Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Eddie and I work on the Tabblo team. Nice to meet you.

I have focused a lot of my efforts here into making sure we had a jump start on good uploaders. Uploading is one of those necessary evils for a photo site. We want Tabblo users to spend the bulk of their time creating beautiful stories about their lives, not waiting for files to upload. And though we have not yet seen the realization of our grandest dreams in this regard, we are making steady progress. We have forms-based, Flash, Java and ActiveX uploaders, as well as a steadily improving Flickr integration that allows Flickr users to quickly leverage all the pain they already spent uploading to Flickr without having to go through it again at Tabblo. We have an iPhoto plugin that allows users of the default photo album manager on the Mac to upload their photos and make a story in just a few clicks. I’ve written but not yet released an experimental Windows shell extension uploader as well — this one I’m on the fence about, since it’s written in .NET. All that aside, though, what I really came here to write about was Tabblo’s unique Picasa extension.

I came across Picasa and Hello in 2004 or early 2005. At the time, I had been thinking a lot about the fact that I was frustrated by the lack of photo integration options in Blogger — one of my personal websites involves a lot of reviewing and picture-taking, and so having a place to land a lot of text and a lot of photos is really important to me. Blogger by itself didn’t really give me what I wanted. Enter Picasa and Hello. Besides being a good photo album tool in its own right, Picasa floored me with its integration into Blogger, not because I was unaware that Google had bought up Blogger too, but because I couldn’t believe how dead-on they were in seeing this problem domain and trying to offer a solution. To my mind, the idea of integrating photo sharing into a messenger-style app and then integrating that into an album manager and a blogging tool was a fresh and plausible leap in the right direction.

Fast forward a few months and I’m joining Tabblo to take another stab at that problem from a different direction. As I reach the upload problem, you can imagine how I envision the solution from a distance:

• web uploaders: Forms, Java, Flash, ActiveX
• importers: Flickr
• client apps, Mac: iPhoto
• client apps, Windows: …Picasa!

But, as I start doing research into Picasa, I find that there’s nothing out there in the way of plugins. The closest thing I find is the ability for people to create their own custom album formats by introducing new exporter XML descriptions (from what I understand). Though this could come in handy later, it’s not going to solve the problem I want to solve of getting photos from Picasa right into Tabblo with no intermediate steps. Drat.

Over Christmas, however, I had another chance to take a closer look at Picasa, and I found a way to get exactly what I needed. Some hacking and hard work later, and the Tabblo Picasa extension was born. If you’ve not yet seen it in the wild, the extension puts a new button labelled ‘Send to Tabblo’ right next to BlogThis! in Picasa’s album manager interface. All you need to do to get your photos onto Tabblo is select some photos from your Picasa albums, click the ‘Send to Tabblo’ button, enter your Tabblo login, and voila, your Picasa managed photos end up on Tabblo available for storytelling! As far as I know, this extension is a one-of-a-kind for Picasa, and we’re more than psyched to bring it to our users.

When I left the Mac for a PC, I really missed iPhoto. But now Windows (and Linux!) users can grab Picasa and the Tabblo Picasa extension and get a really powerful combination of photo management and sharing tools. We hope you’ll try out our extension and let us know what you think. Write some comments here, or post on our forums!
~e

p.s. Picasa just released a new version that has a web albums tool built in. This upgrade is currently in beta and available only to invitees that sign up at picasa.com. I got my hands on a copy today, and I found out that with a slight modification to the Tabblo Picasa extension, it will work with this new version of Picasa. So if you’re one of the Picasa beta users, we’ll be releasing our updated installer early next week at the latest. All you’ll have to do is run the new Tabblo Picasa extension installer after your Picasa upgrade, and then restart Picasa. So stay tuned!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 17th, 2006 at 12:49 am and is filed under from the trenches, product news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.