14 DAY TRIAL // The upcoming Vancouver Winter Olympics have sports fans buzzing with excitement now that the start of the competition is just two days away. Google seems to be catching the bug as well, and is dedicating quite a lot of energy to provide fans with all the resources they need. To make sure you don't miss out on any of the action, Google has also set up a dedicated Picasa gallery to house the best photos of the events from regular folks but also professional photographers and official sources from Google News.
"While thousands of lucky fans get to experience the excitement of the Games live and in person, most of us will only be able to watch from afar. This year, we've created a special Picasa Web Albums gallery so people around the world can get a front row seat to all the action," Ping Chen, software engineer at Google, wrote.
"Whether you're at home or in Vancouver, you can peruse the best user-submitted photos of the Games from Picasa and recent photos from Google News. Click any user-submitted photo to see the full screen version or check out other photos from the album," he added.
Google will be spotlighting the best photos, it couldn't possibly list all the public photos from the Olympics as they are bound to be quite a few, but if you want a chance to have your pic seen by the entire world, there's only a couple of things you need to know.
You don't need to upload the photos to a special location, submit them to Google or anything of this sort. Just upload your photos to the Picasa Web Gallery, like you normally would, but don't forget to tag them with "wintergames2010" and make them public. Google takes care of the rest, it automatically detects the photos and the best ones will be featured in the gallery. If you're uploading from a mobile phone just use "wintergames2010" as the email subject.
There's plenty to see on Google from the 2010 Winter Olympics. All the competition venues are modeled in 3D in Google Earth, and you can check them out in Street View as well, Google even sent a snowmobile out there for the job. For everything regarding the games on Google, you can check out the special page, www.google.com/games10.