Flickr vs. Picasa Deathmatch
// April 29th, 2008 // Creativity, Digital, Photography, Software, Web
If you have been following my tweets lately, you might have noticed that I’ve been fighting over which service I would prefer to use: Flickr or Picasa. This has resulted in far more headache than I would have initially thought, and I still don’t feel any closer to coming up with an answer. I thought by sharing my opinions, maybe you could toss some feedback my way that might help the decision making process. You may also ridicule and taunt me, as it pleases you.
I am not a photographer. I enjoy taking pictures, and I believe that I take relatively good ones, given my amateurish state. But I admit that it’s just a small hobby. Until now, I have used a Coppermine powered gallery that I kept on my personal server for managing and sharing my pictures. This works relatively well. To be perfectly honest, the only real reason I even care to switch is because I’d like to connect to more social tools through my photos. My own hidden little gallery site doesn’t do that. I also don’t have a lot of interest in keeping the software maintained, so I end up with older software that is a pain in the butt to update. But, I’m also not looking for 100,000 people to drool over my pictures. Mostly it’ll be stuff from plays I work on, or trips I take, things none of you care about (even though you try to act interested).
And here’s the matchup. Flickr is clearly a more socially driven web site. It’s purpose is more closely linked with my goal, I think. But, they lack a good desktop app for organizing pictures like Picasa does. They have an uploader application, which seems to work well enough, but I’d like my offline archive to basically mirror what I have online (at the moment, my photos folder is a pretty big mess, I admit it). Flickr is also pretty crippled if you don’t spend $24.95 a year on a pro account. Without it, you only get to use three sets (albums), which is, frankly, useless to me. You also only get to upload 100MB of photos a month, which if you are trying to migrate to their service, is also pretty useless. I said I’m not a photographer, but I still have a solid 2GB+ of photo (not that I need to share them all, but if I can, I probably will share most). However, with pro, you get unlimited everything for the most part. Storage, bandwidth, sets, collections, even video (if you care. I don’t).
Picasa has a slightly different purpose. It is geared more towards what Coppermine did for me; simply provide online gallery/album functionality. It’s desktop app is nice for organizing offline, and it integrates right into web albums. You get unlimited albums out of the gates, and a full gig of storage with no upload limits per month. But, extra storage (10GB) starts at $20/yr. Cheaper than Flickr Pro, but Flickr Pro gives you unlimited storage for five bucks more. Alternatively, you can do more for free through Picasa, just at a loss to some of the social networking features Flickr has. If you need more than 10GB, the price starts hurting.
My problem is basically that I can’t easily decide what kind of user I am, or what my goal is. I fall right in the middle of one big gray area, like Nick-at-Nite TVLand poop. Ideally, the systems should just merge into one super warehouse, like my crappy Photoshopped graphic above intimates. $25 a year isn’t much, but a lot of what I’d pay for I could have through Picasa for free. And using Flickr leaves me stuck managing stuff offline through something else. I could use Picasa as a purely offline file manager, but that’s like using it and wasting half the purpose of it. Half a dozen of one, six of another. I sure as hell don’t want to do both, I’d like one solution that answers my needs.
You could solve this problem for me, of course. Just sponsor a Flickr Pro account for me, and that will make up my mind for me. It’s not that I’m cheap, it’s just that I’m cheap.
Update: I almost forgot to mention; Brad Ward has a nice blog writeup on Flickr over at SquaredPeg on Flickr, and using it to manage your photos. I read it the other day and it was really what got me thinking that Flickr might be the way to go.
25 Responses to “Flickr vs. Picasa Deathmatch”
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I use Flickr, but I think you convinced me to use Picasa for some family stuff.
And, I just recently bit the bullet on the Flickr Pro. Only thing I regret is not doing it sooner.
I just use photobucket .. sorry no help
Skip a night of sushi. That’ll pay for the Flickr Pro account
download windows live photo gallery. It is a desktop app much like picasa, but it can directly upload photos to flickr.
get.live.com
[...] I did find this article and this one, and this one very interesting, if anyone else is having the same issues as me. Tags: [...]
