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.

We've covered Panoramio as competition for Photosynth, Microsoft's effort to stitch together photos into 3D places and build them into Bing Maps. Panoramio's role in Google Maps and Google Earth is one of providing personal color and context to a place. This is a rather different kind of photo sharing than the kind that organizes snapshots into galleries. Some new apps, such as Trover, take this same approach to photos as ways of exploring places. Panoramio's groups will bring an element of collaboration to the adventure.

A storm is brewing in the photo-sharing space. The flurry of mobile photo-sharing apps is one thing, but the very social networks where we host and display our images are in flux. Photographers are pronouncing the death of Flickr, Facebook is changing its long-held policy of opt-out photo tagging, and Google Plus has saved Picasa with its instant uploading and unlimited storage. Even Twitter is adding photo galleries, and while they're not Flickr-style, full-featured works of art, they're great for the kinds of informal moments that get tweeted.

These services are beginning to distinguish themselves from one another. A photo gallery with comments is a kind of Web experience we're all used to by now. In response, the major photo services are either adding distinguishing features or they're stagnating. Panoramio had its distinguishing feature first, though, and it's only now beginning to build a social layer on top of it.

Where do you host and share your photos? Let us know in the comments

Even if you're planning to maintain a social presence on both Google Plus and Facebook, it's always smart to have multiple backups of your photos. And since Google Plus now offers unlimited photo storage, it's a good place to keep an extra copy of your digital pics.

To get started, you first need to install the browser extension Move2Picasa. This puts a small Picasa icon at the top of Google Chrome, next to the address bar. To use the app, click the button to authenticate with Facebook.

You can then check and uncheck which Facebook albums will be copied over to Picasa. You can either check "upload all," "upload none," or you can pick and choose the photos to migrate. The extension even offers to delete any empty albums you may have accidentally created over on Picasa previously.

After selecting the photos, it's just one click of the "upload button" to get the process started. The export process goes pretty quickly, we found, even if you have a large number of photos.

When the photo uploads are complete, these albums will be available to you in Google Plus (set to private by default). You can then share them with your Google Plus Circles, as you would any other album hosted on the site.

Thanks to Googler Eran Belinsky for the tip.

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?

Parr's reports, if accurate (Google has not responded to my request for a comment), are hardly surprising. The massive push around Google Plus seems to bring all the company's social elements under one site: mobile and video messaging (Huddle and Hangouts), relationship management (Circles), and photo-sharing (Picasa, soon to be Google Photos).

Bye Bye Blogger? Or Better Blog Integration?

Renaming Picasa clarifies the product's purpose; renaming Blogger, less so. Indeed, the report from Mashable seems to have set off quite a stir of nostalgia (in my Google Plus stream at least), as many of us have fond memories of the blogging platform from the earliest days of blogging's existence - whether we still use Google's blogging platform or not. Although many of us have moved on to other blogging tools - Tumblr or WordPress, for example - Blogger does remain one of the most-trafficked sites on the Web. For its part Google has been in the process of refreshing and updating the look to Blogger this year. However, removal of the Blogger brand would be a much bigger change than simply new templates.

Hopefully that change would also include integrating Blogger more fully into the Google Plus site, linking Blogger profiles with Google profiles and giving blog updates a prominent position. But that integration isn't something folks would like to see just with Blogger. Many early users of Google Plus are calling for the platform's integration with Google Docs and of course Google Apps accounts as well.

Rebranding Google

Those products, however, already fall into the Google naming convention. The other outlier, of course, when it comes to branding is YouTube. Parr says that Google has no plans to rebrand YouTube to Google Video (a good thing considering the fate of the actual Google Video earlier this year).

Bringing all the products into alignment with the same sort naming convention does help solidify the Google brand - search "plus" all these social, communication, and collaboration components. Whether or not this adds more fuel to the fire about supposed antitrust violations remains to be seen.

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

According to a FAQ on Picasa's support site, the photo-sharing service provides up to 1 GB of free storage for photos and videos to its users. But since Google+ actively encourages storing and sharing photos - its Android app even offers an "instant upload" option - there may have been some concern about storage limits among Picasa users.

As it turns out, there's nothing to worry about. If you're signed up for Google+, photos up to 2048x2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes long won't count towards this free storage limit. And Google will automatically resize photos for you when you upload them to Google+, so they stay under the free size limit.

