Why I switched from Flickr to Picasa Web Albums
October 4, 2006 at 1:35 PM by cb
[As a disclaimer, I am probably not fitting of the ideal demographic for either of these online photo sharing tools. I am not a professional photographer, nor really even a digital photo enthusiast. (My wife and I take lots of pictures, but are under no illusion that they are compelling or interesting to others.) However, I do use these tools to share images of my sketchbook and other drawings with some of my art-school friends.] That being said, I was initially psyched when I signed up last year for a Pro Flickr account, which allows me to create multiple albums and have an enormous storage capacity for images (a free account only allows 2 or 3 albums and less storage). Flickr has tons of cool features that really qualify it as a 'Web 2.0' site: tagging, networking, messaging, etc., which has certainly led it to be a wildly popular tool with many users. The big problem for me became that it is just too darn slow to use! Perhaps if I were more interested in its many 'Web 2.0' attributes, I might have been willing to put up with the wait, but ultimately I was really just interested in having a place online to put images. If you've got lots of free time to wait for pages to load, check out my Flickr albums. Being the Google fan that I am (not being a Google fan will probably be added to the list of "CLM's" at Newfangled), I tried out Picasa after I downloaded it with the most recent edition of Google Pack software. Picasa is a great local software tool for organizing your images. It scrolls through images smoothly, creates multiple sizes, creates slideshows, and has a cool screensaver feature. As it turns out, it also allows you to create web albums and upload them to a free Picasa Web Albums page really easily. In fact, I just uploaded 62 photos of postcards that a buddy and I sent back and forth to each other and it only took about a minute! I will admit that if you're looking for really robust, community-oriented "Web 2.0" features, Picasa Web Albums is not quite up to par. However, for my purposes I was very willing to trade all the Flickr bells and whistles for Picasa's simplicity, ease of use and speed. With Google's track record in mind, I have little doubt that Picasa Web Albums will only grow in its features and possibly become just as good as, if not better than, Flickr. |
Tags: software
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Comments 
 VJ |
January 6, 2007 12:22 AM Thanks for this very insightful review. Thinking about switching myself...Cheers! |
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Fiona |
October 13, 2007 7:45 PM 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. As you've said, in Flickr 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. |
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alucard8 |
December 19, 2007 4:17 PM Yes, Google rocks!! There is just one thing from facebook that I miss in Picassa web, and that is the tagging feature. It allows you to see the persons name in a picture just by pointing the mouse over his face. And if you click it will take you to a list of pictures with that person on it. Cool huh? |
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John Beckley |
February 13, 2008 8:39 AM Flickr deleted one of my Real Estate clients accounts yesterday...with no warning,saying it is commercial however the flickr account was only used to feed their blog with photo updates on new developement property not selling the property, there were several other albums of tenerife, staff etc. The blog did not try and sell anything!! What makes it even worse is their flickr account was getting indexed in google search results! If I advise our clients to move over to picasa do you think the pictures can get indexed in hte search results and how relaible are the photo plugins with wordpress blog software? |
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truth |
May 24, 2008 8:59 PM you wrote this in 2006. we all now know that flickr beats the pant off picasa, evidently through your continuing use of flickr instead of picasa :). flickr interface simply makes more sense and is sleeker than picasa. how many users on picasa vs flickr? |