Crave

It's a match made in heaven: the Eye-Fi card and Google's Picasa.

(Credit: Eye-Fi)

About a month ago, Google made some serious price cuts to its Picasa Web photo-storage service. For example, a mere $5 per year now buys you 20GB of online storage.

In other news, Eye-Fi memory cards are really cool. They wirelessly upload photos from your camera to your PC OR online storage service of choice--like, say, Picasa.

Right now, if you sign up for a 200GB Picasa account for $50, you'll get a 4GB Eye-Fi Home card for free.

That card, which works in most digital cameras, normally sells for $69.99, so here's another way to look at the deal: Buy a 4GB Eye-Fi Home for $50, and get 200GB of Picasa storage for free.

Either way, I think it's a smokin' offer. Picasa effectively gives you an online backup of your entire photo library, along with basic slideshow, sharing, and print services.

I'm also an Eye-Fi fan, as manually copying photos from card to PC--and then PC to Web service--is a huge hassle. This is a great gift item, in my opinion.

This is a while-supplies-last offer, and I suspect it'll sell out quickly. So grab it while you can!

Backup deal: If you've been eyeballing "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" (and what avid gamer hasn't?) but unable to stomach the $60 price tag, the Microsoft Store has it for just $41.99 shipped. That's the lowest price I've seen anywhere.

(Credit: Masa Fukata, Panasonic)

Watch your latest YouTube creation, show the photo album of your trip to Thailand, and then check in to see how far your Yahoo stock has tanked--all without leaving your couch or using an external box (e.g. Apple TV). That's Panasonic's new Viera Cast system in a nutshell--just don't expect an ideal experience with this first generation technology.

Available on the high-end TH-46PZ850U and TH-50PZ850U plasma televisions, Panasonic's Viera Cast system isn't exactly the first of its kind--Sony's Bravia Internet Link and HP's MediaSmart TVs, and Samsung's A650 line all offer varying degrees of online connectivity and/or digital media access. The concept, however, is as old as Microsoft's attempt to bring the Internet into the family room with WebTV. Unlike Microsoft's old external box, Panasonic has its web features built into the television itself. Like Apple TV or Roku's Netflix Player, don't expect to use a mouse or keyboard. Navigating through several YouTube videos is done with the standard thumb pad on the remote. If you find using the system menu on most televisions cumbersome, like we do, don't expect any difference with Viera Cast.

The display itself is set in a grid pattern: YouTube on the right; Picasa on the left; and on the bottom, Bloomberg News reports. Above that, in the right hand corner, is a banner for Panasonic's concierge service (currently inactive)--Panasonic's repair service that may include a live chat module in the future. We have to give credit for Panasonic's slick navigation design: windows slide in and out (similar to the Xbox 360's menu) with a relatively quick response time. We did, however, notice some occasional lag when retrieving our Picasa photo albums, which we intend to test more thoroughly in the future.

Of course, you'll need to enter your account information to access most of these features; you can't see your Picasa photos without entering your account name and password, for instance. It's enough of a chore to enter the information using a standard remote and onscreen keypad, but the fact that it doesn't retain those settings is unforgivable (yes, powering off the TV wipes the info). If you do want to show that photo album of your latest trip to Thailand to family and friends, expect a lot of weary expressions by the time you punch in your letters and numbers.

Once you do open up a photo album and begin the slide show, we recommend that you push down on the mute button. That's because there's no way to change the music for the Picasa slideshows--and after hearing the folksy, new-age instrumental music loop for three hours, we imagine a lot of people would agree. It would have been nice if Panasonic provided an option to include your own music collection, or at least a more varied playlist to change things up a little.

On the plus side, rather than pulling up Weather.com from your browser or waiting for the forecast to appear on the weather channel, simply press the Viera Cast button and view today's forecast--a necessary feature if you're rushing to work in the morning. The same goes for your stocks and business headlines from Bloomberg. There are two boxes available displaying "Coming Soon," so we envision that future content from other content providers could be included (no word on whether--or if--this will be happening, though). And, because the television is connected to the Internet, it'll be easy for Panasonic to update both its firmware and content. Stay tuned for a full review.

