That Kool-Aid guy, who does he think he is? Just smashing through walls with no afterthought? Does he realize the mess that will need to be cleaned after his fat ass leaves?

I’ve had Kool-Aid, and while it’s generally pretty tasty – especially the purple – I’m not sure it’s worth smashing through the family room wall.

Halfway Homemade Chicken Soup and Grilled Cheese, originally uploaded by firsttubedotcom.

“Halfway Homemade chicken soup” starts with a mirepois. Then you add pre-made chicken broth and two leg quarters of a chicken and egg noodles. The grilled cheese is hand wrapped fresh mozzarella and peasant bread lightly brushed with grapeseed oil griddled until golden brown. A perfect rainy evening combo.

If you’re interested, check out my food pics here.

1. How easy is it to do batch uploads?
2. Are there decent Mac and Windows upload tools?
3. Does it work in all major browsers (Opera and Safari are both important)
4. Will the default display scale to upwards of 2500 photos?
5. How fast does each page load?
6. Is the image scaled down? If so, is the original available?
7. Is it a fly-by-night startup that I can count on to be around?
8. How much does it cost for a pro membership, if anything? What are the benefits?
9. What are my storage requirements?
10. What is my traffic/bandwidth limit, if any?
11. Are there integrated ads?
12. How easy is it for others to access my photos?
13. Is there any sort of privacy?
14. What type of tools exist for me to manage my photos once they are online?
15. Is there some sort of embed/slideshow for my webpages?

I’ve tested the following services: Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Zoto, Zooomr, SmugMug, Photobucket, Facebook, and MySpace. Read on for my initial results.

PicasaWeb
Picasa Web Albums (hereafter Picasa), obviously, is not fully sufficient for me, which is why I’m looking at other solutions. My problems, although chronicled in exhausting detail on firsttube.com in the past, are numerous. Firstly, and most importantly, no “sub-albums,” which means the number of albums on my page gets uncontrollable very quickly. Secondly, no real privacy: each album can be made “private” which simply gives it a unique key in the URL… in short, security by obscurity. Lastly, the tagging mechanism sucks. Want to tag all photos in an album? Ya can’t! One by one is all they offer, and since I had well over 1300 photos upload when they introduced tags, it was a no-go from the get-go. In addition, Picasa Web doesn’t offer a view count, or a way to mark a photo a “favorite.” Oh yeah, and Google wants to charge me $25 for the same thing that everyone else pays $20 for.

I have had problems getting Picasa to run flawlessly in Opera. It does run properly in Gecko, Webkit, and IE based browsers, however, in Opera, I’ve had issues where the photo refuses to advance after a few clicks. Of course, the entire interface is extremely AJAX heavy, which means that when it does work, at the photo level, at least, it’s about as responsive as you could ask for.

That said, Picasa is far from bad. They have cross platform upload tools. 6GB of space now costs $20, and you know there will not be downtime and your photos won’t go up in smoke because the funding dries up. There are no ads and it’s very easy to find and navigate your albums, even for someone who has never seen Picasa. There is a photo embed and a slideshow embed, the ability to upload video, and even geographical information. Also, you can access the photo’s EXIF data, if it exists.

Picasa also has a great mobile interface, and works like a charm on the iPhone. Google is a great company with fantastic web products, and I do believe that eventually, this app will be a powerhouse, but for now, it’s nice, but far from perfect.

Flickr
Flickr is the original daddy of online photos, and owned by Yahoo!, which means, like Picasa, your photos aren’t going anywhere. That is, unless Flickr decides to censor your photos. Actually, Flickr is generally very reliable and very heavily used. As a result, Flickr has a large and vibrant community. Flickr’s Groups are as varied as the Internet itself – there are groups for almost anything. Flickr, unlike Picasa, offers a very robust tagging system, and three levels of photo privacy tied to specific access levels which are very easy to manage. Flickr offers batch upload tools outside the web browser, and a complete API is available. As such, there are scores of apps out there that work extremely well. Sadly, the best Flickr/iPhoto plugin is shareware, but it’s hard to hold that against Yahoo!. Free members can store up to 200 photos and now get 100MB of upload bandwidth (5MB per photo) per month. While the images are resized, the full sized originals are only available for subscribers.

