Picasa Web Albums adds new API features

Posted by Ryan Boyd, Google data APIs Team

The latest release of the Picasa Web Albums data API has added a number of new features that you have been asking for:

• Community Search: You can now search through the photos of all public, searchable albums using the q query parameter. Example: http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/all?q=penguin will find all penguin pictures.



• Retrieving a user's recently uploaded photos: You can retrieve the photos recently uploaded by a user. Example: http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/userID?kind=photo&max-results=25 will retrieve the 25 photos most recently uploaded by userID.


• Retrieving recently added comments for a particular user: You can retrieve the comments recently added to photos owned by a particular user. Example: http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/userID?kind=comment&max-results=25 will retrieve the 25 comments most recently added to photos owned by userID.



• Searching a user's photos: You can search through all the photos belonging to a single user using the q query parameter. Example:

  http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/userID?kind=photo&q=penguin

  will find all photos owned by user userID which contain the word 'penguin' in the title, caption or tag.


• Filtering by tag: You can filter photos in the album feed or user feed based upon tags using the new tag query parameter. Example: http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/userID?kind=photo&tag=dog will find all photos owned by the user userID which are tagged with 'dog'.



• Uploading non-JPEG photos: You can now upload bmp, gif, jpeg, and png photos via the API.


• Downloading the original photo: You can now download the original photo, including all EXIF data. This is accomplished by retrieving the feed with the imgmax=d query parameter and value This will return a feed where the media:content elements reference the original downloadable image.

We hope you enjoy these new features. We welcome your continued feedback and feature requests in the developer forum.