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Picasa Web Albums catching up with Flickr

on March 8, 2007 in Tech for Life

I talked about two best photo sharing apps that I love in a previous post. Picasa Web Albums is Google’s answer to Flickr that Yahoo bought and done a great job with. One thing that Picasa Web Albums was missing was the community element of searching others pictures by ttitle, subject, tags, etc.

Now, Google has answered by enabling the community search! Here is an excerpt from Picasa Web Albums’ What’s New? page:

Discover and explore public photos posted by others in the Picasa Web Albums community. You can look up captions, tags, album titles, album locations, and album descriptions. Search also works across only My Photos or My Favorites if you’re signed in.

Here is how they compare right now:

Flickr’s Free Account:

  • 100 MB monthly upload limit (5MB per photo)
  • 3 sets
  • Photostream views limited to the 200 most recent images
  • Post any of your photos in up to 10 group pools
  • Only smaller (resized) images accessible (though the originals are saved in case you upgrade later)

Picasa Web Album’s Free Account:

  • 1GB storage (and counting!)
  • No other feature restrictions in free account as fas as I can tell

Flickr Upgrade: $24.95/year

  • Unlimited uploads (10MB per photo)
  • Unlimited storage
  • Unlimited bandwidth
  • Unlimited photosets
  • Permanent archiving of high-resolution original images
  • The ability to replace a photo
  • Post any of your photos in up to 60 group pools
  • Ad-free browsing and sharing

Picasa Web Albums Upgrade: Starts at $25/year

  • 6.25GB ($25 USD per year)
  • 25GB ($100 USD per year)
  • 100GB ($250 USD per year)
  • 250GB ($500 USD per year)

I am still torn between using the two web photo sharing tools! I will continue to use the two of them together for various purposes and I will post my observations in a future article. If there was a sort of plugin for Picasa to upload directly to Flickr in a few clicks, I would right now choose Flickr over Picasa. But, i haven’t yet so I am going to explore a little bit more before I shell out the Flickr Pro account!

Thanks for reading and let me know if you know of such a tool/plugin for Picasa!

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  • http://www.techwinter.com Roger Kondrat

    Nice post.

    I hate to point out a few obvious items but here goes.
    Flickr is better because it provides more value initially and exponentially so when you pay the $25/yr.
    *Free – You can upload 100MB every month that means over the course of a year you can upload 1.2GB so yeah Flickr grows too and at a much higher rate than Picasa

    *Paid – you need a GB or 2GB because you just flew around the world, cool. You would still pick Flickr because after your upgrade expires you can keep you several GBs of photos up on Flickr where as you need to keep paying over at Google for your storage usage. GB to GB value is enormously on Flickr’s side.

    You like Picasa(S=Software), great, me too. But PicasaS doesn’t do nearly as much as Flickr. PicasaS offers a great organisation feature, yup so does Flickr, PicasaS doesn’t offer Geotagging, sharing, commenting, timelines (visual), or any of the APIs that allow for the diverse and changing patterns of usage that Flickr does. Admittedly its convenient when offline to use PicasaS but that shouldn’t preclude you from using Flickr. Its no harder to use Flickr with PiacasS than without PicasaS.

    Please have a thought about this, when Google adds Geotagging and now they are adding lots of the features I have mentioned are you going to go back and make changes to those photos? I know I won’t. Flickr has the functionality I need today and I won’t wait on Picasa to add that functionality so I can spend weeks back checking photos so they have the right tags, geo or otherwise.

    That much being said I should point out that I use Zooomr. Zooomr is everything I said about Flickr but better. There is one hitch and why I don’t say much about it and that is uploading photos is an ugly process (third-party efforts are amateurish right now), but its cross platform is nice. Also Zooomr uses OpenID which isn’t even close to ready for Primetime and people have no clue what OpenID is so no one I know has signed up to see my pictures (not even my partner).

    Now that being said I love Zooomr, Kris the guy who founded them is really smart and while things like OpenID hold them back from market share in the consumer market he is doing wonderful things for pro’s and hardcore amateur photographers like me and we will tolorate OpenID and once OpenID goes mainstream or he caves and adds a mainstream login feature his audience should swell enormously as his service is a million times more sophisticated yet elelgant than Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, etc.

    Sorry for writing a post here. I just (obviously) felt passionate about it.

    I am publishing a version of this comment on my site and will link back since I respect you may choose to delete such a large comment or trim it a bit.

    Chers
    Rog

  • http://shankrila.com K-IntheHouse

    Roger,

    Thanks for the comment and the insight into Flickr’s capabilities.

    Flickr beats Picasa Web Albums hands down. There is no doubt about that. But, I primarily use my desktop Picasa software as my primary photo organization tool. And only a portion of what I take makes it into the web. Since I spend so much time in PicasaS, it is just a huge convenience for me to upload pictures without having to use another interface! Of course, the price I would pay for it would be all the features that Picasa Web Albums is lacking at the moment.

    That’s the reason why I continue to use Flickr but I will continue to watch Picasa playing catch up. Also, thanks for sharing the information about Zooomr. I have to look into it and maybe I will report back with what I thought of it.

    The information you have shared is valuable. Please visit us again.

  • http://prof.rogerkondrat.com/2007/03/11/picasa-web-albums-as-a-competitor-of-flickr-and-my-opinion-of-their-feature-competitiveness-copy-of-my-comment-on-shankri-las-blog/ Technological Winter » Blog Archive » Picasa Web Albums as a competitor of Flickr and my opinion of their feature competitiveness – Copy of my comment on ShanKri-La’s blog

    [...] My response to this post from ShanKri-La [...]

  • http://www.eJabs.com Matthew Jabs

    Good informative post K-IntheHouse!

  • http://shankrila.com K-IntheHouse

    Thanks Matt! What do you use? Picasa Web Albums or Flickr?

  • http://www.eJabs.com Matthew Jabs

    You know…I use both in a very limited way, but am looking to use them more.

    Historically I have used Picasa to organize the photos on my PC, and I used Photoworks to print off copies, but I have been wanting to switch to Flickr…I have a Flickr account and may be giving it a go soon.

  • http://www.shankrila.com/tech-stuff/popular-cameras-on-flickr/ Popular cameras on Flickr | ShanKrila

    [...] that you are hooked to Flickr after reading my posts here and here (wishful thinking!), now you can see how popular or unpopular your camera is at Flickr!! [...]

  • http://www.itechnovation.in Guest

    well i believe softwares like web studio 2.5 are much better than dreamweaver or other html editors but you know every thing have its pros and cons…. i did it my way have a look if u wish to learn more… :)
    http://itechnovation.in