Flickr eschews the concept of albums in favor of “sets,” which, like Gmail’s labels, are essentially groups, of which a photo can be a member of more than one. While this is most flexible, it’s also more confusing for the novice and for non-technical folks. Another drawback is that it’s nearly impossible to have a linear view of photos without going through them one at a time, since all photos aren’t necessarily part of a set, and sets may include the same photos as other sets. Another limitation is that free members are limited to 3 sets. This organization is the main reason I left Flickr some time ago, because those unfamiliar with this very modern paradigm (namely, my parents) were perplexed by it.

Flickr also provides the “Organizr,” which is a powerful flash-based photo manager that allows you to perform incredible bulk operations from re-ordering to re-tagging to re-grouping to removing. I also never spotted another service that focused so much on your ability to place a license on each photo.

Overall, Flickr is a great system, and as it has matured, features have become easier to use and tools have become plentiful, and it seems as though everyone I know has a Flickr account. It’s easy to look favorably upon Flickr as their system has proven to work and stand the test of time (well… internet time). Flickr works flawlessly in all browsers and provides numerous access points, making it an excellent all around site.

Zoto
Zoto is an interesting system that has a few years experience under its belt now. Zoto offers something unique: a fully dynamic interface. The entire site: colors and all, is widget based, and the experience utilizes modern technologies. As incredibly cool as the site is, it’s also pretty confusing.

Zoto has opted to integrate a lightbox-like effect for their photo viewing. When you visit a user’s page, clicking on a photo creates a javascript layered pop-up that shows the photo and some basic details, along with the ability to move forward or backward in the photostream. Click on the photo will bring you to that photo’s detail page, which allows you to navigate through the detail pages, but not back to the lightbox view. Confused? It’s not actually as scary in practice, but it does take some getting used to and as you click through, you are viewing URLs like this:

http://www.zoto.com/site/#USR.sethadam1::PAG.lightbox::ORD.date_uploaded::DIR.desc::OFF.0

These URLs don’t link to the same thing you’re viewing, making permalinks a little confusing too.

Zoto offers multi-platform upload tools, however, in practice, the uploads ran very slowly, and via my 4MB/sec broadband, it took me in excess of an hour to get my 32 photos uploaded.

While Zoto has a lot of stickles about it, it also has some really cool positives. Firstly, like the above, Zoto has an open API, and there are third party tools that utilize it. Secondly, for the tech-savvy, the lightbox views and the complex navigation are pretty snazzy, and allow you rapid access to lots of photos with a modern browser. The experience mostly worked for me in all browsers tested – although page refreshing when the Javascript stalls is painful, and virtually every time meant reloading back to my user page and re-tracing my steps.

Zoto’s membership is less than $20 a year, and for that, you get unlimited storage, an ad-free, spam-free, experience, plus some other fun features. Zoto can export to your Flickr account, making it an interesting companion app if Flickr is your secondary or public photo store. Zoto offers “albums” and “album sets,” and even allows you to apply different template themes on a per album basis. Bulk editing tools are present, as are an awesome array of actual photo editing tools, as seen below. Zoto also included the most granular permissions seen to date: by group or by user.

Click picture for a larger view

Zoto is definitely something special, although it’s not ready — for me — to go primetime for my photos. It’s still too slow to load on some screens. To clarify, the page loads very quickly, and then you wait for the “Loading stuff…” message at the top to populate the widgets with content. It’s worth noting that Zoto worked, for me at least, about 3-5 times faster in IE7 than it did in Opera 9.2.

Zooomr
Zooomr — yes, with three o’s — is another neat photo site comparable, more than anything else, to Flickr. The site was founded by Kristopher Tate, but it’s mostly known for its CEO, Thomas Hawk, a San Francisco based blogger and photographer. Hawk had a very public falling-out with Flickr, which may or may not have been staged, he landed at Zooomr. Hawk and Tate orchestrated a major new version of Zooomr, and within minutes of launch – POOF! – server dead. An internet plea went out, and Zoho and Sun Microsystems stepped in to save the day. So I tend to believe that Zooomr is safe, since there are some major players behind them now.

