Picasa Web Albums

Well what do you know... what with all my recent work with client-side scripting and then today's look at Mauvesoft Gallery and scanning for photos, I was just thinking about an AJAX-powered web-based Picasa clone when I stumbled across Google's Picasa Web Albums, which I hadn't seen before.

I've uploaded a few photos to it, and it's OK I suppose, but it's not as developed as some of the other Google webapps: it's just a basic web gallery. It's better than Gallery (Capital G) because Gallery is a mess these days. Gallery 2.0 is hugely bloated, and for all that bloat it isn't very much more powerful and certainly not as easy to use as Picasa Web albums.

Still, I think Mauvesoft Gallery is a fairly good web gallery core, and it's simple and hackable enough that I could probably rig up some AJAX over the top quite easily. It would certainly make for an easy-to-use administration interface, but I was thinking more of the on-the-fly searching, and Picasa's wonderful 'Timeline' feature. I wonder whether the publishing to the world of photos is the main aim when people use web galleries, or is it that they just want access to all their photos wherever they are? (Or a third option: my brother, on holiday, uploads photos from Internet Cafes so that he can delete them from his camera to free up space.)

A fork of Mauvesoft Gallery is used to power the ImageChooser component in my e-Commerce software, and that is desperate for some attention. The UI is appalling at the moment. Perhaps I'll download Dojo and see if that can speed up the development.