2 Picasa2 Tips

Tip 1:

Hover over any thumbnail and hit Ctrl-Alt. It will instantly fill the screen with the high resolution image.

Tip 2:

Hit Ctrl-L and your web browser will pop up connected to a web version of Picasa2. You’ll get some funny looking URL like this:

http://localhost:1606/2325d8afb4426bbca5ba8cf7afbb20db/

You can easily browse the images and do searches through your entire Picasa library. It’s very quick and actually lets you browse your library organized by whatever labels, folders on disk, exported pictures and other stuff you already have setup in Picasa.

Another nice thing is that when browsing the actual images, they show up with all of the rotations and corrections that Picasa has applied. Additionally, the last variable that is in the image URL looks like this:

...image21085.jpg?size=800

If you want a smaller size, just change the 800 to your preferred width and a new image will be generated on the fly. You can use this feature to quickly create web images from photos by simply dragging the generated image out of the web browser onto my desktop and it’s saved in it’s new convenient size.

For security reasons (I assume), it doesn’t look like this mini web server built into Picasa is accessable from any computer other than the local computer. Also, the port number seems to be random since it changes each time you re-launch Picasa.
Looks like it would be a minor thing for the Picasa team to allow for sharing of photos across a local network if they’d just allow the webserver to talk to the network. Naturally, this would require some security work first but it would be very handy.