Zooomr is pretty cool. They have the “zipline,” which is a great way to view someone’s photos or even everyone’s photos, if you’re so inclined. There are inline description editing tools, geotagging, and labeling. There is a place to specify details about selling prints of your photos, as well as per-person permissions, Zooomr user or not.

Click picture for a larger view

Zooomr does have ads, but their pro account removes them for $20 a year, but offers little else: you can view an extended zipline… that’s about it. Your photos are featured in more places, which isn’t really a feature, and you get “better support.” Says Zooomr: “While we help everyone as best we can, being a Pro will escalate your issues to the top of our lists.” I emailed Zooomr support about a few questions on Sept 26, over a week ago, and have yet to hear back.

Like some of the other sites, rather than can-belong-to-one-and-only-one albums, Zooomr offers “Smart Sets.” This novel approach allows you to dynamically add to sets. So, for example, I may have a set of all photos tagged “Food,” another set of all photos geo-tagged to one area, another that features my most-viewed photos, another that features a certain person, etc. This is one of the cooler ways to instantly organize.

Zooomr does not have any batch upload tools outside of the browser, and while it can do batch uploads in-browser, you still have to add them one-by-one to the uploader. Certainly, it would be impossible to upload in excess of 1000 photos this way without incredible patience, which makes it a non-starter for me. In short, Zooomr is working just to keep on par with Flickr, but is feature-light. Zooomr, for now, is most compelling as an alternative to the “big” photo companies, a small site managed by some cool contemporaries of ours. But it’s far from offering the best feature pack. Zooomr does offer an attractive and easy to use site, but lacks much of a community outside the “zipline.”

SmugMug
SmugMug is the real deal. Put simply – these guys have their ducks in a row and have built a gorgeous site that does what it should. However, they seem to know it, and unlike all of the other sites reviewed, there is *no* free account on smugmug. After your 14 day trial, it’s pay to play. And it’s not cheap: $40 a year minimum for the standard user, $60/yr for an upgraded “power user” plan, $160/yr for the premium “Pro” plan.

If you can swallow that price tag, SmugMug features everything you’d want to see in a photo-sharing site: a light AJAX-where-appropriate interface, photo rating, albums and sub-albums (called “galleries” and “albums”), per album theming, password protected albums, visibility/privacy without logging in or needing an account, and so much more.

Once you sign up, you can download one of a dozen or more tools for uploading. There are several Windows apps, several Mac apps, and even a Flickr migration tool. They also feature a simple uploader form and a standard form. Their standard in-browser uploader is Java based, so it’s drag and drop, and it uploads flawlessly and quickly. Once your photos are uploaded, you can view your album immediately and begin playing with the huge lists of photo modifications and tools available to you.

The array of configuration options available to the gallery owners is dizzying: password protection, public v. private, indexable by Google, should the gallery be in SmugMug’s site search, will you allow external links, can users view the full size original, should the page hide your name and navigation, can people rank your photos, can your friends and family edit captions, do you allow comments, can people share the photos – and much more, and that’s all PER ALBUM!

For your account, you can organize everything however you like – you can put galleries in any order, albums in any order, photos in any order. You have geotagging, groups, and, unlike most of the other sites, this one really caters to pros, allowing massive photo uploads (up to 12MB for Standard and Power users, 16MB per photo for Pro accounts), high-quality professional printing (none of that grainy Shutterbug nonsense), your own domain name, and individual guest passwords.

SmugMug uses Amazon S3 for a backend, so count your photos as safe. If you’re still nervous, you can have a CD or DVD backup delivered to your house (albeit for a very steep $11/650MB CD or $22/4GB DVD).

SmugMug is, by far and away, the most featureful, controllable, professional site for photo sharing I have experienced. The only problem — which is a biggie – is that for the hobbiest who just wants to store photos of his family events and pictures of his kids and dogs, it’s really expensive compared to the other alternatives. $40 per year is double what the other sites charge, and while you get many more features, that’s a pretty big yearly commitment for just hosting what I could otherwise do on my own website.

Other than the price, SmugMug is the clear winner for features. Anyone could figure it out.