I think Picasa is better than Flickr for free users because the limitation of photo album. Flickr only provides 3 albums (sets) for free account, while Picasa has no restrict of it that is easier for people organizing their pictures.
Sad thing is that I HAD a Flick Pro account. Time went by and as my 1-year old baby grew, I forgot to renew my yearly membership (he is why I got it in the first place… to share with friends and family). When I logged back on (no more than 1 week after expiration), all but a few of my ’sets’ had been deleted. Are you kidding me? I had over 3,000 photos there! Yeah, sure, I’m gonna renew THAT service! I don’t think so. I know that Picasa isn’t the solution for me, but here is a MEGA-Thumbs down for flckr!
Gster: Did you email Flickr about that issue? That seems like something they’d totally work with you on to correct and get your stuff back.
Man I thought you were gonna solve this for me…
Flickr is superior in terms of usability IMO. Picasa has the sync feature (doesnt worry me really, since I use other SW for managing that, and am happy doing so).
The thing that im getting into now is geotagging, or at least drag-and-drop-to-map-and-call-it-geotagging…
Yahoo maps, obviously, are way inferior to googles.
That’s a tick in the Picasa box. A big one. Enough? Not sure, yet. We’ll see how it plays out… There are some nifty migrators if I decide to jump ship.
@Gster – man I really hope you have the OGs somewhere – that is a nasty, nasty twist and a hard lesson for us. Flickr! Please listen to consumers and get your act together.
Gster – they’re not deleted, only hidden from view until you renew. It’s in the FAQs. Once you renew, all of your photos will be available again.
use Picasa AND flickr! with picasa2flickr addon button.
I prefer Picasa because it looks more organized and has more albums for free users.
And if you forget to renew your subscription, your photos won’t get deleted, you just won’t be able to upload more photos until you delete some or renew.
Jenn and Fiona are right. Your photo’s are not deleted when your subscription has expired, just the last 200 (i.e. your free account). When you re-subscribe they will all be there
Sorry that should read – just the latest 200 will be displayed. :S
I think the current Flickr (May 09) is a mess—at least in terms of slideshows. The simple act of arranging your photos in a specific order is an ordeal, which even Flickr Support admitted in a reply to me was “sucky.” And I hated the way the slideshow operated: no manual advancing of slides, descriptions up in a corner (with unneeded info always displayed),etc. And if I wanted to use the home page as my slideshow, only the first screen would display them at a decent size. So I looked into Picasa and found it to be highly superior to Flickr in these particular areas. Flickr’s got the name-brand that automatically attracts new users. To all of them I say, check out Picasa too!
If you actually want any of your photos to last until you are 80, get old fashioned prints!
My requirements for online photo storage are different. I want to use an API (Application Program Interface) to let users on my website upload pictures to a service such as flickr / picasa and allow users to comment on said photos and create albums / delete albums / move stuff around etc..
I don’t mind if my photos appear on either site (public) and I don’t mind paying for the service if my site grows and needs lots of storage space.
Basically I want users to take advantage of the storage of PICASA and image processing ability but I want to host the content (so to speak) on my website.
I’m looking at picasa for now, but I was wondering how others felt about this kind of thing? I previously used Coppermine to do this, but as stated in the article the problem is Coppermine’s framework is very dated and lacks lots of functionality.
Plus its bridged to another open source system. I want to move away from this problem.
Any help or experience is appreciated.
I looked at both Flickr and Picasa, but finally decided to settle on Picasa. Picasa had one very important component that I thought would be extremely useful especially if you have a lot of pictures to organize. Their desktop app is a great way to organize, sort and search through and provide quick little tweaks to the pics before uploading them. I normally fight for time to prep all the pics before posting them but this way I could start off sharing them and sync up the other pics the next time around into the same album. In my context, that has been very helpful.
Thanks for the discussion here, i think i’ll take picasa side !
