Zmarties

There is a new feature just appeared on the Picasa Web Albums settings page. Between the existing Public Gallery URL, and the Content Controls, there is now a section that allows you to set up an Email Digest.

It looks like Google are defaulting this to a weekly digest, to get the news out to people, and then giving them an option in the email to turn it off. The 4 choices given are no digest, or at a frequency of daily, weekly, or monthly. The description alongside explains:

What is an Email Digest?

When people you have marked as favorites create new albums, upload more photos, or comment on your photos, we send you a summary of these activities to your email address at the interval you specify.

The digest email itself is an HTML formatted email as follows:

The links in the email for changing settings are generic - they just take you to the main Picasa Web page, where you can then log in if needed. This means that you can forward the email to someone else without security issues.

The images do of course link through to the album that has changed. The thumbnails shown are embedded in the email, not just links to the Picasa Web site, so they can be seen when offline, or when external images are turned off (as is the case with most email programs these days).

I didn't have any new comments for this example to notify me about, but the source of the email indicates that they would follow after the list of changed albums.

(This should have appeared on my Documenting Picasa blog, but I'm having a few publishing issues at the moment).

Update:It did eventually make it to the Documenting Picasa Blog.

Labels: picasa