Google/Picasa Web Album API for OS X and others

I missed this June 5 Google Mac article: Picasa Web Albums meets Google data APIs. The author provides some interesting examples of using a data API with Picasa (combine webcam image feeds with RSS), shows examples from an OS X image upload application, and points to Google's open source Objective C (Mac) data API.

Of course if another photo service has an API, then one application is transferring images and metadata between services.

The Google Web Albums Data API has more information, I'm going to start hunting for people who've implemented their suggested examples:

• Include your public photos in your own web page, and allow users to comment on them (and have the comments stored in Picasa Web Albums).
• Write a plugin to manage your albums and photos from a desktop or mobile phone client.
• Create a custom screensaver to display your Picasa Web Albums photos on your computer.

Some recent additions are documented here. You can even play with them directly from your web browser (click here for my last 25 public uploads in Feed (XML format, I've got them in a Bloglines feed now).

I wonder if it's possible to call these APIs from AppleScript written within Apple's Xcode IDE? If so, it might be possible to do some interesting things almost readily. (Or just use Python?)

I do need to think about this. Heck, it might be possible to suck images directly into iPhoto just by creating a URL-query that creates an RSS feed ...

Today, I do like Picasa, even if Google doesn't understand URLs.

Google Earth and Picasa strange loops and the need for four dimensional coordinates in Google's image map layer

Update 9/2/07: Google's Picasa image integration with both Google Maps and Google Earth doesn't work the way I'd thought it did. I'm not sure how it's supposed to work, I can't find any documentation. The one thing I see is that all images are not routinely available to the public even when the appropriate layers are enabled. As of 9/07 image display in Google Maps seems to barely work at all.

I really can't come up with a title to quite explain this. It's just so extremely geeky, recursive, and quintessentially 21st century that I do, however, have to describe it.

First, here's the picture. The rest of the post makes more sense if you click on it, or, if you have Google Earth installed, this link might work to take you to the current view.

From Reunion photos

What you're seeing here is a snapshot of a Google Earth display of an obscure building in Saint Laurent, Quebec (ok, it was once Father McDonald high school, I don't know what it is now.) If you view the entire display you'll see some picture icons.

The picture icons belong to this (public) Picasa album. The album cover picture is also this Google Earth picture. If you click on the Google Earth link above (as of 8/13/07) you'd see that the Google Earth view also contains the above image. Hence the recursion.

The Picasa images appear in the Google Earth embedded image, and are visible to anyone in the world who uses GE on that site with the image layer enabled, because I assigned them all geolocation using Picasa Web Albums "map" feature.

This would, of course, be even more interesting if Google Earth added a fourth dimension (time). Then one could view sites over time, and these images might show up only for certain time slices. Alas, if Google adds this feature in 2037 my heir's will need to update the image metadata, Google 2007 does not allow user specification of the image acquisition date.

PS. There are a few more examples of "strange loops" in this exercise, but I think I've done enough damage for the moment.

Quick and dirty album imaging

The unexpected energy of two organizers means that my high school is having a class of '76 reunion (11th grade in Quebec). I'd love to go, but I can't make it. I sent some images from my iPhoto libraries, but then I decided to try to include material from a very crummy old album.

I didn't have time to peel the photos out and scan them, much less hunt down the negatives, so I decided to try a very crude approach to imaging, one that wouldn't quite qualify for Scanning Basics 101. I put the album on the floor with the cover sheet peeled back, and I snapped page shots with my Digital Rebel XT dSLR. I then ran the images through Aperture, cropped a few and adjusted levels, straightened the pages, then uploaded them as JPEGs. You can see some examples (page background visible) here.

It was a very fast process and it worked surprisingly well. In a few cases I could see more detail on the screen than was readily apparent in the original print. In other cases the original print is better. I'm going to try this with several old albums, though I'll probably use a tripod and work harder to square the images.

PS. While editing this post Firefox abruptly died and I lost the original draft. It's never done that before!

