Bengfort.com

I have been a Flickr user for some time now, but a couple months ago I finally ran up against Flickr’s photo limits (200 pictures) and had to decide whether or not to upgrade to a Flickr Pro account for $24,99 a year. I had initially decided to use Flickr to share family photos and use plug-ins from our blog to manage them- rather than its more common usage as a photo sharing social networking site. Unfortunately, the regular account’s restrictions- only 2 sets (albums) and 200 photos was not substantial enough for our website. I was still planning on sticking with Flickr, however, because the Flickr API was easy and Flickr’s batch photo management system was superb and I had also built up a pretty good network of contacts on Flickr.

Meanwhile, I had been receiving shared album links from other friends and family via Picasa. At first (and with previous versions of Picasa), I was not impressed. I had other software that did what the desktop version of Picasa did, and it was nothing exciting. The web albums side was also just a means to share pictures privately, there was no social networking aspect, so generally I just downloaded the pictures from Picasa or embedded a slide show in another page I was working. However, I could not ignore the fact that most of my friends and family have GMail accounts (including me), so I decided to check it out.

Picasa 3 (the desktop software) is much improved from older versions, and has a connection with the web albums side of Picasa that is much better and cleaner than the batch photo organization tools from Yahoo. Plus, because I already had a GMail account- the social network on Picasa was already developed, and with a few minor tweaks I managed to build a network that rivaled my Flickr account. Picasa is now my default photo viewer and has some awesome details that improve web photo orgnaization, including watermarking and copyright management- as well as a desktop organization system that ties in with Windows Explorer. I still use Adobe CS4 to do all my photo editing and image work, but Picasa is a great image manager because it organizes both web and desktop (and external harddrive) images.

Google does not limit you on the number of photos you post, but rather on the amount of disk space- for free you get 1GB. However, upgraded storage is offered at very reasonable prices (comparative to Flickr), but here is the gravy- with Google, your upgraded storage goes across all your accounts- Gmail, Picasa, etc. So I purchased 10GB for $20 and vastly improved my Google experience. Photo management also has tie-ins with other Google applications- including geotagging from Google Earth. The public photos page also now rivals Flickr’s photostream as a place to put up your public albums.

I guess the bottom line is this: if you are a Google user (and most of my family is) then you should be using Picasa- you’ll find that your Google expereience improved dramatically. However, if you are a Yahoo user, then Flickr is still a very good web application, and you probably don’t care about all the tie ins that I mentioned above.

Just as a note- you will now see that the pictures on this blog (in the sidebar) are now from Picasa and not the Flickr photostream. If you would like to see my public photos page it is here: http://picasaweb.google.com/bbengfort.