New Picasa and web publishing

Google have released a new version of their excellent (on Windows at least) photo organiser, Picasa. I've been using it since before Google bought it up, and find it ticks more boxes for what I want from a photo organiser than any other piece of software available for the two operating systems I use. (Everyone knows about iPhoto already, thanks.)

The one thing that I, like many others, have been wishing for is a Flickr uploader plug-in - and now that I've got used to using it, a Treemo uploader would be nice too. The Treemo one won't happen because there's no published API at present, and the Flickr one won't happen because Flickr is part of Yahoo! these days, and Google are hardly going to add a load of functionality to integrate a competitor.

With the latest version of Picasa though, I can see a really nice way that the two could be made to marry. Apart from an improved screen saver, which mimics my favourite iPhoto pan-and-zoom effect, they've added a new feature that lets you seamlessly upload to a Google-provided web album. One that publishes RSS feeds and allows access to nice, high resolution photos together with captions, titles and tags - all the things you need to filter through into Flickr.

Here's my idea, in case anyone wants to try it. I don't stand a chance to spend the time needed to pull this together, so I'm floating this idea so that any interested parties passing by with the skills can assemble it as a free, online service. I only ask for credit for the concept!

The Picasa web albums are stored at http://picasaweb.google.com/{googleusername} - so mine is here at http://picasaweb.google.com/irregularshed. Within this space, the individual albums are made and given sensible names, tacked on to the end of the path, and these are where your photos are stored. What I propose doing is to make an album called 'flickr' (for example) where I will be uploading the photos I want to publish on Flickr. The first thing I will do is notify an online service (could be a public one, or just a cron-script one for single users) that this is the album I'm using, and it will pull out the RSS feed's URL. Thereafter, it will check every 15 minutes or so for any new photos in that feed. When it finds new photos it will take from the feed the URL for the largest version of the photo (several sizes are rendered when you upload, and are appended as an option in the URL - you can resize to a maximum of 1024 or 1600 pixels wide, ot just upload your original) together with the caption, title and tags provided by Picasa. This will get piped through the Flickr API to copy the photo onto Flickr with the same data.

Of course, it doesn't have to be Flickr. Anything with an open API could benefit from the combination of Picasa and this service I'm describing (*cough* Treemo *cough*). It'd be nice to do it myself, but - hey - I'm a realist. It's not going to happen until Jack goes to university!