Picasa quietly introduced a new zoom tool for Web Albums. The new Flash-based viewer takes up the whole screen and enables you to zoom in and out of an image. This is different from the regular full-screen viewer which doesn't have any zoom options. A new dedicated page for EXIF data has also been introduced which lists all of the metadata available for a particular photo.
The new zoom viewer, which the Google Operating System blog
calls "microscope zoom," enables you to check out the finer details of a Picasa photo. You can zoom in pretty deep, it looks like you can view the photos at their actual size, even for the large ones.
It's also fairly responsive, though there seems a slight delay when changing zoom levels. In terms of functionality it's pretty bare bones, you can zoom in and out and that's it.
It may need some polishing yet, for example when changing the size of the browser window the overlay doesn't adjust to the new size.
Judging by the fact that the version number is displayed in the right-click menu, this seems like an early release. Overall though it offers a solid experience.
It's interesting to note that Google chose Flash over the standard web technologies it normally opts for. Google and Adobe have been very friendly with each other this year, but, most likely, the choice was a technical one.
A new EXIF data page was also introduced. Clicking on the "full details page" link will open up a new page with all of the EXIF metadata available for the photo.
Some details are displayed alongside the images, things like size, camera maker, aperture and so on, but the dedicated page goes beyond this with data such as white balance, metering mode and anything else the particular camera or image editing software included in the EXIF tags.
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