Tech Center Current

Update: Since posting this, Google has added the ability to upload these formats through the regular interface.

Picasa Web Albums is a free service from Google that allows you to upload and share photos, similar to the popular Flickr service. Although Picasa Web Albums’ interface is slick and visually appealing, it does have a few shortcomings to Flickr. One of the big ones is the fact that the PNG, GIF, and BMP image formats are not supported. Picasa Web Albums currently only allows you to upload images in the photo-optimized JPEG format, which makes the service less than ideal for things like screenshots and design mockups for which PNG would be a better choice. The Picasa desktop application only allows uploading of other image types by converting those images to JPEG, which still reduces quality and dramatically increases filesize of certain non-photo images.

However, I’ve discovered a solution which allows you to upload PNG, GIF, and BMP images unaltered to Picasa Web Albums for people to view. Here’s what to do (this assumes you already have Picasa Web Albums set up):

1. If you don’t already have a Blogger account, sign up for one at http://www.blogger.com/

2. Create a new blog. The title will be the name of the album you want to make on Picasa Web Albums. You have to use Blog*Spot for the hosting, and you should pick a Blog*Spot address that no one else is likely to want (some random keyboard mashing will be fine). You’ll never need to actually visit this address.

   Warning: If an album of the same name already exists in your Picasa Web Albums account, they will not merge. You will end up having two albums of the same name (but different URL), which you probably don’t want. Take this into account before picking the blog name.

3. Once your blog is set up, go to the “Create Post” page in Blogger.

4. Click on the “Add Image” icon just above the post entry field. This will open an “Upload Images” window.

5. Click on “Browse” and select the image you want to upload. This may be a JPEG (JPG), GIF, BMP, or PNG up to 8 MB in size.

6. If you want to add multiple images at once, click on “Add another image”. A maximum of 5 images may be uploaded at once.

7. Once you’re ready to upload, click the “Upload Image” button.

8. After it’s finished uploading, optionally give the post a title (today’s date or something, just to identify the image upload session), save the draft, and leave Blogger. The post body may be blank and you don’t need to actually publish the post, but there has to at least be a draft saved or else the images will be lost.

9. Go to your Picasa Web Albums account. If all went well, you should have a new album with a little Blogger logo in the bottom-left corner. If the album isn’t there, try waiting a few minutes and refresh. If it still isn’t there, you should recheck the steps above.

10. To make the album public, open the album page in Picasa Web Albums, click on Edit Album Properties in the left sidebar, and set it to Public.

For these Blogger albums, you’ll always have to use Blogger to upload images; the regular Picasa Web Albums interface won’t let you upload images into those albums. But you can view them normally, set captions, comments, etc. The images retain the full pixel-precise quality and filesize of the original images, and you can manually download them in their original PNG/GIF/BMP formats.

It would be nice if Picasa Web Albums would allow us to simply upload PNG/GIF/BMP images from the regular upload interface, but this will have to do for now.