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Google's photo services regained prominence this year when Google Plus rolled in Picasa as the natural choice for hosting photos shared on the social network. But Panoramio, Google's less well-known photo service based on location data, is making moves as well.

Google has just announced Panoramio Groups for sharing photos with likeminded people. There's a directory for existing groups, and anybody can create a new one. Groups are a fundamental building block of a social network, and Panoramio has joined that club.

Looking for an easy way to move your photos from Facebook to Google Plus? So were we. That's why we were happy to discover this Web application, available in the Chrome Web store, that does the work for you. Available only as a browser add-on for Google Chrome, Move2Picasa exports all your Facebook albums and photos and imports them into Picasa for you, for free. You can then share those pictures with your Circles on Google Plus.

It looks as though the efforts to bring together Google's services under the "Plus" umbrella might involve rebranding two of Google's longstanding products: Blogger and Picasa. Mashable's Ben Parr reports that the Blogger and Picasa names - not the products - will go away, as early as the end of the month. That timing will coincide with, according to Parr, the opening of Google Plus to the public.

As Parr points out, this won't be the first time that Google has rebranded products, particularly following acquisitions. The VOIP company GrandCentral, for example, became Google Voice after Google acquired it. Both Picasa and Blogger are acquisitions, although it's been almost a decade since they were bought by Google.

So why rebrand these two products now?

With the launch of Google Plus, there may be some confusion as to how the photos uploaded to the social network (Google+) integrate with Google's online photo-sharing service (Picasa), especially in terms of storage limits. The answer provides some great news for Google Plus users - nearly everything you upload to Google Plus won't count towards your storage limits on Picasa, with the only exception being videos longer than 15 minutes.

And there's another nifty feature involving photo-tagging, too - your Google+ friends can now tag your Picasa photos.

Google Apps Engine has received a few new updates that include multitenancy capabilities, image serving and custom error messages.

The new features are part of the 1.3.6 release of App Engine for Java and Python. Google Apps Engine competes primarily with Amazon EC2. Other competitors include Windows Azure and Salesforce.com and its Force.com platform.

In March, Google acquired the online photo editing service Picnik and today, the company is integrating Picnik with Picasa Web Albums, Google's online photo sharing service. Picnik, which allows users to perform basic photo editing functions and add stickers and text to images will retain its own branding and web presence, but Picasa users will now find an "Edit in Picnik" button as one of the options in the online version of Picasa.

Google just announced dramatically reduced prices for their online storage options via a post on the company's Official Google Blog. The new rates give you 20 GB for $5 per year, or, as Google puts it "twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price." The new options also let you expand your storage all the way up to 16 TB if need be. As always, these extra storage options are available once you reach the limit of your free storage.

However, the system still only works with Gmail and the photo-sharing service Picasa. There's no mention of it expanding to encompass other Google services like Google Docs, for example. And there's definitely no mention of the seemingly mythical GDrive, the long-rumored online storage system supposedly under development which would allow for the upload of any file type for safe storage in the cloud. We're beginning to wonder: will Google ever offer us a real cloud storage solution?

Say goodbye to your controlled web presence and say hello to Picasa 3.5. Google released Picasa 3.5 with a slew of new features including facial recognition and name-based batch tagging, faster geo-tagging and better web uploading functionality. The service is so good at finding your mug and tagging it that wild photos from yesteryear can resurface and wreak havoc on your reputation.

Google just made its Picasa Web Albums a lot more social. While you could always share albums with others, you can now also invite other users to contribute photos to an album themselves. Currently, as Google rightly points out, if you go to an event and a number of people take pictures, they will end up on various different photo sharing services afterward. Now, you can just set up one album and everybody can contribute their photos to this one album.

Google Labs added four new offerings to their already rich set of optional features you can enable in Google Mail. The new features arrive in the form of previews for different site content, specifically YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and Yelp. The new Labs features all work the way you would expect them to, activating when a link to one of these services is detected and appending the message with a small gallery.