YouTube and Picasa services are available right from the TV in Panasonic's flagship TH-PZ850U.

(Credit: Masa Fukata, Panasonic)

We detailed Panasonic's full plasma lineup earlier this year, but having just returned from a press event devoted to the flagship TH-PZ850U series, it feels incumbent to reiterate some of the cool new features of these expensive sets.

The coolest? A demo at the event proved that the 850Us can stream YouTube videos, right on the TV screen with no PC required. The TV's "Viera Cast" interface allows you to search YouTube by keyword, sort videos by popularity, or access your own list of favorite videos, for example. During the demo we were treated to a video of a laughing baby, the (no-surprise) current champ of the popularity list. According to Panasonic, the entire catalog of YouTube videos is available on the TV, although it may take a day or two for a new one on the site to appear on Viera Cast. The TV can also access Picasa, Google's photo sharing site, so you can view digital photos stored at your (or someone else's) Picasa account directly on the big screen.

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I was in a pinch a few weeks ago, and Google's Picasa software saved my skin. But now my warm glow of gratitude has begun wearing off, replaced by a simmering annoyance with camera makers for their profusion of proprietary raw formats.

Let me explain. I was covering the Photo Marketing Association trade show in Las Vegas, toting my Canon EOS Rebel XT camera to photograph products and people. For my personal photography I usually shoot in raw format to maximize the detail and flexibility, but for work purposes I use JPEG because it's faster to process and CNET News.com graphics are too small to require top resolution.

This screenshot shows a raw image from an Olympus E-3 SLR in Google's Picasa software. At right is the low-resolution JPEG preview, at left the garbled view after an incorrect decoding Google's support for the E-3 is on the way.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

But I had a brief moment of panic when I discovered, on a tight deadline, that I'd photographed a Sony full-frame SLR press conference and accompanying photo gallery in raw only. I wasn't happy, because I hadn't installed any software for processing raw images on my laptop. I briefly considered downloading a trial version of Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom, which I use at home, but dreaded the time it would take to get myself to a network connection and install the software.

Then I remembered that Picasa supports some raw formats. Sure enough, it did the trick--after I made my usual end run around Canon, which annoyingly doesn't include a mass storage driver on its cameras, requiring me to retrieve raw files using a separate flash card reader.

Picasa lacked some editing tools I like in Lightroom (and now Apple's Aperture 2.0, too), but I wasn't about to complain.

Until Wednesday.

That's when I received an Olympus E-3 that I'll be testing on an upcoming vacation. The camera has been out since November, but Picasa still doesn't support its raw images.

Raw-support challenges
Picasa showed the low-resolution JPEG preview fine, but as soon as I clicked on the thumbnail, the photo became a speckly mess of pixel gibberish.

For its part, Google said Thursday that E-3 raw support is coming. "We're in the process of testing it and plan to support it soon," the company said in a statement. Picasa uses Dave Coffin's freely available dcraw software, which supports the E-3, but Google said it makes its own modifications "to make it run faster."

It's no surprise Google employs outside software for the complicated task. Olympus told me it leaves programmers on their own to reverse-engineer raw formats: "When asked, we will provide sample raw files to companies, but it is up to them to figure out what to do with them. Our raw format is not difficult, and anyone with any experience with graphic file formats will figure it out in a matter of seconds."

For photographers, there are unpleasant consequences of camera makers' opacity and non-standardization. Programmers from Adobe Systems, Apple, and other companies must toil constantly to support new cameras, and camera makers must develop and support their own software. And the obstreperous nature of raw can curtail the innovation of other programmers, too.

For example, software that can embed location data known as geotags in raw files is much rarer than software that supports JPEGs. Adding metadata such as titles, captions, ratings, and tags is another risky operation; Microsoft Vista can do this, but relies on camera makers to supply software to support their various raw formats.

A programmer's plight
Sachin Garg, a programmer in India, is another example. He's been working on software that can compress raw files more efficiently--about 20 percent to 60 percent more than those already compressed by the camera.

Programmer Sachin Garg

(Credit: Sachin Garg)

That's work that conceivably could be useful for those of us with vast archives of raw images, but Garg said the difficulties of working with raw files makes it tough.

