14 DAY TRIAL // Recently, YouTube unveiled a new privacy setting which enabled users to keep their videos out of sight but make them accessible to those that knew where to look. Now Google is doing the same with Picasa, its photo-sharing service. The site has quietly introduced a new feature to allow users to share their albums to a group of people while not making them available to the wider web. The “unlisted gallery” feature provides an unique URL which can be shared with friends to provide access to all of your unlisted albums on Picasa Web.
“Your unlisted gallery displays all of your public and unlisted albums. Albums set to the most private visibility setting - 'Sign-in required to view' - will not be displayed unless the person viewing is included on an individual album's 'Shared with' list,” Google’s help page on the feature read.
“Your unlisted gallery has an authorization key in the web address; this key is a combination of letters and numbers which makes the web address very difficult to guess. You can manually generate a new authorization key at any time for your unlisted gallery. A new key is useful if more people than intended are viewing your unlisted gallery,” the entry explained.
When you visit your online Picasa gallery you’ll see a link to Unlisted Gallery. This link will allow access to almost all of your albums, depending on your privacy settings. Contrary to the name, this includes all of your public albums as well as unlisted ones. However, it does not include albums which have been specifically set to a higher privacy level which only allows access to users which have been added to a ‘whitelist.’
Picasa users have been able to share unlisted albums or photos one by one, but now they can share their entire gallery with just one link. This does come with more risk for the users, but they can reset the link at any time if they want to prevent some that may have acquired it from seeing their albums. [via Google OS]