Picasa Web Albums vs Flickr - Which Photo Sharing Service is Right for You ?
When Google launched Picasa Web Albums in June 2006, we wrote a detailed review comparing Google's offering with Flickr, a Yahoo! owned service. Flickr clearly emerged as the winner in Round One but lot of things have changed since then.Both Google and Yahoo have updated their online photo sharing services in the last few months and so we decided to do a comparison again - Flickr vs Picasa Albums Round II.
Photo Storage Space and Uploading Limits
When you have a free Flickr account, you can upload 100MB of photos each calendar month but the counter is reset ever month and the overall storage space is therefore unlimited even for free Flickr accounts. With Picasa Web Albums, you get only only 250MB of free storage space.
Cost & Benifits of a Pro Account
A Flickr Pro Account is available for US$24.95 a year and you get unlimited storage space and unlimited bandwidth. A $25 yearly subscription on Picasa Web Albums will get you only 25 GB of extra storage space and if you pay $500 per year, you get 500 GB of storage space in Picasa Web Albums. Unlike Flickr, there's no unlimited space option in Picasa Web.Limitations of a Free Account
For free users, Flickr will limit the number of photos that are displayed to just the 200 most recently uploaded photos though the older photos won't be deleted. Also the large size photos are automatically resized to 1024 pixels at the time of uploading. Each photo that you upload to a free Flickr account must be less than 5MB in size.
Picasa Web Albums won't resize your high resolution pictures even if you are a free user. They limit the individual photo size to 10 MB.
Uploading Photos Online
Both Picasa Web and Flickr offers basic tools for uploading pictures online but Picasa Web Album users have an advantage here - they can use the Picasa Image Editor to upload their photos directly using the software. No such "official" tools exist for Flickr yet that can enhance images and also upload them.
Downloading Pictures from your Photo Galleries
When it comes to downloading images from the web to your hard disk, Picasa Web Albums wins by a large margin again thanks to Picasa software. Users can select the Picasa albums / pictures that they want to download and the software will automatically download the entire set in a single click. A useful feature that you will miss in Flickr.Other Unique Features of Flickr
» Flickr allows anyone to add notes on your photos or annotate them.
» Flickr easily lets you search public photos of other users by tags, descriptions or even based on Camera models.
» With a Flickr pro account, you can replace one photo with another keeping the tag information, picture description and comments intact. May come in handy when someone is using your photos without credit.
Picasa vs Flickr - Who's the winner ?
Google has definitely paid lot of attention to Picasa in the last few months - they have added support for tags, introduced pro accounts for international users and significantly enhanced the Picasa desktop software.
However, Picasa Web is very expensive - Flickr offers unlimited storage space for $25 an year while Google wants you to pay a dollar per GB.
Picasa software definitely makes life extremely simple for managing your online Picasa Web Album account but other than that, we really found no convincing reason to switch from Flickr to Picasa Web Album.
Flickr clearly walks away as the winner of Round II as well. In Flickr, you feel like being an integral part of some community, something which you would never experience inside Picasa Web Albums.
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Reader Comments:
"Also the large size photos are automatically resized to 1024 pixels at the time of uploading."
If you look closely, there's a little hack which you can find the full size uploaded photo on Flickr. :D
actually i don't like yahoo,how excellent their products are ,i don't want to use it,yahoo mail ,my yahoo...because some of their product is annoying for Chinese.
merry christmas and thanks for your work.
I like picasa more, upload and access pictures very quickly.
Possibly I would prefer having my own WebHost than the rest of these .
Install a gallery script on it to complete my requirements and i am done !
In Picasa when you click to enlarge a picture it first appears blurred initially for some time , its very annoying...
Actually, theres a limit of 2GB transfer per month for flickr pro users.
Oh...it seems this december, flickr has lifted off the upload limit for pro users to unlimited.
Raja - Change you Image Dithering settings in the web browser and the flickering may vanish.
Good post Amit. Yools are available to download pictures from Flickr.
I have blogged about them before -http://alpesh.nakars.com/blog/2006/08/13/flickr-download-all/
But all in all Flickr rocks just as your post :-)
Alpesh
I'm having a hard time w/ Flickr in that it doesn't post to a Blogger type blog as well as Picassa does. The photos displays too large.
Also, I can't seem to get the blogging function on Flickr to display more than one photo per post.
Any workarounds?
I just noticed that Google has upgraded their free storage to 1GB.
1. well, flickr is having a complex interface...annoying enough not to use it.
2. For average users, 1GB space provided by picasaweb is enough. If more is required, either go for pro account (1US$/GB is practically cheaper than 25US$ for unlimited space --- for most of the users) or create another account and link the two accounts using add-to-favorite feature.
3. Flickr's slideshow is having bad resolution....degrades the experience significantly.
I prefer Picasa. Not only does the software make upload/download easier than Flickr but it also keeps my pictures well organized on my computer.
I also don't want strangers to tag my pictures on the web. That's tantamount to my property being tagged with graffiti.
Furthermore, I don't want to feel like part of a "community". If I want that I'll create a blog. I upload my pictures for my family and friends to view. They're not meant to be easily searchable for the entire universe.
I really like Picasa's software, it's very user-friendly and makes uploading and such easy. The only advantage I like on Flickr is the better options for photo printing. Google only offers prints by mail through Picasa, Flickr allows you to print through your local Target store. This is a clear advantage for me.
What the review doesn's say is that u can create only 3 albums on flickr (!!!) with a free account, while on picasa the number of albums (sets) is not restricted (and they don't have symlinks like flickr - you upload the photo again taking more space. still u are not limited while flickr...).
There are countries where is very hard to have an paypal account. It's not nice to bag for some one to buy u an account. And it's not nice for that limit to exist - it is brutal.
This is the reason why I changed flickr for picasa...
As a non-paying user of both services, I prefer Picasa's interface to Flickr's. Photos look more organized when placed in albums and you can create as many albums as you like in Picasa. In Flickr, last time I checked, you can only create 3 albums (sets) if you are a non-paying member. I still haven't figured out the best way to organize my 1,600 travel photos using only 3 albums. I'd rather have a separate album for each destination and I'm glad I can do that with Picasa.
I must say that i am on flickr side, and i dont worry about wanting to download my pictures, because there are several tools to do it in one clik
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