Google and Yahoo beef up picture galleries

Mountain View (CA) – Google and Yahoo are dueling it out by adding new features to their respective picture albums and galleries. Google has updated its Picassa web albums to include geotagging which allows users to stick their images onto Google Maps and Earth locations. Yahoo has fired back by adding Flickr images to its Yahoo Image Search.

The updated Picassa now has an option in the album properties to allow addresses to be added to each picture. After the album is shared, other people can view the pictures superimposed on a Google Maps or Earth layout.

But Yahoo didn’t stand still and added Flickr images to its image search. The displayed images will contain captions that will attribute the photographer and clicking the image will bring the viewer to the photo’s Flickr page.

Currently the search is a bit finicky and the text descriptions of the Flickr images don’t appear to have been crawled yet. We were only able to find Flickr images by searching for the photograhper’s name or Flickr handle.

Google also recently released a mobile version of Picassa.