Photobucket
Photobucket is primary known in tech circles for two things: 1. that annoying image when someone has exceeded their bandwidth, and b) hosting all the bullshit sarcastic “look I’m witty!” graphics that pollute MySpace pages. Yet, they offer one of the best features seen yet: FTP upload access. Surprisingly, Photobucket has one of the more complete photo systems out there, and for $20/yr, a pro account not only grants you FTP upload access, it gives you ad-free, high-bandwidth galleries and sub-albums. My biggest complaint, visible immediately, was a deal-breaker right off the bat. My photos could be located at this URL:

http://s238.photobucket.com/albums/ff247/sethadam1/

That’s it. There’s no customization, not even a redirect from photobucket.com/sethadam1. Put simply, the gallery URL is a mess, impossible to remember, and unusable. I couldn’t seriously tell people to check out my photos at “ach tee tee pee colon slash slash ess two three eight dot photobucket dot com slash albums slash eff eff two four seven slash sethadam1.” It would be easier to drive home and burn them a custom photo DVD than to recite that three times.

That aside, photobucket allow pictures and video and accepts uploads via email as well, including your cell phone, which is handy. Photobucket not only allows you to create custom slideshows – a MySpace must – but also custom “remixes,” which are custom compilations created in a Flash environment which can even be set to audio.

There is no community in Photobucket, mostly because you’re side-to-side on the server with photos that say “Happy Hump Day!” in bright pink letters or “Thanks 4 the add, dood!” as a caption with a bunny with a pancake on its head, or something like that. Photobucket is primarily a hosting service for embedded photos, and while it can hold a huge number of pictures, in albums, by the way, it’s really aimed more for people who use pictures elsewhere on the web, not people who store their photo collection online.

Facebook
Facebook is a really cool site. With the addition of Facebook apps, it’s got a really thriving community. It hasn’t been ruined by a large company like Yahoo!, Microsoft, or Google yet, who shut off access, then integrate it with their accounts… yet. It has a great “face-tagging” feature that allows you to label each person, and the photo is dynamically available in their photos as “photos of X.”

While very cool, Facebook requires a login. That means you can’t view my photos at all unless you have a Facebook account. And while it’s nice for showing off some photos, it’s not an online photo album service… in fact, far from it. You can store lots of photos, but there are no photo-specific features and the management tools are non-existent. Surprisingly, there are several tools out there for integrating with Facebook, but don’t be fooled: this is not a real option for an online photo album.  Update: You can view Facebook photos without a login, however, like Picasa Web Albums, you need an obscure URL for each photo album. 

Privacy options are decent though: if someone isn’t logged in, nothing. If they have merely “limited” access to your profile, nothing. If they aren’t your friend, nothing, except if you tagged someone who is their friend, in which case, they can see that photo.

That’s it. Facebook is a non-starter for real photo sharing.

MySpace
MySpace is, aside from being the ugliest and least responsible site on the internet, worthless for photo sharing. Privacy options do include public and private, but all friends see all photos, which can be in albums, but that’s it. No management tools. Comments are allowed. And the site is dead ugly. Avoid using MySpace at all costs.

Seriously, again, MySpace is not a photo-sharing site. It’s just a site that allows you to upload some photos.

Conclusion
It’s very hard to pick a clear winner, so instead, I’ll award a few prizes here. Best of breed goes to SmugMug, and not by a little. SmugMug is everything a real photo hosting site should be, including a plethora of management and privacy tools. The cost is its only, but very legitimate, drawback.

Most accessible goes to Picasa Web Albums. It’s just drop dead simple, but at the expense of features. Tags are really a non-starter, privacy is non-existent, and there is no community around it. But if you just want a simple app — internet accessible photo albums with photos within them — Picasa Web Albums may be for you.

Lastly, the most powerful free experience is easily Flickr. At 200 photos, you’re barely able to show all of Aunt Mable’s 94th birthday, but with the huge, dedicated community there’s always “stuff to do,” and with an affordable yearly price-tag, Flickr may be the best choice for most of the tech-savvy, and even non-tech-savvy enthusiasts.

click image for full picture

Google has always been a “release now, update frequently later” kind of company, and I respect that. It’s cooler, as a user, to get something today and slowly and unexpectedly watch features trickle in, but Picasa Web Albums is a disaster right now. Read more for the details.