That means only photos uploaded directly to Picasa Web Albums over the 2048x2048 size will count towards the 1 GB of free storage, explains Google. And when that limit is reached, photos will be automatically resized.

Meanwhile, for non-Google+ users, there are slightly stricter rules: photos up to 800x800 and videos up to 15 minutes won't count towards free storage. Again, when the 1 GB limit is reached, larger photos will be resized down.

Simply put, this means that whether you're on Google+ or not, Picasa offers unlimited free storage for photos and videos (under 15 minutes). The difference is that Google+ users can upload higher resolution photos to Plus/Picasa without being penalized.

Photo Tagging, Too!

There are a few other integrations between Google Plus and Picasa to take note of as well, for example, photo tagging.

This very Facebook-like feature lets anyone in your extended network in Google+ tag people in your public photos.  The person tagged is given the option to view the album and share it. If you've been tagged by someone in your Circles, the tag is automatically approved. You can remove tags on the photos homepage in Google+ or the Photos tab on your Google Profile. And if you would rather have more control, you can adjust this setting to enable manual approval of tags.

For those who were already using tagging in Picasa previously, all existing name tags in Picasa remain when you join Google+.

Additional source, re: storage - Ryo Cook, via Google Plus, of course; Above photo - it's never too early to be tagged, right Josie?

The integration between the two services is seamless, though Picnik's design is clearly different from Picasa's and quite a few users will probably think that they've arrived on a non-Google site. As Jonathan Sposata, the product manager for Google Photos and Picnik's original founder told us yesterday, this was a conscious decision on Google's part. Just like YouTube and a few other Google properties, Picnik will retain its original branding. Google is also keeping Picnik's fee structure intact. Picasa should automatically recognize if a Picnik user has a paid or free account.

Google didn't add any new features to Picnik. Instead, Sposata told us, most of the work over the last few months went into migrating Picnik's back-end (which ran on a combination of Picnik's own servers and Amazon's S3 storage service) to Google's infrastructure.

What About Picasa on the Desktop?

Overall, this is a welcome addition to the online version of Picasa, as it enables users to perform relatively complex image editing functions right in the browser. Interestingly, though, there is now a very clear mismatch between the editing functions in the Picasa desktop client and the online version. Chances are that Google will soon rectify this situation. As Sposata told us, today's announcement is just "the first sign of many wonderful things to come." Judging from our discussion with Google, bringing more of Picnik's tools to more Google properties in the near future is definitely one of the team's current priorities.

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?

Over on The Next Web, blogger Alex Wilhelm thinks the increased storage space hints at Google's future plans with their upcoming netbook operating system, Google Chrome OS. We have to admit, the same thought occurred to us as well. After all, netbooks don't typically have the same hard disk space as their larger, less totable counterparts. However, that's not always the case these days given the new middle-of-the-road offerings like the HP Mini 311, for example, which falls somewhere between an ultra-portable netbook and full-sized notebook with its 350 GB hard drive option.

But Alex has a point: by providing this type of cloud storage solution, netbooks can remain basic machines which are smaller and cost less. That would pave the way for the Google Chrome OS line of netbooks to be even more affordable devices than what's on the market today since they wouldn't need to come equipped with large hard drives.

Obviously, an OS-integrated cloud storage system of this nature would be a natural fit for Google's cloud operating system designed specifically for netbooks. And yet, it still seems to be an incomplete offering at this time.

But Still So Limited!

As much as we want to believe that the new changes are a sign of Google's plans for Chrome OS, it's just as possible that they're nothing more than the great discounts they appear to be. There's nothing all that new being introduced here - just better rates and more available space.

Sadly, the core storage offering itself is unchanged. It's still very limited, only encompassing Gmail and Picasa photos. What about the rest of our files - like the ones stored in Google Docs? What about our music and movie collections? What about the hundred or so of home videos we can't bear to delete from our hard drives? Google has no centralized solution for any of this yet. And many are beginning to wonder if they ever will.

In the tech community, there have been rumors about an all-encompassing online storage service called GDrive for years on end now, and yet, nothing has ever come of it. According to speculation (and wishful thinking), the supposed system would allow for the upload of all types of files and would tie together all of Google's services.

