#PICASA WEB HOW TO#
#PICASA WEB CODE#
#PICASA WEB WINDOWS 7#
#PICASA WEB FREE#

I pasted it into my browser, viewed the source, and found a section in the XML like this:ДЄnd there it was! The elements gphoto:shape-Гџ(where attribute type='face') are face tags, and the name attribute contains the face name. (Note that the numbers in the URL are unique to my account and album вЂ“ you will need to substitute your own). Almost immediately, a URL with the string-Гџ back_compat-Гџin it caught my eye: I decided to do a little spelunking, and fired up Fiddler to observe the HTTP communication going on. Or was I? I thought for a minute and realized that Picasa was somehow accessing the tags data from Picasa Web, because the UI helpfully showed me that it was only updating the changed face tags when I modified them. picasa.ini file data was unreliable and the API face tag issue had been unresolved for years, so I was stuck with no solution.

I tried applying multiple tags, waiting, and re-launching Picasa, with no success.

I could not determine what action in Picasa triggered an. When I added new face tags to a photo, the.

Unfortunately, it was not as simple as that. They seemed to contain everything I needed. After looking at the proprietary database briefly, I decided the format was indecipherable, and moved on to looking at the. picasa.ini files in each folder containing photos.

#PICASA WEB WINDOWS 7#

It turns out that, in Windows 7 at least, Picasa stores the face tag data in two places: вЂ¦Local SettingsApplication DataGooglePicasa2db3, as well as in hidden. Then I set out to see if I could access the local data store. I first set up Picasa in a networked fashion using PicasaStarter, both to allow use by multiple (non-concurrent) workstations, and to make sure the database was backed up in case of hardware failure. Not an ideal solution, but it gets me where IвЂ™m going.

#PICASA WEB CODE#

Picasa stores its data locall вЂ“ perhaps I can just use that? As long as the data is on a drive accessible by our intranet server, I could write code to parse that and render the appropriate photos for each user. Not willing to give up just yet, I decided to explore some other options. (Among other reasons, I was not interested in being banned from PicasaWeb for lifeвЂ¦) And this is across all Google data issues, not just the Picasa Web Albums Data API.Д¬ontinuing to Google, I found no viable solution to the problem, with the exception of screen-scraping Picasa Web, which I was not willing to do for tens of thousands of images. Over at GoogleвЂ™s gdata-issues project, my problem is documented as issue #751 (first reported Sep 6, 2008), and out of 591 open issues, it is the fifth most popular, based on the number of users that starred it at the time of writing. It turns out everyone else was having this problem. After double-checking the URLs to make sure I was hitting the right feed (I was), I decided to explore the Google-verse and see if anyone else was having this problem. I then accessed the tags feed, and was surprised to find none of the face tags appeared in the data, while other manually-applied tags did. I imported some photos into Picasa, applied some face tags, and synced a few albums to Picasa Web. This is going to be a piece of cake, I thought.

#PICASA WEB HOW TO#

(Since I wanted to use non-public data, I first registered my application in order to get authentication tokens.) After a quick perusal of the docs, I understood how to retrieve a list of albums, and from there, how to retrieve the metadata for each photo in the album, including the tags applied to each photo. Great! The API looked simple, and it had been around for several years, so I expected few problems. With tens of thousands of photos taken already (and many amateur photogs on staff), we needed a way to help automate the process of identifying who is in each picture, with the end goal being to display all the photos a user appears in when you go to their profile page on our intranet.ДЄ bit of Googling turned up the Picasa Web Albums Data API.

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It seemed like a good fit вЂ“ it allows quick sorting and editing, can sync selected albums to the web, and offers a free CDN to boot.Д«ut the facial recognition feature was the one that really interested me. Our COO suggested using Picasa, because of the facial recognition feature. Recently, we decided we needed a way to make our corporate event photos more easily accessible to our employees.

Picasa web