Picasa Web Albums has a search feature that can be restricted to several albums including, your albums (or fav albums), public albums of your favorite users or all the public albums hosted by Google. Given below are some ways you can use Picasa Web’s simple search engine:

1. In order to find random photos published by Picasa Web users: just click on the search button from the homepage, while leaving the search box empty.

2. If you want to see the photos from the users you have added it to favorites, click on the search button and select “Favorites” where the photos uploaded by your favorite users can be viewed.

3. You can navigate between the results where you can move to the next result by clicking on the right arrow button or by using keyboard shortcuts: j or right arrow. You can also go to the previous result by typing k or use the left arrow.
4. If you want to view the results in a slideshow, you must click on the “Slideshow” option to view the results without manually navigating between them.

5. You can adjust the size of the thumbnails from 72 pixels to 288 pixels width using the selection bar.

6. You can download the results in Firefox where Picasa Web Albums provides a feed output for search results and you could use it to download the photos.

7. Wow! You can restrict the results to a user too, by opening the album gallery of that user, enter your query and then select the name of the user from the line “My Photos | Favorites | Community photos | User’s Gallery”.

8. You can view the search results in a screen saver where Picasa 3 lets you create a screensaver that shows images from media RSS feeds that can be added to the screensaver.

9. When you want to find photos from a certain location you must go to Google Maps, find the desired location, select My Maps and check Photos from Picasa Web Albums from the featured content section. The map lets you enter a query and it displays the results on the map.

10. Hey! You can use Google Image Search to search Picasa Web Albums photos where you simply add site: ggpht.com to your query, for example: (christmas site:ggpht.com). Google Image Search does not include all the photos hosted by Picasa Web, but it produces more relevant results.