We had a chance to try Picasa Web Albums and our first impression is that it is very inspired by Flickr but not anywhere near. Here's a first hand comparison of Picasa Web Albums with Flickr based on several parameters like prices, storage, ease of use, features, etc.
Storage Limit and Price for Pro Accounts
Flickr Pro charges $25 for uploading upto 2GB of pictures per month while Google charges the same price for uploading 6GB of photos per year. Therefore, Flickr provides 4 times more storage space than Google at the same price.
Storage Limit for Pro Accounts
For free accounts, Picasa users are limited to 250 MB of space while Flickr lets free users upload upto 20 MB per month. So the storage limit is roughly the same for both services. Also, there is no bandwidth limit in either of the servies.
Photo Uploading
Both services provide a web browser interface for uploading pictures. When it comes to software, Flickr has a very basic Flickr Uploader software while Google has integrated the photo uploader right in the Picasa software itself. However, Flickr provides other photo uploading options like Mobile Phones and email.
Tags and Descriptions
Unlike Flickr, Picasa Web has no support for tags. You can attach labels to individual images or an entire photo album in Picasa Photo software but that doesn't reflect in the web albums when you upload a photo. Both services allow you to add captions to pictures but Flickr automatically parses text and converts URLs into clickable hyperlinks.
Photo Notes
Flickr allows users to visually mark certain areas of the picture by drawing a marquee and attach a description and even a link to that area. For instance, in a group photo, you can mark your face and link it to your website. Picasa Web Albums have no such feature.
Photo Comments
Both services allow users to post comments on other pictures. In Flickr, you can also subscribe to your recent comments feed.
Picture Slideshows
Flickr creates photo slideshows using Flash while Picasa Web Slideshows are done in HTML and Javascript. Flickr Flash has more effect like zoomable thumbnails, dynamic hide-show features but Picasa Slideshows are more usable and easy to integrate in external websites.
Mark a Photo as favorite
Both services allow users to add any public picture to their favorite folder.
RSS Feeds
Both Picasa Web Albums and Flickr provide RSS feed for all photos from a user or selected album (or photoset). However, in Flickr you can subscribe to photos based on Tags.
Downloading Photos locally
Flickr allows download of individual photos while Picasa goes a step further and lets you download all pictures in a web album. However, Flickr provides various size options when you download a picture. We miss this in Picasa.
Support for Developers
Flickr exposes a nice API that has been used to develop some amazing web-apps like the Flickr Graph. Google Web Albums provides no API.
Support for Blogging
Flickr lets you directly publish a photo to a blog. You can do this from Picasa locally but not from the Web Album interface.
Where Google Picasa Web Album Wins:
Picasa provides an extremely easy program to upload photos online. You can visually select files and folders in Picasa, save them to the tray and upload all of them in one go. Picasa Slideshows are much easy to customize as they are done in HTML code.
Where Flickr Wins
Flicks is a more mature and robust application than Picasa Web Albums. Flickr supports tags and photo clusters which make the task of finding relevant photos so easy. Unlike Picasa, Flickr provides communities and photo pools where anyone can join and share related pictures. Flickr has an active support community and your Flickr related queries are answered almost instantly. Also, Flickr has an API for programmers.
Conclusion : Take the Flickr route. I would probably use Picasa Web Albums for storing picture backups but Flickr remains my favorite service until Google introduces tags, communities and more photo uploading options.
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/06/flickr-vs-picasa-web-albums-no-tags.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
The one thing with Picassa is it does have labels and keywords, aren't they basically tags, and as far as uploads, I would expect them soon, not right away.
Written on 14/6/06 4:20 PM
Not a comment but to point out a typo...
As pointed out earlier, it's Google who provides more storage space and it's 3 times not 4 times the storage space.
Keep up the great work and keep us all inspired... :)
Written on 15/6/06 12:20 AM
Minor typos in your post:
"Flickr Pro charges $25 for uploading upto 2GB of pictures per month while Google charges the same price for uploading 6GB of photos per year. So Flickr provides 4 times the storage space at the same price."
You mean Google provides 4 times the storage space...
Anyway, as this is in beta, I'm sure Google will improve the web album up to par with Flickr and maybe even better.
Written on 14/6/06 11:58 PM
If only there was a built-in way to hook Picasa to Flickr everything would be great! Don't see that happening though in this google vs. yahoo world.
Written on 14/6/06 9:21 PM
what's the best "free" online photo album available, and which has no constraints on size etc ?
Written on 14/6/06 7:04 PM
Yup also the Flickr API is open to developers and already lots of tools for easy uploading and downloading multiple photos to and from Flickr are available.
As for the 2 comments above, read carefully it's 2 GB PER MONTH = 24 GB PER YEAR (Flickr) vs 6 GB PER YEAR (Goooooogle).
