Google Picasa update brings Picasa Web Album

Google might be developing a Flickr competitor, which is now owned by competitor Yahoo! the company has released an update of their popular image manager application Picasa. This update would let the users to organize and share photos over the Web.

Picasa Web Album would be initially made available to a limited number of Google Gmail service users. This is to make sure that the servers are not overwhelmed in the initial days and the company can fix any issues reported by these testers.

Google acquired the company, which developed the Picasa software way back in 2004 and made it available for free to the users. Since then, it has become a hit amongst users who keeps a lot of images on their computers. The application till now supported image sharing through email and Hello application.

With this new update, users would be able to make images and albums available to anyone using a specially generated link pointing to the Google servers hosting the images.

Google has said that the users would be free to host around 1000 images. Interested users can get extended storage for an additional fee. Yahoo! Flickr allows users to upload 20 Megs worth of images every month. It would be interesting to see if the competition between these two companies results in more free offerings for the end users.