14 DAY TRIAL // The Picasa team is making a small but welcomed change to the way Picasa Web Albums handles geo-tagged photos. Until now, you had to option to either show your visitors the location of all geo-tagged photos or none. Now, Picasa is enabling users to customize access at the album level.
"For some of you, many of your memories are based around a place. It could be a cherished family cabin, an iconic landmark or a trip to an exotic locale," Ping Chen, Software Engineer at Google, writes.
"In Picasa Web Albums, you can leverage the GPS technology built into many cameras and mobile phones to tag where your images were taken," he adds.
"Until today, you could manage the visibility of geographical information at the account level - you chose whether to display location information for your entire account. Now, you can control whether or not to include location information for each individual album rather than at the account level," he announced.
It's not a huge change, but it should make a lot of difference in the way geo-location features are used in Picasa. Faced with the option of either enabling visitors to see where every geo-tagged photo was taken, or none of them, plenty of users would choose the latter.
While allowing others to see where some photos were taken is great, some you may want to keep to yourself, though still share the pic.
Now, you can specify for each album whether location information is displayed or not. What's more, by default, geo-location data is not displayed for an album, you have to specifically opt-in.
While it's a small feature, it's nice to see that Picasa is getting at least a modicum of attention. Very recently, Web Albums enabled secured HTTPS connections by default, after introducing support last month. Also last month, Picasa introduced a new, more complete, EXIF data page and a new zoom viewer.