"I have started with Nikon's NEF (raw format), and it's a mess. What makes it worse is that even for this single format, there are variations based on each camera, and camera's firmware version," Garg said. "I have managed to read and compress the file, but re-creating the original file again is giving me nightmares."

And that's just one popular format. There are also cameras from Canon, Olympus, Fujifilm, Pentax, Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Hasselblad, and others to contend with.

"It's a much different ball game to write an algorithm (than just) trying to put it in a practically usable application," Garg said. He understands the camera makers' situation, though. "Looking at each format, one can see the technical reasons why different camera makers are doing things differently and that adopting a common standard can possibly limit the innovations they introduce in newer cameras."

One possible alternative to the raw plight could be HD Photo, which Microsoft is trying to standardize as JPEG XR, a higher-end alternative to conventional JPEG. My guess is that this file format stands a reasonable chance of catching on--especially given the warm response from Adobe and more recently Canon--but even then it's more likely only to intercept photographers just moving beyond JPEG rather than replacing raw.

That's because HD Photo/JPEG XR requires the camera to process the image for de-mosaicking, noise reduction, sharpening, and white balance, all of which are "baked" into the image. For the folks who want total flexibility, they'll stick with raw.

DNG to the rescue?
A more likely alternative is Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) format, a raw format whose specifications are openly shared if not a neutral industry standard. Adobe explicitly created DNG to deal with the raw format "tower of Babel."

But larger camera makers have been reluctant to embrace DNG. It's hard to get firm answers on exactly why not; I'd imagine a variety of factors are involved, ranging from not wanting to be reliant on Adobe or a fixed format to inadequacies of DNG to fully represent raw images. And Pentax, whose SLRs support both DNG and its own PEF raw format, told me that most customers shooting raw use PEF, so users apparently need more convincing, too.

Maybe Adobe just needs to do a little more marketing, standardize DNG, or come up with an improved version 2.0. But for now, the raw format mess shows no signs of being tidied up.

Photo-sharing and -storage sites Picasa Web (click for Picasa's PC download) and Photobucket announced new mobile interfaces this week. While m.photobucket.com and picasaweb.google.com/mobile (or via Google's new mobile interface: mobile.google.com) grant access to online albums from any mobile browser, the interface on iPhone's full Safari browser is still a special case. iPhone's large, sharp screen is ideal for viewing slide shows, but bars users from directly uploading iPhone photos to Web sites.

While this essentially leaves Picasa handcuffed as a mobile photo viewer, Photobucket's site provides an account-linked e-mail address for users to send photos that are then pushed to their Photobucket accounts. It's a decent roundabout uploading technique that's legal under warranty, until Apple enables direct photo and video uploading.

Both Picasa and Photobucket for iPhone display personal albums and search fields for seeking out public photos from each sites' larger community. Photobucket throws in a few suggested search items on the log-in page, like all photos tagged "glitter," but has a clumsier linear display that won't produce iPhone slide shows and fails to resize when flipped horizontally. Picasa's more polished interface offers a much cleaner user experience that also makes better use of the iPhone's dimensions, passes the "iPhone flip" test, and also provides a quick link to Google's other mobile services, like Google Reader, the calendar, and Gmail.

If Google's Picasa were to adopt a photo-upload workaround, it would easily be superior to Photobucket, whose full version already outstrips Picasa Web in features that include video uploads and wide distribution options. However, Picasa users who don't mind uploading iPhone images via their PC will enjoy the flexible viewing that mimics iPhone's native photo-viewing.

Related stories:
Photobucket goes mobile, launches pocket-friendly site
Photo tour: The Google booth at Macworld

Readers of this blog will have inferred I'm a fan of geotagging--in fact, I'm trying to label all my photos with the tags that show where the picture was taken, even though the geotagging process is complicated.

I'm betting that much of the value of geotagging lies in the future, for example, when I might have a harder time remembering which hike a particular picture came from. But can anything useful be done with those geotagged photos today?

Based on my scrutiny of a handful of sites--Google's Picasa, Yahoo's Flickr, SmugMug (the only fee-required site), Locr, and Everytrail--the answer is yes.

