Photo-sharing sites beware: Google may soon be nipping at your heels (or eating them for lunch).Google has initiated a very limited first-come, first-served test of its upcoming Picasa Web Albums. After a quick test drive on both Firefox 1.5 and IE 7, I have to say that it's fast, intuitive to use, has an icon right inside the main Picasa user interface. Even in its very beta condition, it just plain works.
With Web Albums, you can with one click upload whole albums or single pictures. You also have the choice of making those photos public or keeping them unlisted (private), and you can change that and other settings easily from the Edit Album Properties tab.
We aren't sure what sort of secret sauce they are using, but moving through your photos on the Web application seems almost as fast as if you were using a desktop application. It is also very easy to resize and move images, and generally navigate between photos and albums.
Other features worth mentioning are the ability to add comments to the public galleries of others and send e-mails with links to galleries, albums, or photos.
The only real catch—something not at issue with the unlimited storage of several of the currently popular sharing and printing sites—is the storage limitation of 250MB, which could obviously change when the full public beta begins or thereafter.
If they are still admitting folks to the test, you can get access at http://picasaweb.google.com.
