Picasa Thinks Photography Didn’t Exist Before 1970

I use Picasa Web Albums from Google. I know lots of folks use Flickr, but something about that site has always irked me. (I think it is all the mark up I see on photos, and all that white space in their page design). Picasa Web Albums meets my needs very well for the most part, with a good amount of storage, and a well documented and useful API.

However, whenever I try to set an album date prior to 1970, I get this message:

Album dates must be set to 1970 or later. Please try again.

I have this scanned photo of my Mom and Uncle:

Mom and Uncle Jim before she left for Paris.

You can see right on the print it was time stamped ‘Sep 57′. So, I want to set the date of the album that contains it to 1957. But I can’t, because:

Album dates must be set to 1970 or later. Please try again.

Sigh.

I opened created a post in the Picasa Web Forum about this (2 years ago), but I guess taking into account that photography existed before 1957 is beyond the geniuses at Google. And this surprises me, because one of the founders went to the same high school as my sister, and I know she understands photographs existed prior to 1970.

Maybe if I had a Ledo’s pizza sent to Sergey Brin, he would get someone to fix this. Having lived in Adelphi, and having graduated from both Eleanor Roosevelt High and the University of Maryland in College Park, he must know this is simply the best pizza in the world, and if I could get one sent to Mountain View, perhaps he would work on the code himself. Come to think of it, getting Ledo’s out here to California might be a better way to spend my time than trying to get Google to acknowledge photography existed before 1970.