Written on 15/6/06 11:12 AM
"Picasa users are limited to 250 MB of space while Picasa lets free users upload upto 20 MB per month."? Picasa everythere :\ Who's there?
Great new and review. Thank you.
2 Anonymous
you should pay 25$ every mounth to have opportunity upload 2Gb instead 250Mb. And for google that's 2$ per mounth and 6Gb ~_0
Written on 15/6/06 12:27 PM
What's really important for success of Picassa will be to develop the community. (one of the biggest asset of Flickr) -
And I am not too sure how easy/difficult it will be for Google..
Dude: send me an invit if you can.
Ashish sinha
ashishk dot sinha AT gmail
Written on 15/6/06 3:27 PM
The one thing I really like about Picasaweb is that I can publicly post shots that I really only want family to see. With Flickr, if I use the Friends & Family privacy options, then our friends and family all have to sign up with Flickr just to see our photos...lame.
Written on 16/6/06 11:10 AM
I don't know if this is really Google's Co-founders' public galleries on web picasa.. but anyways I stumbled across this:
http://picasaweb.google.com/sergey.brin
http://picasaweb.google.com/larry.page/
:D
Written on 17/6/06 1:02 PM
Amit
Picasa web albums has a limit on storage whereas flickr has a limit on bandwidth per month.
there is a difference which does not allow us to compare these two services
Written on 17/6/06 9:30 PM
In the free version of Flickr, only the 200 most recently uploaded photos are shown. Picasa beats that easily because the free version offers 250 MB total storage space, which is enough for over 1500 photos at 150 KB each. What do you prefer for free? 200 photos or 1500 photos?
Written on 19/6/06 9:15 PM
Also worth mentioning is that Picasaweb prefetches the next photo in the photostream and does not refresh the whole page so viewing consecutive photos is much, much faster.
Though strangely enough Picasaweb doesn't have search??? At least not yet.
Right now it seems like there is no main page for Picasaweb. Example, welcome page with search and community aspects. You can't even navigate to someone else's photos without added them as a contact first. And just how are you suppose to add people as contacts if you can't search for them?!?
I hope Google adds these features soon. But with no community pages I think I'll stick to flickr.
PS as for "hooking Picasa to Flickr", I recently discovered that you can email your pictures to flickr through picasa. It works great. :)
Written on 20/6/06 11:32 PM
The free Flickr account only allows three sets...? I just let my Flickr Pro account expire and all my sets are intact. A trick around the 200 limit is to blog your photos. I don't acutally delete photos past the 200 limit, you just can't find them in Flickr. Unless they've been linked to somewhere else. :)
One important thing missed is that whether you tag or not, photos in Flickr don't get ranked high in Google (and even Yahoo) searches. So if exposure is important, a Google route may be more desirable. Plus, combined with Blogger, you have far more possibilities if you wanted to implement AdSense or other custom code. Flickr is very strict in that regard.
Written on 22/6/06 5:02 PM
No no no! With Google you pay them 25$ a year and you get 6GB storage that's it. You don't get any more storage ever it's 6gb. After you upload 6gb of photos that's it, you can't upload any more ever. Well unless you delete photos.
Written on 23/6/06 11:17 PM
Let us remember that Flickr has been available since February 2004 and has been owned by Yahoo! since March 2005, whereas Picasa Web Albums was released less than a month ago. It is still in the Test stage (this fact is prominently displayed on the Web Albums logo). We can only assume that it will improve as time goes on, as other Google products have.
Written on 10/7/06 10:31 PM
Great review.
I use both, Flickr and Picasa web and in my opinion google is easier to use (and I think it also has faster upload) and better for reviewing pictures, while Flickr is better in sharing and searching for pictures.
Written on 6/11/06 10:30 PM
about storage:
flickr is $25 a year for 2GB UPLOAD bandwidth a month, that means you can upload 2x12GB a year, that's 24GB a year, and you never have to delete. google offers 6GB a year for the same price, and that's it.
Written on 4/12/06 3:47 PM
Agreed. Actually, the ideal route would be for picasa to have a flickr plugin, in where you could specify which album to upload it to and where the labels you put on the photos in picasa would translate to tags on the flickr site.
Written on 26/1/07 1:06 AM
nice review!
flickr is still bigger, but google has many fans out there... I think he'll win :)
Written on 22/5/07 8:27 PM
Google offers just 6GB of storage when you paid them 25$ NOT 6GB/year that's it...
Written on 31/5/07 10:36 AM
Storage Limit and Price for Pro Accounts: currently Picasa rates are
* 6GB $20/yr
* 25GB $75/yr
* 100GB $250/yr
* 250GB $500/yr
(source: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=39567&topic=8993)
Flickr offers a year account with unlimited storage for $25 (source: http://www.flickr.com/upgrade/)
As much as I dislike yahoo, this is the reality
Written on 23/8/07 7:31 PM