firsttube.com

You should post this on OSNews

binarycrusader — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 05:31:39 GMT

Great little review! Why haven't you posted this on OSNews yet?

Compression?

Paul TÃ¶tterman — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 07:02:20 GMT

Why do you use the term compression, when it's really about resizing or rescaling (downscaling)? You even say resize correctly, when you talk about what Picasa the program does before uploading the images.

Yahoo Photos

Mike — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 18:55:47 GMT

You should try out Yahoo Photos. It may not be 100% as intuitive as Flickr, but it gives you unlimited space for free, and the interface is generally not bad at all.

Flickr is so much deeper

David Chilstrom — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 19:34:47 GMT

You said: "While flickr is a mature site, it has a serious drawback - it's not familiar feeling to less technical people. My parents struggle to understand the tagging concept and don't immediately understand how to locate certain pictures or types of pictures when I have nearly 1000 photos in my photostream. "

#1 "it's not familiar feeling to less technical people." (i.e. your parents) Here, Google wins because it simply does so much less. There's not much to learn, because there's not much there. Being "familiar' is easy when there is so little to become familiar with.

#2 "My parents struggle to understand the tagging concept and don't immediately understand how to locate certain pictures or types of pictures when I have nearly 1000 photos in my photostream. "

You're folks don't need to now diddly about taging (that's your job). They can just enter a search term like "Snuffy" or "June Picnic" and Flickr's search engine will scan your tags, titles and descriptions for that term. Finding 4 pix of my Dog Harley out of over 600 photos is a snap on Flickr. Picasa offers no way to find a particular photo other than to manually browse through the albums. When it comes to finding photos on a specific topic, Flickr wipes the floor with Picasa.

Picasa is good as a "Me" tool where it's all about me sharing my photos via a dead simple (and very limited) user interface. The ability to easily email a link to your sets, an album or a specific photo via the "Share" button is a great feature of Picasa, plus I like that any album can be viewed with three sizes of thumbnails. Very nice.

Flickr is a "We" tool, where I might share a family album (via a private group) that other family members contribute to. On my Flickr home page, the latest pictures from my family, friends and contacts appear. And, of course, there are the many, many groups on Flickr. It's amazing and a whole different concept from Picasa.

I agree that the Flickr user interface is more complex than necessary, though part of that stems from the fact that it is much, much, much more fully featured than the present iteration of Picasa. Speaking of user interface, people unfamilar with the practice of comment spamming may be perplexed as to why they must type text from a funny looking grahic into a box before they can post a comment here. Tell us why (briefly). Think of mom and dad when you develop.

Incidentally, I sprung for the iPhoto Flickr plugin available at: connectedflow.com and it's worth the $21 I paid many times over. You can view my photostream at www.flickr.com

photobloggers.net

Ygor — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 20:40:54 GMT

I like your comparison, and i agree with the previous post. Have you guys also looked at www.photobloggers.net ? It's entirely free, and offers a nice way to share your photos a la flickr.

your review

bunkalicious — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 16:26:29 GMT

Well I am going to try picasaweb now and see how it goes.... It only lets you have 500 per album, and we will see how many photos it will allow!

Thx for writing this

The right analysis

Alexandre Gacon — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 17:01:37 GMT

I totally agree with your analysis. Personnally I manage my photos on my laptop with Picasa (easy to organize, easy to find photos and the new feature Tag with Google Earth feature is really cool) but I share them with Flickr.

I tried PicasaWeb but I found it too poor (in particular it doesn't read the tags embedded in jpeg files, even they are entered via Picasa). Whereas Flickr automatically extract them from the photos and add them to its own tag system.

Alexandre

Flickr comparison

Photo Mojo Denbow — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 20:57:40 GMT

As a Flickr Pro, I use it extensively but may I make another suggestion? Try zooomr.com (yes, there are 3 o's) Zooomr is tagged as a Flickr killer but I doubt it. Same uploading features, you can geotag your pics, create sets and sharing as well. Limited but absolutley worth a look. I'm a pro there as well. Enjoy!

Quick look at zooomr

Alexandre Gacon — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 08:11:00 GMT

I just cast a glance at Zooomr and indeed it looks promising : geotagging is already included and moreover it supports several languages (I am French and the most part of my familly is scared of english websites).

But the project is just starting so for the moment I will keep Flickr.

Picasa lack of EXIF tags is real problem - for pics on web, advantage flickr

Chris Jones — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 20:07:32 GMT

Good review! I have both but find the Picasa software a great "front end" for easy photo editing and organization. However the lack of EXIF integration in Picasa is a real concern as it is clear that this will remain the dominant "open-source" tagging method. I would also like to use Picasa to upload into Flickr. Compression also degrades the quality of pics in downloaded Picasa Albums.

Advantage Flickr!

Picasaweb Does can upload Full Size Images

TonyB — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 15:30:07 GMT

A very nice review. I agree that Picasa Web Albums is much more accessible to non-technical people, as most of the people I share photos with are. Flickr has great features and community, but I am doing my sharing with Picasa Web Albums. My family doesn't want to search on tags or any of that stuff. They just want to click on the Zoo Trip album, and browse the pictures.

Picasa Web does preserve metadata such as Tags and Captions. I can Tag photos, upload them to Web Albums, and then download them to another computer with my metadata intact. Captions entered as IPTC data are displayed on Web Albums already. It is probably just a matter of time until Google updates Picasa Web to read Tags.

