Stowe Boyd just wrote a [quick post][1] to request that Google begin caching attachments (especially photos) uploaded with messages you compose through Gmail and that they should provide a nice interface to browse the photos you upload. As Stowe notes, Gmail already lets you add attachments you _receive_ to your Google Docs collection, and it would be great to have an interface to manage _your own_ attachments.

[1]: http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2007/07/add-one-to-the-.html “Add One To The Google Wishlist”

Google already has their [Picasa][2] photo software and [website][3], but so far it’s only barely integrated in the Google apps package–you have to manually sign up for a Picasa account for “Photos” to appear in your account’s navigation bar, and even then the photo management interface is little more than a personalized Google image search.

At the moment the interface is secondary. Google should take Stowe’s suggestion and begin offering a way to browse the cached documents and photos attached to outgoing Gmail messages. Having access to such a rich history of documents and photos would be amazingly useful for archival purposes, and those documents could be included in Google’s personalized and desktop search interfaces, thereby providing access to one’s own content from any machine. Storage isn’t an issue, since Google already caches the content as soon as the message is composed.

After providing access to such content, Google can then have a crack at making a slick management interface for all of that content. Who knows, maybe they could sic [Veen][4] at the design work.

[2]: http://picasa.google.com “Picasa from Google”
[3]: http://picasaweb.google.com “Picasaweb”
[4]: http://www.veen.com/jeff/index.html “Jeffrey Veen”