How to upload a video to Picasa from Linux, Mac OS X and Windows

This blog post explains how to upload a video to Google Picasa from Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

It is not possible to upload a video to Picasa Web Albums from your web browser. (However, it is possible to upload images this way.)

Please note that the video you upload will be transcoded, most probably to lower quality than the original, and the original video file won't be available for download or watching on Picasa Web Albums.

On Windows, use the latest Picasa desktop application ([download]). Version 3.8 or newer works. Alternatively, you can use GoogleCL ([project page]).

On Mac OS X, use the Picasa Web Albums Uploader. ([download])

On Linux, use the Google command line tools (GoogleCL). [project page] Example command to upload photos and videos:

$ google picasa create --title album_name
$ google picasa post   --title album_name ~/Photos_and_videos/*

It might take a few minutes for the video to become transcoded and made available. In the meanwhile, you'll see this image on picasaweb instead:

On Linux, you may have to install the newest googlecl (0.9.11 works) and the newest python-gdata (2.0.12 or newer works), and remove your

~/.googlecl

directory to make it work.

Installation instructions for Ubuntu Lucid, before you can run the

google

command above:

$ sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
$ sudo easy_install gdata
$ sudo easy_install http://googlecl.googlecode.com/files/googlecl-0.9.11.tar.gz
$ mv -f ~/.googlecl ~/.googlecl.old