Picasa Web Albums now have a nifty feature for mapping. Whatever address you enter in the album properties under “Place Taken”, it automatically maps your pictures. It can be done for the album as a whole or for individual images. You can use just a simple state or a city and state for the address or be as detailed as a street number and zip code, and Picasa2 seems to find it exactly with no further tweaking from you — quite unlike the tediousness of entering map locations on Flickr.

You also have the option under properties of not entering the location at all, or of entering it, but disallowing Picasa to map it. All of your albums that have been mapped are shown with a red thumbtack next to them, as here: picasaweb.google.com/barneykin

Kudos to Picasa2!

Unfortunately, along with this nice addition to Picasa Web Albums has come an unbelievable increase in the number of SPAM comments - almost all in the Portuguese language. And even more unfortunately, I cannot find any instructions at Picasa Web Albums of how to control it, except to disallow ALL comments. And even worse, I cannot find any way to delete them. That is a bummer, but I am counting on Google to learn how to control SPAM comments at least as well as Flickr manages to do, which seems to be quite excellent. If they cannot control the Portuguese SPAM, at least allow me to delete them.