Update 8/13/07: See also: Google Earth and Picasa: strange loops and the need for four dimensional coordinates in Google's image map layer

Update 8/15/07: I've been puzzling over the fact that at least one image shows more detail than is apparent in a quick glance of the original print. On reflection, it's a product of the sophistication of modern digital software enhancement. Aperture is playing tricks on us, filling in missing data by some clever inferencing. The digital image is a simulacra of the original analog image. Interestingly, as a trigger of memory, the simulacra is more effective than the original. The inferencing works. For more on this topic, see this.

You can put application links in a Finder Toolbar?!

Jeez, I thought I knew this stuff: Mac 101: Applications in the Finder toolbar. I did have to switch to "customize toolbar" for the drag and drop to work. I'm a bit aghast. This would have been very handy for configuring my mother's machine if I'd know about it.

Another post mentioned that cmd-T will add a highlighted icon or folder to the Finder Sidebar, and that this is then available for all file save/open operations. Wow, what a way to save on navigation tasks. I never thought of this area as being a "scratchpad" for this type of quick operation, but now I see it was designed that way.

Once gain I note the gap between how a software designer intends things to work and what users end up doing.

Update: oops. I'm not sure the Finder toolbar tip is so great. I added a Folder rather than an application, and when I clicked on it I got the SBOD. Of course my MacBook has been doing that sort of thing since I updated to 10.4.10, so this might be a bad coincidence ...

Dockables: a clever donationware app

[An earlier version of this was accidentally mis-posted to my "world" blog.]

I think TUAW pointed me to Dockables. These are donation ware applescripts with a full installer and excellent icons. I have "sleep", "screen saver", "screen capture", "screen sleep" and "log off" in my Dock now. Since I don't use my Dock for much these are great to have, and of course LaunchBar (love it) can activate any of them easily.

I've always had trouble remembering the key combination for screen captures, and I don't like the TIFF format Grab uses (though I'm sure there's a way to change Grab to use PNG, I don't like those tweaks if I can avoid them). Now I use dockables, open the PNG in Preview, select, copy and then either pastse into a document or "create new from clipboard", then save with a useful name or paste. Ok, so it's not ultra efficient, but it works rather quickly.

Screen sleep is another of my favorites. It simply puts the display to sleep. I didn't think this was possible on an iMac, but it works. I can now quickly rest my screen at night while allowing backups to proceed normally.

These are also handy for the docks of my family members, who really don't know any key shortcuts or hot corner mouse actions.

I'm sending the author a donation.

dotMac needs a refresh: Zip disk?

This is from the readme file displayed with a brand new.Mac iDisk:

Using your iDisk

Your iDisk behaves much like any other removable storage available for Macintosh, such as a ZIP disk. Use the same drag-and-drop techniques to copy documents or folders to or from your iDisk. You can also access your iDisk to upload and download files via a browser by going to www.mac.com and clicking the iDisk icon.

A ZIP disk?! What are the chances that anyone under thirty knows what a zip disk was?

Sheesh.

SkyDrive from MSFT vs xdrive from AOL vs nada from Google

I've had an account for a while with AOL's xdrive. I don't use it all that often, but it's handy every month or so for moving files around. Today I tried setting up a Microsoft SkyDrive from my MacBook. It was a mixed experience. Safari 3.03 (beta) was firmly rejected. Firefox seemed to work, but it hung with a SkyDrive icon after an initial upload. Subsequently I couldn't get SkyDrive to respond from any browser, so maybe I crashed it :-). The Firefox usability was pretty weak in any case, clearly Microsoft intends to bind SkyDrive to IE.

The primary advantage of SkyDrive is that you can share files with anyone on the net and with other SkyDrive users. I don't think xdrive.com allows either option. Press coverage is comparing this to Google's Gmail share, but that's an awkward solution with no public sharing option. Google's only true public file sharing is their feeble Page Creator file file upload option. Apple's .Mac sharing is comparable, but it's fairly expensive (though better than it was).

I guess we'll have to keep waiting for Google to contemplate their next move ...