Since buying my G1 I have been playing about with the built in digital camera. It has proved to be better than I expected, although by no means as good as my Canon DSLR. However, what makes a digital camera so good on a Google phone is the ease at which you can upload pictures, or share photos, with friends.
By default the Android OS allows you to share photos by either sending a picture message, sending a GMail, or sending by the POP3 email service (if you have set one up). However, there are applications that provide better methods of sharing.
The first I tried was PhotoBeam which allows you to easily sned photos to a Facebook profile, amongst others. I used this for a few days, but soon got frustrated that people needed a Facebook login to view them properly. So I decidedto look at Picasa.
Picasa is Google’s own photo album software. It forms par of your Google account. On its own, Picasa is not really all that great. It is not easy to move set up new albums or move photos between albums on a mobile device. However, it does have its own application, also called Picasa, that is free to download from the Android Market. The advantages of the application are that you can create new albums, upload to an album of choice, and also upload many photos at once. By this I mean that photos are held in a queue while uploading, rather than you having to wait for each to upload.
One nice feature of Picasa is that is provides an RSS feed of you photos, so that you can publish them direct to you own family album, travel website, or any RSS readere. This makes sharing easier still. Also you can chose whether your phots are public or private, which determines whether or not they are listed on Google Search. So far I am very pleased with the Google G1 – Picasa application – Picasa website combination.