Google's Picasa site can show a map sprinkled with thumbnails of a photo album's pictures.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

But as with other aspects of geotagging, today's cartographically clever Web sites are likely to appeal chiefly to enthusiasts who have some patience and technical abilities. Just like we're not at the stage where most cameras can add a location stamp as easily as they can add a timestamp, we're not yet at the stage where most folks are going to start with an online map when they want to share their photos or reminisce.

Collectively, the sites I checked show the potential of geotagging--but also the rough spots. My top pick is Flickr, with Picasa and SmugMug tied for second place. But each site has different strengths and weaknesses, so look carefully before you make any commitments.

One of the main reasons I picked Flickr as tops is because the Flickr maps interface can sift data better. For example, you can see a high-level view of all your geotagged photos, and you can filter that view with parameters such as your photos, your friends' or contacts' photos, anyone's photos, and most important in my opinion, specific tags. That's a handy interface when trying to find photos of, say, Yosemite National Park, but you can't remember which of several trips a particular photo is associated with.

Flickr displays pictures as unevocative pink dots, but the photos themselves are shown on a strip below.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

In contrast, Picasa and SmugMug draw maps that only reflect the contents of a particular group of photos--called galleries at SmugMug, albums at Picasa, and sets at Flickr. (Google Maps can show Picasa images of a particular area to Google account holders who install a Mapplet application, though.)

Flickr also lets you take a set-based view of a map, with a scattering of pink dots representing your pictures. Indeed, it's probably the most likely way somebody might want to use a map to show off pictures of a recent trip, for example.

SmugMug, though, has what I found to be the slickest geotagging feature out there: fly-through slideshows of a gallery. With this ability, the site automatically shows a gallery's sequence of photos, displaying thumbnails along the way on a map and a red line connecting them.

It's a bit rough around the edges--I'm guessing because the technical difficulties of combining external Google Maps data with its own thumbnails--so it can be herky-jerky at times and with missing map elements. And for slideshows, thumbnails are hardly the best way to showcase sweeping vistas. But there's no question in my mind that the feature imparts a sense of traveling through a place, a sensation that regular slideshows completely lack.

Where Picasa has the edge over Flickr and SmugMug is in showing thumbnails of each image on the map, not just a dot or pushpin, which I like better even though thumbnails can get pretty crowded. It also shows larger pop-up versions than Flickr does. And for people who are geotagging their photos through the Web site, I think Picasa's interface is the best.

I also like the way Picasa, on an individual photo's page, includes a map showing where it was taken. But in part that's because there's a big panel of verbiage to the right of the screen on which that kind of real estate is available. A more photo-oriented site might not have that space to spare.

SmugMug lets you tour a gallery of photos on a map--a cool if still rough-around-the-edges feature.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Another major advantage of Flickr is its handling of location privacy--geoprivacy in Flickr parlance. Naturally you might not want to share with the world the location of your living room, and your pernickety aunt might be even touchier. Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield prohibited geotagging of images of a party at his house.

Happily, Flickr lets you set the geoprivacy of each image, though doing so is awkward. I'm glad the Organizr lets me change this setting, but why isn't there a geoprivacy option in a photo's privacy settings window or in the map that's shown when you click the photo?

There are some other options out there that deserve a look. Google's Panoramio has a reasonable approach to virtual tourism if not necessarily the best interface for storing your photos--it seems like a ripe candidate for some integration with Picasa.

Loc.alize.us likewise is an entertaining way to browse geotagged photos; it's a glitzy interface built on top of Flickr photos and Google Maps.

Like Panoramio, Locr, a German company, lets you upload your own photos. Like SmugMug, it's got a slideshow ability, though its photos are large and its map, a strip on the left edge with pushpin locations, is more an afterthought. That makes for a nicer slideshow than SmugMug's thumbnails, but there's not too much of a sense of place to it. And I can't help thinking when I see sites like Locr, though, that it must be tough building a critical mass of members when there are bigger photo-sharing sites already with major momentum.

For a journey-oriented site Everytrail lets people upload whole GPS track logs and label them with points of interest and photos. It's also got a handy feature that can show others' Panoramio pictures. It's a good way to look at trips people have taken in a particular area.