Okay, maybe “a disaster” is a little extreme. But it has lots of major problems, and they are all over the place. The problems pervade the entire app, and make it really hard to use effectively. But mostly, you can boil it down to this: it doesn’t scale, period.

Let’s examine. I currently have 52 albums in my collection, and the front page now takes about 2 second to load just the front page, which would be a bear over dial up (which my father still uses). On top of that, it has to load at least 52 thumbnails just to go from album to album. That’s a pretty slow experience.

The second problem is organization, and a simple feature could fix the first problem as well – galleries. Or subfolders. Or albums within albums, whatever you want to call it. This simple, logical ability would make Picasaweb incredibly more usable because not only could I group the front page, but it would make much more sense! This has to happen soon! Really, it has to. Not ONE other major photo app displays a thumbnails from every album, gallery, set, etc on the user’s front page. Know why? Because it’s a bad, ineffcient idea, the page loads incredibly slowly, and it makes navigating your photostream clunky.

I get the “simple user interface reaches the largest crowd” thing. But a photo collection of any size becomes a pain in the neck with Picasaweb. Quickly.

Next is the incredibly weak let-down that is tagging. I love the concept. And Google did one thing right: tagging is non-obtrusive but searchable. Unfortunately, not only is the implemention [[http://firsttube.com/read/I-Found-a-Google-Bug|bug-ridden]], but it’s impossible and impractical to tag all of your photos, because they must be done one by one. Hey Googlers, if you’re going to give us a feature, at least make it worthwhile. Do yourselves a favor, go sign up for a Flickr account, upload 1000 photos, and check out the Organizr. You already have a nice little Ajax interface for adding comments to all the photos in an album. You’ve got the Gmail apply tags to multiple conversations thing down. You’ve gotta iron this out. Seriously. Tagging is both painful and useless as is.

After all the work Google has done in all of their apps to rid us of the concept of folders and favorites in favor of “starring,” how is it that we cannot “star” a photo yet to indicate its one of our favorites? Seriously, where is the consistency? I almost wonder if any of the dev team has ever used another Google app. Google makes their online apps incredibly consistent – from Docs and Spreadsheets to Gmail to Maps to Checkout to Groups it all feels the same. Picasaweb is mostly there, but lacks so much of what could be.

I haven’t even touched on so much of what else should be there: password-protected albums, allowing others to “star” your photos and you to “star” others’ photos, a view count, a way to make some photos in an album private, and many more.

I have spent a lot of time moving from Flickr to Picasaweb, but these guys are going to have to kick it into high gear if they want to retain me as a customer in the future. Otherwise, I’m going back to Flickr or over to smugmug.

Read more for the review.

Flickr
Flickr.com (hereafter, flickr) is owned by Yahoo! and has been online for about 3 years now. Flickr is heavily AJAX based, and is very dynamic. Due to a very robust web API, there are many third party tools available to a user. Flickr gives each free user account an allotment of 200 public photos and 20MB of upload bandwidth per month. While you can upload more, only the most recent 200 photos will be visible to visitors. Both of these limits are extremely reachable.

Flickr offers “Pro” accounts, and these accounts have substantially more space. Uploads are increased to 2GB per month with unlimited storage. “Unlimited” is a tricky term, although I’ve never heard of a Pro user getting turned away for using too much disk space.

Flickr’s organization system is tag-based, akin to Gmail’s labeling system. Photos can be tagged an arbitrary number of times with aribtrary tags. In addition, they can belong to a “set.” A free account is given three sets and a pro account unlimited. Sets are a bit like the traditional “album.” While browsing by a user’s tags is fairly easy, it’s not easy to cycle through those photos.

In its lifespan, the flickr system has also matured and introduced some nice collaborative features. Users can create groups and these groups can host discussion and a photo pool. Users can be granted access to these groups – and the permissions are fairly granular, where an administrator can limit the people in the group, the number of photos in the pool, even the privacy of the content. All group photos come from an individual’s photostream.

