Welcome to Google Pictures
Google has been the technology media darling all month as they have finally rolled out Google+ and have made various subsequent announcements that seek to make the Google brand more coherent. One of their first moves is to rebrand Picasa.com as Google Pictures.
Many of you will be interested in this shift not only because Picasa (which we’ll call Google Pictures from hereon out) offers 1 GB for photos and videos at no cost and more impressively, Google+ offers unlimited storage for photos, likely as a means to attract photography hobbyists and professional photographers to their network as opposed to their competitors which cap storage limits before charging.
You already have pictures, bring them to Google Pictures
Rather than start from scratch with a new photo portfolio, populate your Google Pictures account with photos you have on existing accounts like Facebook and Flickr.
There are several methods in which to do this, outlined below are just a few.
Migrate Facebook pictures to Google+
One way to take add your Facebook pictures to Google Pictures is with the MyPicsToGooglePlus Facebook app which is free and allows you to populate Google+ with all of your pictures. Because there is no storage limits at Google+, this is great news for people with large Facebook albums.
Move2Picasa has just been launched that with few clicks, all of your Facebook photos are sent to Google Photos. It’s super simple, but we have learned they are overwhelmed with requests for migration, but will resume when they have the capacity.
Back up your Facebook photos to your desktop
With PickNZip, you can back up all of your Facebook photos into a zip file on your desktop which can then be shared on any Google service including Google Photos and Google+. This is a great option because not only do you get to migrate your account photos, you now have a backup!
Migrate photos from most places to most others
One of the ultimate tools which is very popular is Migratr which is a desktop application that moves photos between photo sharing sites and “will also migrate your metadata, including the titles, tags, descriptions and album organization” which is not necessarily a feature of the other migrating tools. As a bonus, Migratr supports these services: 23HQ, Faces.com, Flickr, Menalto Gallery (Self-Hosted), Picasa Web (aka Google Pictures), Phanfare, Photobucket, SmugMug, Zenfolio and Zooomr.
