Solo Technology

Picasa or Flickr? That was this evening’s question as I pondered some pictures of kids and snow from the last couple days (we had a blizzard here).

To be honest, I’ve never used either of them. Traditionally I’ve either hosted my own photo gallery or I defer to the good wife for sharing photos with Shutterfly or similar services. This seemed like a good chance to at least dabble a bit, so I did.

I started with Picasa by downloading the free desktop software and playing around with it a bit. This is all about organizing your photos along with some common and simple photo editing. I liked it a year or two ago and I find I still like it now. Pretty simple to run and very easy to play with, but I had some issues trying to convince it to find some image formats after I told it that it could keep track of .png files. It just didn’t seem to want to… perhaps a user error, I wasn’t feeling overly patient.

After experimenting with the software a bit I moved on to have a look at the Picasa Web Album feature. This works with the desktop app to get pictures to the web and is osted by google. Very slick — Just select pictures from the desktop application and ship ‘em right on up to the web album. No fuss, no muss and drop dead easy. In theory, this is my album link. Very intuitive to use and work with.

250MB total space for free, pay more to get more. Hmmm. Paying more gets you into some big storage amounts quickly. Doesn’t seem all that spendy for what that’s worth.

I then popped over to Flickr for a look. No desktop client for organizing, this one is all about the web — tags and all. My initial run at uploading caused me to actually laugh out load when I saw the web-based image uploader. OMG, welcome back to the 90s! Fortunately, there are quite a few options for upload tools that are much more useful.

I went with the Flickr uploader for XP and it seemed to work just fine. Selected a pile of images, then drag’n'dropped them on the uploader. Filled in the tag prompt and it took it from there. Worked great and much more friendly when moving multiple pictures.

I think my stuff is here. I have one photoset up there, but will need to rethink that in light of the free account limits.

Free version is 100MB a month, reset each month. Only 3 photosets though. So, long term I get more space with Flickr in exchange for not having the desktop photo organizer/re-toucher that Picasa offers. Upgrade for $25/year for unlimited.

I think, for the moment, I’m more interested in Flickr just because I can stretch “free” out a bit more (assuming I get interested in hosting photos there). I also admit to being a bit embarrassed about not having tried either of these options until now…

I look forward to hearing other opinions or suggestions. What do you like for online photos?

3 Responses to “Online Photos - Picasa or Flickr?”

1. Rich G. on December 21st, 2006 11:25 pm
   

   Big time flickr fan here.
   The tagging and social aspect is nice.
   I like the comments from other users, and comparing my tagged photos with other ppls similarly tagged.
   the interface isn’t much, but for me it’s about what I do with the pictures once they’re there more than how they get there.
   You might add webshots to the fray if you want a more robust interface/client.

2. Bill on December 27th, 2006 7:54 pm
   

   I started with flickr and was uploading some game pics to show to other gamers. First problem I ran into was the monthly upload limit. It was not 100MB as I hit the limt with my first 40 pics (1280×1024). I got around this by resizing all pics to 600×480. The second problem was that with the free account only the last 200 pics are displayed. That was it for me.

   Picasa. I was able to find and upload all of my pics the first try. No limits hit, and all of the game pics are viewable. After uploading, it turned out to be 10MB with the resized pics, all 255 of them.

   I like Picasa better. I have even started creating some picture DVD’s using the software for family photos.

3. Chris on December 27th, 2006 8:07 pm
   

   Thanks for the replies Bill and Rich.

   Rich, do you have the paid version of Flickr?

   Bill, I hadn’t realized the “last 200″ thing with Flickr. Thanks for your input!

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