As I mentioned before, there are many third party tools available to interact with Flickr. I have had luck with several tools thus far, although some have been hit-or-miss. While this is not flickr’s fault, I find that there are times it’s hard to upload large numbers of files. What I’ve really been missing is a free-as-in-beer iPhoto integration tool. There appears to be one, but it’s commercial. Yahoo has not thus far released their own official flickr tool, although I understand they do recommend Flickr Uploadr. Personally, I’ve had problems with the Windows version (it tells me that the images aren’t JPGs when, in fact, they are).

Security wise, each app using the API must be authorized by you before it can upload, which is a great feature.

Another fantastic feature of flickr is the the built-in feeds. Flickr offers an astounding number of feeds, including RSS, Atom, SQL, and many more. A cursory web search will reveal other dynamic feeds available. Using these feeds, it’s relatively easy to syndicate a photocast or even sync a remote site.

Flickr’s strength lies in its management tools. The fantastic “organizr” allows a user to perform amazing batch edits and manipulate their photos in virtually any way imaginable, complete with editing metadata and EXIF data. In addition, when logged in, you can often change titles, tags, descriptions, etc. inline, AJAX style, without reloading the page.

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.

Overall, flickr is a great service, and I am a Pro member.

Picasaweb
Picasaweb may be one of the very few non-search Google applications not in a “beta test” phase. However, that’s because it’s in a “test” phase, which I have to assume is pre-beta test. That said, it should be remembered that Picasaweb, Google’s foray into online photo storage, is a newcomer to the field.

Picasaweb’s initial offering is 250MB, which Google claims will hold about 1000 photos at 1600 pixels. This would seem to indicate that Google may be degrading the JPGs or applying some sort of compression algorithm to your photos upon upload. Either way, You can certainly store more than Flickr’s 200 photos. By upgrading storage (a feature only available to US users, by the way!), your limit is raised to 6GB (actually 6394 MB). After uploading about 1000 photos so far, I’m still at 475 MB. Many have been compressed, since the default is compressed to 1600px.

Google has approached photo management differently and it shows. They have opted for a much simpler, albeit less powerful, interface. Instead of tags, which they’ve implemented in their own apps like Gmail, they’ve gone with albums. A photo belongs to one and only one album (though it can be copied to other albums). While this means I can’t send someone a single link to look at “Friends in DC” and “Friends in FL” in one link, it does mean my mother can figure it out, and so can everyone else.

Google has released a new version of their image management software [[http://picasa.com|Picasa]] which integrates “web albums” and makes it drop dead easy to create or add to albums on Picasaweb. The tool is extremely simple and very quickly formats/resizes/uploads images. Google has also released a Mac bundle with two great tools. First, the Picasa Web Uploader. It’s a very simple drag-and-drop upload tool. The second part is an iPhoto add-on, a great one, which makes integration with your web albums as simple as a photo export.

One amazing feature of Picasaweb is the fact that, should an author make an album fully public, you can click “Download to Picasa” and download the entire album in ONE CLICK. This is a great feature I’d like to see in other online tools. This only works in Windows, and it sems that Picasa registers a new VFS so your browser understands the picasa:// directive.

Picasaweb has far fewer features than flickr. There are no groups, there’s no sharing or discussion beyond photo commenting, and there are no EXIF manipulation tools. Beyond some simple rearragement tools, all the work needs to be done on the client, and changes must be re-uploaded.

Conclusion
In the end, flickr and Picasaweb provide different things and a comparison isn’t as apropos as you’d think. Picasa integrates with your current tools (Picasa on Win and Linux, iPhoto on Mac) and creates a simple interface to share and organize your photos. Flickr’s strength comes from its thriving Web 2.0 community and collaboration and search. If you are seeking a place to store your online photos, either service will likely serve you perfectly well.

Ultimately, I have chosen Picasa because Flickr’s interface is just too clunky for quickly accessing specific photos when you have a large number of photos in your photostream. However, I still use flickr, and fairly avidly, because the communities are great and the number of photos is simply astounding. It comes down to the fact that Picasaweb is a personal experience and flickr is a group one, and what I’m looking for for my photos is a simple way to show them to my family.

Picasaweb, on the other hand, integrates freely with Picasa and iPhoto, which makes it VERY attractive, it’s cheap ($25 a year for 6GB storage), and it’s drop dead simple. So for now, I’m on Picasaweb.