Locr shows individual photos fine, but doesn't handle groups with much aplomb.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

I found Everytrail's interface a bit difficult and unintuitive at times, but it does have the advantage of being able to piggyback on Flickr: I successfully imported my bike trip Flickr set into an Everytrail map--though the klunkiness of the process was evident by the fact that I have three copies of each photo, and I can't figure out how to get rid of the duplicates. Also, when I inadvertently uploaded the wrong day's track log for a batch of photos, I had a hard time figuring out my error.

In the months that I've been trying this out, though, geotagging has been improving. I'm certain that these sites will improve as geotagging photos in the first place gets easier, more people try it, and programmers hammer away at the computational and user-interface challenges.

Another area with potential is software to deal with geotagging on computers. Mostly that's limited today just to utilities to marry geographic data with image files. But the rudimentary geotagging support in Adobe Systems' Lightroom and Apple's Mac OS X 10.5, which both can show a photo's location on a map, is a harbinger of things to come. Better geotagging abilities on people's computers will fuel improvements on the Web and vice-versa

Correction: I updated the blog to correct a misspelling of Don MacAskill's name.

This is how SmugMug now looks on a 1280x1024-pixel monitor. It looks pretty good, unless you're the frog.

(Credit: SmugMug)

SmugMug, a site popular among photography aficionados, has been retooled with a more adaptable interface and overhauled video-sharing technology.

The new interface, which the Mountain View, Calif.-based company calls SmugMungous, automatically displays one of nine different sizes of a photo on the screen, with a patch of thumbnails of related images to the left side. The reason for the SmugMungous name: the largest of these images is 1600x1200 pixels, enough to fill up very large monitors.

In addition, the new site comes with an iTunes subscription option so that friends and family can automatically download videos or sync them with iPods, he said.

But the company also wants to make it easy for the photo buff with a 30-inch flat-panel display to share images with friends and family with comparatively tiny monitors. The appropriate image is automatically displayed according to how much real estate the Web browser shows, and it updates automatically if the window size is changed, said Chief Executive and founder Don MacAskill.

"Our customers tend to be photographers with big cameras and big monitors, but they may be sharing with friends with 15-inch monitors at 800x600," MacAskill said. "The goal is so grandma can see it at home without you having to coach her to maximize her browser."

This is SmugMug's apperance on a screen with only about 800 pixels of width to spare.

(Credit: SmugMug)

I gave the feature a quick test drive, and found that it worked fine and with snappy performance. I liked it a lot better than Flickr's options, which involve clicking on an "all sizes" button then on again to select one of a handful of preset options--and worse, doing so moves you away from a the page where you do anything interesting such as read comments or click through a user's photo collection. Google's Picasa Web Albums, though, offer images that scale automatically according to available real estate, but I find the interface much more cluttered than SmugMug's.

Previously, users had to manually select different photo sizes with tabs that popped up over the image. "It's safe to say those links will be going away. When you click on image, you can still manually switch sizes if you want, but we're pretty good picking the size for your particular screen resolution," MacAskill said.

The other half of the SmugMug change is the addition of H.264 video streaming, a much more modern standard than the MPEG-1 technology earlier supported. "Our video support before was just terrible," MacAskill said.

Moving to the new standard opens up video viewing options including Sony's PlayStation 3, Apple's iPhone and iPod, Apple Quicktime software, and shortly, Web browsers with Adobe Systems' widely used Flash software. The newest version of Flash, released this week, supports H.264, but Smugmug is "not quite done with our player," he said.

As with the photos, the video also scales automatically according to screen size. The highest resolution is high-definition 1280x720 video, but I had to actively select that option to override the site's preference for a smaller size; the sliver of screen real estate lost even to narrow window frames around the video was enough to lower my 1280x1024 monitor's usable width below 1280. MacAskill said the company might adjust that behavior.

MacAskill wouldn't offer predictions about how the new features would directly affect the company beyond offering, "I imagine some users may upgrade to power users so they can get video." However, he said the upgrade is in line with the company's core strategy to keep customers happy so they'll keep paying the mandatory subscription fees and recommend the site to others.

