"The 'Views' metric allows you to see how many people have viewed a certain photo or video. Views from all sources are included: Picasa Web Albums, embedded photos (if applicable), image search, etc. The view count, updated every 24 hours, is located on the bottom-right of an individual photo or video and is visible to anyone who can see the content. The number of views for each photo or video dates back to June 30, 2009. All views before this date are not included," explains Google.
Picasa Web Albums started as a service that helped you share photos with your friends and family, but it gradually added features from community-oriented services like Flickr: search, tags, Creative Commons licensing, comment moderation.
The service was launched as an online extension of the popular photo organizer Picasa, but this was an important factor that limited its development: it's difficult to upload multiple photos if you don't use Picasa, there's no photo editing feature and the name isn't very attractive. In addition to the integration with Picasa, Google's service offers only 1 GB of free storage, a great semi-automatic face recognition feature, a simple way to geotag photos, embeddable slideshows and some nice keyboard shortcuts that save time when you browse through photos. How would you improve Picasa Web Albums?