First off, there is some ambiguity about whether Picasa, Google's slick photo album and photo sharing product, has an identity of its own now that it powers the Photo area of Google Plus. It does have its own application that you can download to your Mac or PC, so from that perspective it definitely does, but once you get into sharing, well, then I think you're solidly in the world of G+. Confusing? Well, yeah. For the purposes of this article, therefore, I'll refer to it as Google Plus Photo Album since that's what you see when you're viewing the shared photographs. Got me?

There are a staggering number of different photo sharing and online photo album Web sites available, ranging from the old school Flickr to the highly social Facebook to the upstart Google Plus, with its beautiful display of photos coupled with a convenient sharing capability. For a recent school event, I ended up with just under 350 pictures I wanted to share with the parent community, and after some deliberation decided that Picasa (um, "Google Plus Photo Albums") was the way to go.

Which you know, because I emailed you the secret URL that got you to my otherwise unpublished album. Hence your email. :-)

Once you got there, the photos were displayed in an attractive mosaic, as demonstrated here:

Very nice, but there's no download option from this point in the album. You need to pick individual photos, then while you're looking at the photo you can choose to download it. When I click on an individual photograph, here's what I see:

Don't get distracted by all the icons and buttons: you want to click on the "Options" link on the lower left (I've highlighted it), which reveals a menu of useful things you can do with the photograph that you're viewing:

Click on "Download full size" and you've accomplished your goal for this particular image. In this case, however, I had so many photos I was uploading that I resized them all to fit in a 640x640 box, offering to send larger images to anyone who wanted to make prints. To do that, all I needed was the filename, which can be easily identified by choosing a different option on this menu, "Photo details".

This reveals lots of interesting information, actually:

The key field? "File Name". In this case, it's DSC_4483.jpg.

If you want to download dozens of photos from a Google Plus Photo Album you can see that it's going to be a tad tedious, but for just a few, it's a breeze!