Google Is Showcasing the European Winners of the Picasa Photo Challenge

Google’s Picasa photo sharing service may seen as more of a place to store your vacation albums than to showcase your latest photographic masterpiece, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t great works to be found on the site. The Picasa team is working to dispel this notion and has recently held a competition asking Picasa users from several European nations to highlight the beautiful architecture of their country.

“On a recent visit to Europe, we were so impressed with the architectural variety of the historical and contemporary buildings there that we were inspired to host the first Picasa Photo Challenge in Europe. We invited Dutch, French, German, Polish and Spanish communities to show off their best photo of architecture,” Christina Lin, Picasa Forum Guide, wrote.

“Our Picasa community in Europe impressed and delighted us all. Unfortunately we could only choose one winner for each language group. The most ‘liked’ picture won the challenge and they are proudly featured on our Featured Photos page,” she added.

The winners for each country have now been determined, by a very democratic process, counting the number of ‘likes’ each entry received. Picasa kept the entries separated by country, to ensure that no one was favored just because of the size of the country or the larger number of Picasa users there. Granted, there number of ‘votes’ was hardly overwhelming, but the competition was more of a community building event.

The five winners, one for each country, were featured by the Picasa team and you can check out the photos below as well. You wouldn’t know it by the number of ‘likes’ each got, but the quality of the entries is clearly very high, so maybe the ‘like’ button is just not that popular on the site.



Picasa for Windows is available for download here.
Picasa for Linux is available for download here.
Picasa for Mac is available for download here.