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.

We spend some time testing out the service this morning and came away impressed with the capabilities of Share Sites. Most of the sites functions are accessible even for novice users. Share Sites comes with a very wide range of templates for various special occasions, most of which are actually pretty well designed. Users also can decide to make a site public, only accessible to invited members, or to simply password protect them.

While Shutterfly announces the service to its users as a way to "create a custom website for sharing," Share Sites are really fully featured photo blogs, with comments, polls, RSS feeds, and even the ability to download an OPML file with feeds for your various photo galleries. For those who want to photoblog on the go, Shutterfly provides you with an email address to send your pictures to. You can also embed YouTube videos, though the embedded Google and Yahoo video search for finding those videos didn't yet work during out tests.

Competition

With Share Sites, Shutterfly is obviously competing with Flickr, Google's Picasaweb, and Photobucket, but its real competition includes Kodak and HP's Snapfish, as Shutterfly's business model revolves around making money from physical prints (most of Shutterfly's employees actually work in its printing plant). Indeed, most photo sharing sites rely on Snapfish or Shutterfly to fulfill their printing orders.

Out of the Silo

What is most important about Share Sites, though, is that it provides mainstream users an easily accessible entryway to the sharing and commenting culture of the modern web. In the near future, as the New York Times reports, users will also be able to embed their pictures on any blog or social network.

Though it allowed for sharing, Shuttefly's old system was mostly a closed off silo. However, adding these photoblogging features makes a lot of sense for Shutterfly. After all, the more people you share your photos with, the more people are likely to want prints of them.

At first glance, ScrnShots appears to be a takeoff on sites like FFFFOUND! or We Heart It (our coverage). Those sites let you "favorite" pictures from the web as inspiring, interesting, artistic, and so on. ScrnShots takes it a step further, encouraging you to take a screenshot of the image and then upload it to their service.

Once uploaded, you can tag the screenshot, add a description, and notate the URL from which it came. The screenshot is then available for others to find and use on their own site via an embed code. For example, here's a screenshot I took of a Twitter review site, microrevie.ws:

A Sample Embedded Screenshot

For that screenshot, I used the thumbnail-sized embed code, but there was also an embed code for the full-screen version as well as a medium-sized version, which is the one that displays by default when you go to view a particular screenshot's page.

Grabbing the embed code was as simple as copy-and-paste, but I initially thought that the embed code feature wasn't working yet because, when looking at the embed code on the page, it showed only a truncated portion of the embed code's URL. (See below). However, after copying-and-pasting, through some sort of technological magic, the entire embed code appeared.

The Embed Codes

There is also a blog widget available from ScrnShots which allows you to paste a widgetized version of a screenshot or screenshots onto your own site or social network profile. The widget comes in small or medium size and can be configured to display anywhere from one to ten of your most recent screenshots. Feeds for each user's recent screenshots and favorite screenshots are available as well.

The ScrnShots web site is well-designed and easy to use. However, the one thing it lacks is some sort of upload tool. As it is right now, screenshots have to be uploaded one-by-one, a tedious process that simply takes to long for anyone to become a heavy user of the service. That could be by design though, since they are still in private beta and may not be ready for massive uploads of photos just yet.

When it comes to their business model, ScrnShots is taking a page from flickr's book.  At launch the site will be free with unlimited uploads, and, on June 6th, the PRO service will begin. With a PRO account, you can continue to upload unlimited screenshots and mark them as private, where they can only be shared with specific people you designate. Basic account owners can continue to use the service for free, but will have a monthly cap on uploads.

ScrnShots vs Flickr

ScrnShots will certainly appeal to the design community, who may want to use it to share images with each other, but it seems odd to focus on just that niche when there is an untapped potential to become the main site where bloggers can share and store screenshots with each other. As a blogger myself, I know that I have a whole folder of screenshots taking up space on my computer. They aren't worthy of of the gig of storage they consume and they aren't important enough for me to bother uploading to flickr, yet I haven't deleted any of them just in case I need to reuse one at some point. Having a site where I could offload them would be incredibly handy.

Inspirational Designs of Shots of Web Sites?

In addition, flickr, being the big sharing site for photographers, is filled with photos with varying levels of copyright. Some you can use, some you can't, some you can if you link to a URL and give the photographers name, etc. On flickr, there are some people don't care if you use their image, but there are many others who think that it's worthy of link to their web site if you do so.

Personally (and I think many bloggers would agree with me on this), I don't think taking a screenshot of a web site or logo represents any special effort on my part, so I would have no problem uploading all my screenshots to a service like ScrnShots for others to use. And as a blogger, having a site filled with publicly available screenshots for use, worry-free, would be a great resource.