Customer satisfaction is crucial because the company depends on word of mouth for its marketing, supplemented only by Google advertising. So far the formula has worked: SmugMug has been profitable since its founding in 2002, and annual revenue has grown beyond $10 million, MacAskill said. Unusually for a Silicon Valley company, the company hasn't given an ownership stake to outside investors in return for money to fund the business during its early stages.

MacAskill hired the company's second employee, his father, Chris MacAskill, and started the company "basically as a side project so afford to buy ramen and corn flakes," he said. "We took three servers from an old company, bummed some data center space off a buddy, threw some code together, and crossed our fingers."

The company now is up to 29 employees--including MacAskill's two brothers, mother, sister, and aunt--and stores more than 225 million photos.

Apparently, fast-forwarding through commercials just isn't enough. TiVo announced on Monday that users of select photo-sharing services are now able to access their image collections through its set-top boxes.

The digital video recorder manufacturer has partnered with two photo-sharing services--the Google-owned Picasa Web Albums and Fox Interactive Media-owned Photobucket--in order to enable users to surf through their photo albums as well as their friends' and family members', provided that their TiVo boxes are broadband-connected.

A release from the company emphasized the fact that photos are viewable in the highest resolution possible, which on the TiVo Series 3 and TiVo HD devices means full high definition.

In addition, the TiVo interface makes it possible for users to search the overall database of public Picasa or Photobucket images by keyword.

The Photobucket search interface on TiVo

(Credit: Photobucket/TiVo)

It's yet another step in TiVo's quest to make its equipment more versatile than the standard DVR--and to make it an appealing choice in a market that remains tepid.

"At TiVo, we're focused on the entire entertainment experience, from movies to music, and in this case--memories," Jim Denney, TiVo's vice president of product marketing, said in the company's statement. "By working with these well-respected and popular photo-sharing partners, TiVo enables families to share their pictures in new, fun ways."

This fall, TiVo announced a deal with RealNetworks' Rhapsody to bring the subscription-based music service to its devices.

Along with "What's the best free video-editing software?" one of the most frequent questions I receive from CNET Download.com users is, "How can I put my photos on a DVD that anyone can watch?" For everyone whom I wasn't able to respond to personally, here's a quick overview.

First off, the most important issue is the DVD player for which you're creating the slide show. Many DVD players nowadays don't need a specially formatted disc to view digital pictures, and some have built-in slide-show features for viewing JPEG images. The best way to find out is to actually try it. Burn a DVD full of digital images (I personally use CDBurnerXP), fire up your DVD player with your new disc, and see what happens.

If your player can read JPEG and AVI files from a regular data DVD, you're on Easy Street. There are numerous free digital-photo-management apps that will create AVI files of your images for burning to DVD. Google's Picasa is an excellent choice. Windows Movie Maker (included free in XP and Vista) is another solid free solution for creating AVI slideshows.

The rub, of course, is that not all DVD players can read AVI or JPEG files. In order to view your slide show on these less-helpful DVD players, you'll need to convert your AVI slide show to a VOB file, and, for maximum compatibility, you'll probably want DVD information files (IFO) and their sometimes necessary backups (BUP).

It's difficult to find VOB encoding in a free DVD slide-show burner. In fact, I don't know of one. If you do, please tell me about it. Luckily, there are several afforable commercial apps that can perform the nitty-gritty work of burning DVD slide shows.

The most famous and most powerful software is likely Nero, which includes a massive amount of slide-show-authoring options for photo DVDs. If you don't need all of the audio and video functionality included in the full suite, Nero PhotoShow Deluxe offers a cheaper alternative for creating DVD slide shows.

Another popular option is VSO Software's simply named PhotoDVD app. The interface and features are sparser than Nero; it's simply a bare-bones program that gets the job done. Nero has a 15-day trial for PhotoShow Deluxe, while the free PhotoDVD trial lets you create slide shows with up to 100 images.

What do you all use to create slide shows for watching on your TV via DVD? Can your players handle JPEG and AVI files, or have you been forced into the wild world of video conversion? Tell me about it in the comments.