Google Picasa Web Albums For Macintosh

Those nice people at Google have released a set of tools to allow Macintosh users to upload digital photographs and images to Picasa Web Albums, their online image storage and sharing service.

What you get are an export plug-in for iPhoto and a stand-alone application that allows you to drag and drop images from the Finder and upload them directly.

Okay it's not Picasa for Macintosh, which would be a real bonus for us Mac users, but it makes it easier for us to upload images to their online storage service.

Picasa Web Albums offers a free 250Mb of online image storage, which they compare to approximately 1000 wallpaper-sized photos (at 1600 pixels each). Paying $25 a year will upgrade that to an extra 6GB of space, enough for 25,000 such images. I signed up for the free account a few weeks ago just to try it out but I already use Flickr and also pay $25 for a Pro account so I'm not really looking for another service at the moment. However, my initial experience with it was positive but it's just up there with Flickr just yet but they're still in a test phase so I expect they'll add some more functionality as they develop.

You can get the uploading tools here.

NB: You'll need Mac OS X 10.4 or later to run the tools and a GMail account to sign up for Picasa Web Albums.