Charles Lau dot Com

I have both accounts, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums. I have been wondering which web albums I should commit myself with. I wouldn’t want my friends to go to flickr to see this album, and picasa for another album. It has been bothering me for almost a week when I was uploading photographs of myself going to Batam recently. While working on the comparison myself, I realize I can write something juicy from my findings to share with all of you here.

Picasa Web Albums
Limitation: 1GB space.
Upgrade Choice: USD$20 per year for 10GB for Picasa or any other Google applications you may have.
Able to display directly on external websites.
Software provided for managing photographs, and to upload to Picasa Web.

Flickr
Space Limitation: Allocation of 100MB usage every month, limited to create 3 Sets (aka Web Albums),
Upgrade Choice: USD$24.95 per year for unlimited space, unlimited sets (Currently limited to 3 sets, which is also known as albums), and video uploads.
Able to display directly on external websites.
Software provided for uploading purpose only.

My Analysis
Seriously, the winner is very clear between them. With a purchase of USD$24.95, I get to upload as much as I want. However, will any average photographer like myself use so much? I thought 1GB is enough to use for now. Anyway, Picasa’s 1GB with full features seems to be good enough for me to organize my photographs properly. Moreover, Picasa has a better software (than Flickr) installed in my computer. I have both of them.

Below is the Picasa software.

Below is the Flickr software.

In terms of software functionality, flickr is purely an upload software for you to upload with ease. No doubt for their upload to be smooth. But it is just for uploading. As for Picasa, it has a lot of functions. It even allows you to do simple editing of the photographs. You can do a slideshow for your photographs, a movie, or even create a gift CD to be burned out for your loved ones.

Now, I am going to talk about the website.

Below is the Picasa website.

Below is the Flickr website.

On the web, Flickr is focusing more on sharing photographs (and now sharing videos). Picasa is focusing more on keeping your photographs online. If you are only looking for storage to keep your precious photographs, I think Picasa will be a better place since they focus on security of your photographs. They allow you to share your photographs to people through emails only. Flickr is focusing on sharing with the community. Flickr is more like a social networking website where you share beautiful photographs. Looks like Flickr is a great place for photograph enthusiasts to gather and check one another out.

Conclusion
If you want to have privacy, picasa is the best choice for you because it allows you to manage your photographs in your computer and to upload to the web to share with the people you wish to allow. Picasa definitely also allows public access to your photographs if you want to. But as far as I know, public photographs are only accessible with the picasa web search. That’s not much of other activities other than to comment on other people’s photographs.

As for Flickr, it is more like a community of photograph enthusiasts. You may have taken a lot of interesting photographs to share in a group. It has a lot of restrictions in terms of creating sets (aka web albums) to store different categories of photographs. Limited 100mb of quota space to upload every month. Paid version simply removes all the restrictions, and allows you to upload video to share as well. Great if you have a hard disk of photographs you want to transfer to.

Google owns Picasa, while Yahoo owns Flickr. Seriously speaking, I believe Flickr might one day merge with Picasa and two will become one… For me, I kept on hesitating when I almost sent my money to Flickr because I kept on thinking of using Google first since I have not much photographs to upload and 1GB is enough for me currently. But anyway, it is really your choice now.