some of my friends in some of those photos… well, guess what? If I accept the people tags (without easily knowing which folder those photos were from) then the WHOLE FOLDER is shared with them… and the potentially anyone else in the world.
Why is this REALLY, REALLY BAD? Here’s an example of things I’ve taken photos of that are in my photo folder right now: my passport, my lease, my room and personal items, friends in private gatherings, etc.
Someone could potentially use this information for identity theft, etc.

There is NO WAY that this is going to work, google. NO FREAKING WAY.

Is this overreaction or is Google subtly pushing Google+ on to the masses now, by making tagging such a universal sharing feature? Comments like the ones featured go on for two pages, and if this isn’t addressed by Google, it will only get worse from here. Of course, one wonders why someone would take a picture of their passport and post into a publicly-shared album, but then again, the user obviously didn’t know they were sharing such images.

Currently, there isn’t much response to glean further information from, but you can bet if the outcry gets loud enough, Google will take Picasa’s tagging feature back to the drawing board, at least in terms of Google+.

Mashable is reporting that Google plans to rename Picasa “Google Photos” and Blogger will become “Google Blogs”. They go on to say that several other brands could also face a possible rebrand. It appears as though YouTube will remain intact, for now.

Apparently the rebrand will happen sometime during the next six weeks. Also around that sometime, you can expect a user revolt over the name change. As we’ve learned in the past, people don’t really like change, just for change’s sake… just ask Facebook.

If this seems like something off the wall for Google to do, it’s not. If you remember back to 2007 when Google acquired GrandCentral, a VOIP platform… Google eventually rebranded it as Google Voice. So Google rebranding services is nothing new, but we’ve never seen them do it with a property as popular as blogger, which Gizmodo calls “one of the tent poles of the Internet”.

How will users take the rebranding? We’ll find out sometime during the next six weeks, if the reports are accurate.

What do you think about the name change for Picasa & Blogger?

The previous way Google handled storage caps was simple: Picasa users all had one gigabyte of free storage, and everything they uploaded, whether it was a thumbnail image or three-second clip of a dog sneezing, would count against it.

A post on the Google Photos Blog announced late Friday, “Now, uploaded images that are 800 pixels or smaller and videos that are 15 minutes or less in length no longer count against your free storage limit.  This means you can upload and store unlimited photos and videos at the above sizes – for free!”

Then, as a reminder/advertisement, the post added, “800-pixels is a good size for sharing pictures on the web, but if you prefer uploading your images at a larger size for better quality (archival or print), and you are nearing the 1GB limit, you can always purchase additional storage for as little as $5/year.  To check your available storage amount scroll to the bottom of your home page or view your settings.”

Anyway, this change should go over well with Picasa users, and perhaps convince more people to give the service a try.

It also speaks to Google’s ability to handle massive amounts of information, since we all know lots of folks are going to upload everything they can, sneaking in just under the new limits.

According to those who spotted it, it appeared when they tried to insert files and images into Google Sites and Blogger. A screenshot is now making the rounds, showing that it is tied to Picasa, Maps, Google Docs, and YouTube. 

A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch, "Oops… looks like someone pushed some code too quickly. It’s not quite ready for prime time yet but stay tuned!"

Something like this might come in handy when you want to share things. Incidentally, Google is also working on something else that’s not quite ready for prime time (and isn’t expected to be until the Spring – you know, that "social layer" Google is supposed to be adding to tie its products together. 

Any suggestion that this is related could only be considered speculation, but it’s something to consider. Another thing to consider is that Google is heavily trying to move people to the cloud. Google made an announcement recently that also connects the better part of Google’s services together through Google Apps. 

Something else that is also apparently not quite ready for prime time? Google’s Cloud-based operating system Chrome OS. This very likely has a lot to do with that. In the end all of these things are going to be connected in one way or another, I believe. 

Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb drops a name we haven’t heard in a while. "Wait, a Google storage product? Isn’t that Gdrive?" she writes. "Gdrive, the long-rumored Google competitor to Microsoft’s now 3+ years-old SkyDrive cloud storage service has never officially been revealed. But it was supposedly going to do something similar – tie together Google services into one interface."

"Isn’t that what Cloud Picker is doing?" she adds. "Actually, no – at least not to the extent of what Gdrive would have done. Cloud Picker only appears as a pop-up when you go to insert media into Blogger or Sites at this time, according to the forum posts…In other words, it’s a dialog box, not a service."

It certainly seems that way. There’s probably already more being made of this than is really necessary. It would appear to just be a function that could be applied to any Google offering the company wishes. If nothing else, it should make it easy to share different types of content in any given Google service. If you’re inserting a file, image, map, document, or YouTube video into something, you’re probably sharing it with somebody. Sounds social to me. 

Google is expected to launch a Chrome OS-based netbook on Tuesday.

"Face movies create a movie based around one person both figuratively and literally," explains Google’s Jonathan Sposato. "Instead of the usual transition from one photo to the next, the images align themselves to the face in the photo. This creates an extremely smooth viewing experience which allows the person in the photos to remain the focus rather than the transition effects themselves.

See below:

There is no word on when this feature will make its way to Picasa Web Albums, but hopefully it will at some point.

Other features of Picasa 3.8 include Picnik integration (which was released for Picasa Web Albums recently), batch upload from Picasa to Picasa Web Albums, and some metadata updates.

Picasa Web Albums users using English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese versions will be able to use Picnik photo editing.

To do so, simply click "edit in Picnik" from the edit drop-down menu or the new Picnik icon.

"Then, Picnik away by applying an effect, adding a sticker, or exploring your own creative path with advanced tools," Google says. "When you are done editing your photo, save back to your album by either replacing the existing image or making a new copy."

Picnik as a standalone service is still available (including a premium version in "3 tasty flavors").