Picassa has been growing in popularity for some time now, with Google launching a version for Linux user's its userbase has been seeing a steady growth.

Picassa was one of the companies Google had aquired earlier. It is a desktop based image management software which is avialable for free download from Google, for those who do not have it yet can try it by downloading it from the link below.

Today Picassa's development team went one step further and has launched a web version of Picassa codenamed Picassa Web Albums.

I use Picassa to manage my photos on my desktop and it has a pretty neat interface, with tagging facility and also sorting photos by date, week, month etc.

In addition to that Picassa also has a Photo browsing and slideshow, any new photos you add to your computer are also auto fetched and added to Picassa.

What you can see in the Web Vesion

"Try flipping through photos using the arrow keys (we pre-fetch photos so they load quickly). Zoom in and out to check out details or see the whole photo. Or maximize them on a large monitor. We focused on the photos, not ads or archiving, because we know how important your photos are to you especially when you want to share them. Of course, there's a lot we want to add and improve — which is why for the moment, we're only testing this feature by invitation."

Though its early and no where near what Flickr is, its a better option to simply upload your existing Picassa collection to the web from your desktop easily.

Picassa users will have a initial storage capacity of 250 MB which is approximately 1000 wallpapers with a resolution of 1600 pixels each and as always like a Google product free.

Though there is also a subscription based service avialable for 25$ with which they will provide 6GB of photo storage space, well that's not a lot for that amount of space though.

Picassa Web Albums is invitation only and you can sign up for it at Picassa Web Albums home page.

Source: Official Google Blog