In our imaginations, we envision a dashboard that links us to our online Google Docs, our photos, our Gmail, our Google Sites, and our multimedia content. The GDrive of our dreams would be accessible from any computer, keeping in sync all our user data, preferences, and settings. You can see a hint of how this sync could work with the way the Google Chrome web browser stores your favorites. Your bookmarked sites are now available in the browser no matter what PC you use while a backup copy sits in Google Docs. GDrive should do the same, but not just for web browser favorites - for everything. That would be the final step for making a cloud OS a reality.

It's almost strange at this point that Google hasn't released something of the sort yet. In fact, they've let Microsoft beat them to the punch in this instance courtesy of Microsoft's SkyDrive service which launched back in early 2008. SkyDrive offers a free 25 GB of online storage for your files and also serves as the central repository for Windows Live Photos as well as the documents created via the new Office Web Applications service, Microsoft's challenge to Google Docs. But where's Google's answer to this? When will it come? Will it ever?

Perhaps the company is waiting for the release of Google Chrome OS to dazzle us with some sort of revamped interface for a game-changing cloud computing operating system. Or perhaps the company is just doing what it does best: offering solutions that are simply good enough.

In the same way that Picasa web albums offer facial recognition and tagging, Picasa 3.5 automatically scans all of your photos and groups similar faces together. From there users can add names to their photos in bulk and upload them to their web albums. One of the interesting features of this program is that names auto-complete from a user's Google contacts. While services like Face.com offer facial recognition-based tagging on Facebook, the Picasa 3.5 desktop software allows users to organize friends and groups of friends with a simple offline hard drive scan. After a couple minutes of scanning you can create name-based collages, slideshows and geo-tagged albums. The bottom line is, if you're going to get tipsy at a bachelor party, you better hope your friends have the good sense to uncheck those photos before they start uploading your Coyote Ugly bar dance antics to the wedding slideshow.

Other new features include drag and drop geo-tagging over a Google map and simultaneous uploading and sharing. In the past, photo uploaders have had to go through the additional act of selecting specific contacts to share albums. Now users can alert their contacts to an album as it's going up. Your coworkers and family may get an eyeful. At this point, facial recognition software and batch tagging is making it tougher to put on the facade of being a respectable human being. It looks like underground speakeasys are about to see a resurgence. To download the new Picasa visit Picasa.google.com.

In order to choose contributors, Picasa lets you access your Google contacts, and you can invite individual contacts or groups that you have already set up in Google Contacts (think: co-workers, family, etc.).

Sadly, you won't be able to use the Picasa desktop software to upload images to these albums if you are an invited contributor - only the actual owner of the album can. Also, if you use Internet Explorer, you can only upload five photos at a time.

We do like the idea of these features. But in a way, these features are walking a line that Gmail has carefully been avoiding in directly marking up the information inside an email. Of course, we realize these features are optional and that Google already mines email contained within Gmail for keywords to power their contextually-sensitive ads, but these tools go a step further and modify the content of the message.

We would also like to note that the enhanced content is not in the printable view, so if you were thinking you could quickly print out that email with the attached Yelp review, you will find the additional content isn't there. That said, these features are fun and are another stepping stone for Labs in their continuing quest to find ways of constructively enhancing the Gmail experience.

Declining Traffic from MySpace

Last July, Photobucket still got 54% of its traffic from MySpace, but last month, that number had declined to 38%. In the U.S., MySpace has now been surpassed by Facebook as the most popular social network and given how strongly Photobucket is tied to the fortunes of MySpace, we can only assume that this negative trend will continue for Photobucket.

According to Hitwise, neither Flickr nor Google's Picasa (the number two and three in the market) get more than 6% of their traffic from social networks - instead, these services tend to rely more on traffic from search engines.

Google's desktop photo-managing software has always been a great product, and the newest version, which was released on Tuesday, builds on the success of its predecessors.

The overall layout has not changed, but Google has added a large number of interesting new features in this release.

You can now easily sync albums between your desktop and Picasa's online albums. Any change you make on the desktop will be reflected online. However, this does not work the other way round, which limits the usefulness of this feature quite a bit.

Among the other new features are the ability to add text to your photos, retouch photos, create collages, upload movies to YouTube, and create movies based on your photos, videos, and music.

One other neat feature is that the cropping tool now automatically tries to find the best places to start cropping in a picture.