Finally, I want to address your point on compressing the size of pictures when they are being uploaded to Web Albums. When you click the Web Albums upload button in Picasa, in addition to which Album you want to upload to and so, there is the option of what size you want your photos compressed to. There are three options, with it defaulting to 1600. You can also select No Compression/Original Size.

I have tried Yahoo Photo Beta. It is nice, and does have unlimited free storage. Zooomr is always very slow for me, and some of the concepts they use still don't make sense to me, such as Lightbox. I have tried many of the other options suggested here as well, but I keep on coming back to Picasa Web Albums for its ease of use, integration with Picasa, clean display, simple and intuitive UI for my non-computer friends and family, and its AD free, even with the free 250mb. As I said, I enjoy and use Flickr as well, but I use it more from a hobbyist prospective.
Tony

[No Title]

Ian Worthington — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 16:48:37 GMT

I started with flickr as the images can be directly embedded in postings, unlike Picasaweb.

However I pretty soon hit the limit to the number of sets I could declare, and then found that the organizr tool was rather buggy.

Picasaweb may be in test, and I can't embed my images, but at least the basics work quickly, intuitively, and without pain. Good enough for me.

i
...

excellent post

Brian 3000 — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 03:20:25 GMT

I had a lot of trouble uploading big batches of pics to flickr. I am a pro user and still have the acct, but I use picasa because of the one click feature you speak of. as someone who ocassionally gets drunk and takes 177 pics in a night, flickr is just too difficult to negotiate with a hangover.... and I don't have the patience for the individual uplaod of everything in flik'r. But I think this review was spot on.

A nice handy review to make a choice

Srinivas Rao. M — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 07:37:07 GMT

Finally if it is a question of storing/sharing unlimited number of photos should we use Yahoo photos ?. Doest Yahoo photos alter/compress the original resolution of photos ?.
Any free service available which can do this for me ?

Yahoo Photos is BACK

rykel — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 19:28:51 GMT

I hated and left Yahoo Photos when they decided to forbid me from downloading my own pictures in their original resolutions.

However, thanks to Flickr and possibly PicasaWeb, and of course competition from Google in general, the guys at Yahoo! have woke up... and now, not only do they return the photos to us, they have renovated Yahoo! Photos altogether and give us unlimited space.

On top of that, the new interface just feels real cool, with the dancing hamsters, pretty intelligent Tray and other visually appealing AJAX features.

Well done, Yahoo! You have won back one Yahoo! Photos user, after many years, although I hope you can be trusted for good this time.

I never thought that anything from Yahoo! could be better than Google, but I guess Yahoo! Photos is the tip of the iceberg?

RE: Yahoo Photos is BACK

sadilak — Mon, 07 May 2007 06:45:11 GMT

Yeah Right. Yahoo photos kicked us in our back all right. I am jumping out from the yahoo bandwagon to picasa. It is easy to use. I cannot trust flickr since it is run by yahoo and they will spam my email .

RE: A nice handy review to make a choice

Carl — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 09:56:31 GMT

> Any free service available which can do this for me ?
I use our KoffeePhoto photo sharing service. It consists of a Picasa like desktop software taking care of the upload tasks and a free online space for sharing pictures.

Privacy concern

picOrFlick — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 06:12:04 GMT

Picasa does not allow for enough privacy of your photos. All that one needs is your url to see your album - 'unlisted' or not. What if you send an 'unlisted' URL to your friend who then forwards it to someone else who you didn't want to be able to see the album ?

That way, flickr has given an additional level of privacy - one where you can restrict viewership to those flickr ids that YOU choose. They have to log in and see it. In addition to that, flick has the 'unlisted' and public options that picasa offers.

Would picasa add that level of privacy in the future ?

RE: Yahoo Photos is BACK

Robin — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 13:59:31 GMT

Unfortunately Yahoo is killing off Yahoo Photos in favour of Flickr and are not accepting any more members. If Yahoo Photos was such a great site, what's the logic in such a decision???

Don't use Flickr

Danya — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 13:48:36 GMT

Flickr limits the number of photos you can share, though allowed to create albums and collections of albums, you can only share One album. You cannot copy the URL addresses and put them into an e-mail. You must use their programs to send your pictures. If you pay for the expanded service, be warned it is a NON-REFUNDABLE commitment. All you get is additional storage space when you pay more and you still can't share more than the 200 pictures or one album. Their on-line help is not helpful or friendly. Picasa has much more free memory and allows you to copy the URL addresses into an e-mail so you can share as many albums as you want. Picasa does not have all the fancy printing options, like photobooks, but you can do that with another program, like my publisher or snapfish, or shutterfly.

RE: Don't use Flickr

Adam Scheinberg — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 14:19:34 GMT

Are you crazy? There is *no* limit of Flickr's paid photos, only the free version, which limits you to 200. You can share as many photos as you'd like, you can create as many "sets" and "collections" as you'd like once paid, even the free version lets you do three. You do NOT need Flickr software for anything - even editing photos, and you absolutely can share a URL via email. Your payment for Flickr, like Google and most other services, is non-refundable.

Snapfish SUCKS and requires users to register just to see your photos, and I used Shutterfly for prints once and the quality sucked. I think you're nuts or attempting to troll us.