I’m having an almost identical dilemma as you are/were having. In my web diving, I came across this picasa plug-in: http://picasa2flickr.sourceforge.net/
I’m uploading my first picasa album to flickr right now. Ultimately, this plug-in just prolongs the decision on which service to keep. :-/
I read all of your comments because like all of you I’m also thinking about to find the best way to store publish and share pictures with world and friends.
To make a choice, there is some questions to answer.
1. What kind of pictures you want to share?
2. To who pictures are destinated?
3. How many pictures are you going to upload?
I think Flickr has a better website presentation than picasa, your pictures will be more beautifull to see, so if your photos are kind of artwork than friends stuff or events, Flichr seems better. Flickr can be use as a personal gallery to present your work.
If your aim is to share pictures with friends about things you’ve done with them. Most of people of your social network have a google account or a Flickr account ?
If you are using lot’s of Google Products and tools, you must know that there is a great interaction between them. “Name Tagging” pictures, you directly have a autocompete field of your gmail contacts to easy tag a person in a picture. In an other hand, if you want to put a profile picture in your gmail contacts, you can browse your picasa galleries.
If you have many (like 50) albums in picasa, is it easy to browse them? Will you find easily what you are looking for? Because picasa doesn’t have a categorisation of your albums, at least for now. Flickr is better for that, there is many ways to classify them.
As Flickr has a complicated (but original) way to classify pictures (classes, set, tags, …) rather than picasa (only albums), using Flickr can disturbe a normal photo browsing.
After writing this comment, I think I will use both of Picasa and Flickr but for different goals, Picasa will be more for family and friends stuff because most of my friends have a google account, kind of Facebook, and flickr for pictures I want them public.
Interesting discussion. I’m a Picasa user, though I have considered switching to Flickr on pretty much a monthly basis.
Frustratingly, Picasa Web Albums’ free account 1GB storage limit hasn’t changed since the product’s introduction, and it does lack the more social components of Flickr’s site. Comments on photos seem pretty rare, and it seems to reduce image fidelity somehow by shrinking photo sizes before they’re uploaded. At the same time, I have bristled at Flickr’s ‘deletion’ (really, just rendering invisible, but they might as well be deleted as far as their utility is concerned) of photos if one chooses not to renew one’s $25 annual subscription, and I have not found a compelling Windows application to use for Flickr editing and uploading, so I stick with Picasa. I haven’t wanted to get stuck with $25 every year just to access my photos, and the limits of Flickr’s free service are just too crippling for me to ever use it for anything beyond stuff I would otherwise just post on Facebook.
As of November 2009, however, Picasa may have made up my mind for me. They’ve just announced new pricing for their ‘extra storage’, lowering it to as little as $5 annually for up to 20GB of data. I’m pretty sure this storage is shared between Gmail and Picasa, as well as other Google products, but that’s still a pretty compelling offer. I may not feel I’m getting my annual $25 out of Flickr, but for $5 a year, Picasa’s 20GB is a really simple buy — that’s less than a Blu Ray rental nowadays.
Added to the now-cheap storage (which, compared to Flickr’s unlimited $25 yearly fee, is $20 for 80GB), Picasa is a fairly robust photo organizer, and offers really nice perks like facial recognition and tagging, geotagging with either Google Maps or Google Earth, and some good tools for quick & dirty editing like cropping, contrast, etc. The Picasa program sold me years ago, and I think its online counterpart may have finally done the same.
My only problem now is that I take too many photos… If I were to back up absolutely everything, I’d need over 100GB of storage!
I’ve been battling this out also. I basically just want a link in the sidebar of our family blog so that family can see all the pics. Paying doesnt matter to me. However, I find Google glitchy. Constant bugs and weird things. For example, it is not allowing me to delete pictures out of my own albums this evening. Does not matter which computer I use. And then trying to directly contact support? LOL …. not likely.
After considering both services, I was easily swayed by Picasa because their software works on Linux, which I use 90% of the time compared to windows or Mac. I’m paying $20 a year for 80gb. So far, I’m very happy with it.
an amazing post and a very interactive discussion going on here has made my life so much more simpler… I need more albums, so flickr is out and Picasa is in.
thanks again