Picasa Web Albums

We were a bit skeptical when Google first announced the face recognition feature, but in our tests, it actually performed quite well. Part of this might have to do with the fact that Google did not get too ambitious and left a lot of manual work to the users. While Picasa recognizes that a face is present and will group similar faces together, it leaves the final approval of the tags to the user, though Picasa will make an educated guess about whose face it is seeing. Because of this, there is less of a chance of making a mistake, but it also means more work for the user.

While the face recognition feature is definitely the splashiest addition to Picasaweb in this this new release, Google also added a lot of other new features to the web gallery. These updates include Creative Commons rights management, an Explore page that showcases some of the best public pictures, and the ability to upload photos by email.

Chasing Down the Competition

Of course, a lot of these new features besides the face recognition have already been standard in a lot of other online photo albums and these updates mostly make it seem as if Google is trying to get its feature set up to par with Yahoo's Flickr. Especially the 'Explore' page would not look out of place there.

For Picasa's Web Albums to really become popular, though, Google will have to increase the amount of space it is giving its users on the service. Right now, you only get 1GB of space for photos, which is simply not enough. You can buy more space from Google, but every other service offer more space or uses a monthly bandwidth limit instead of putting a hard limit on storage.

Google is not the first company to add face recognition to online photo albums. Riya, when it first launched, made face recognition its central feature, but Riya's implementation, while interesting, made too many mistakes in the face recognition to be successful. Most users quickly abandoned the site after the early hype and Riya was forced to change its business model. To be successful, Google's face recognition will have to be a lot more precise than Riya's algorithms.

Picasa Update

The updates to the Picasa desktop software are interesting, but not revolutionary. Two features stand out, though. The movie maker mode will allow users to create videos of their slide shows and upload them to YouTube. The online synchronization feature will keep galleries in the desktop client in synch with the web albums. Sadly, though, this synchronization only seems to work from PC to web and not vice versa, making this potentially great feature just a bit less useful.

Competition

It's good to see that Google is showing some drive to innovate in the online photo album market. Flickr, as Stephen Shankland points out, has been slow to add new features, and Picasa itself has not exactly been the most exciting place to store pictures. If Google can make the face recognition work, it will have at least one great feature that will set it apart from its competition.

Hello, which was part of Google's 2004 acquisition of Picasa, seems to have been neglected in recent years. According to Compete, Hello's traffic has fallen by over 50% year-over-year, and Wikipedia says that Hello shut down its "Bloggerbot IM" service in favor of Picasa's "Blog This" function in 2006.

The Hello team encourages users to use Picasa, Picasa Web Albums, and Google Talk, and it seems likely that redundancy is what killed Hello. Google Talk already has file sharing and Picasa albums are viewable within the chat client (though Google Talk doesn't encrypt files and chats the way Hello did). Could we see tighter integration between Picasa and Google Talk now that Hello is out of the picture? And more importantly, what will Google do with such a cool domain?

Within your ubuket, you can create playlists of your media. To include media from the online services, you first enter in your credentials and then look for the "Action" button next to your files. With one click, you can add the file to a list or send the file to your friends.

The Ubuket Player

What's nice about the ubuket service is that it's accessible (or soon to be accessible) in so many different ways. There is an Adobe AIR app (download link) for running it on your desktop, Songbird users will soon be able to utilize a plugin to upload music from their library, iPhone and iPod Touch users can access ubuket from iphone.ubuket.com, and the app is available as an application on Facebook and Bebo. Your ubuket can also be embedded on any web site or blog. Sometime in April an iTunes plugin will arrive, as will apps for Hi5 and MySpace. By May, an Orkut app will be available and you'll be able to access ubuket from other, non-Apple mobile devices.

That being said, I had some issues when I tried ubuket this morning - initially my photos didn't upload, giving me a red circle - the sign of a failed upload, but on a second try the upload succeeded. Also, clicking on the "Home" button didn't seem to do anything in some cases, an accidental click on "Login" required logging in again (it didn't remember me), and overall, the Flash-based widget seemed a little clunky. However, the service is new and still being developed, so it may be worth waiting and seeing what comes of it. I like the idea of a centralized place for online media - especially one that would be accessible from my mobile phone and from facebook. But whether ubuket becomes anything more than a glorified widget is yet to be seen.