Where Should You Store And Showcase Your Photos?
There are many on-line photo sites available when choosing where to store and showcase your photographs. I will give a brief comparison at the end as compared to Smugmug, Zenfolio, Photobucket, and Facebook, but the two elephants in the room, Flickr and Picasa, are what this article is all about.
Google is the biggest name out there especially when it comes to search engines, but Flickr seems to celebrate a similar fame about images. Flickr and Picasa offer a wide number of services, often differing largely from the other, like for example Picasa’s desktop application that does some editing and organization, which Flickr doesn’t have.
This article will be comparing these two sites mainly on storage and showcase advantages! It will also assume that you have/will pay for it, and you are not planning to use it exclusively for free.
SUMMARY:
FLICKR is Yahoo’s photo album site. It is probably one of the most popular hosting and community sites on-line that holds over 5 billion photos uploaded, and continually increasing daily. It has a community of over 27 million people. If you have a Yahoo account, then you are already a Flickr member. Just browse over to www.flickr.com and use your Yahoo log-in and id, and you’re all set. Flickr also hosts video uploads.
PICASA is Google’s photo album site. It has a free desktop application that can organize and edit your photos. The desktop application can also be used to automatically upload your photos to Picasa on-line. It hosts an average of about 500,000 people and also hosts videos, but recommend that you use YouTube instead of Picasa, which also belongs to Google. If you have a Google account, then you are already a Picasa member.
STORAGE & UPLOADS:
Picasa has a 1gb limit to its free account, which accepts video files of any size, or photo files of 20mb or 50 megapixels maximum each. For more storage, you can opt for an additional 20gb for $5.00 a year, or add 20gb at a time, up to a maximum of 1tb for $256.00 a year. This additional storage can be shared across your Google accounts, GMails, Docs, etc. If you need more than 1tb, you can make a special arrangement with Google.
Flickr’s free account has an unlimited capacity, but uploads will accept only 100mb worth of photos, not larger than 10mb, every month. You can access only your last 200 uploaded photos, but the rest will be stored even if you can’t see them. Video size maximum is 150mb. If you want to stick to the free account, there is a way to see all your photos. The trick is to create a group and put them all in it, since there are no limits and restrictions to groups when viewing, whether or not the photo comes from a free or Pro account.
When you avail of the Flickr Pro account for $24.95 a year, the restrictions will be lifted and you can access all your past photos immediately. The capacity, though still unlimited, only accepts file sizes of no larger than 20mb. Video’s can be no larger than 500mb or 90 seconds in length.
IMAGE/VIDEO QUALITY:
Flickr allows users to upload JPEG’s, GIF’s, and PNG files, but any other file type uploaded will be converted to JPEG’s. If you want you can also upload RAW files, but you have to do a bit of modification to the file itself, which involves compressing them to RAR and appending them to the end of a JPEG. It isn’t for most people who aren’t tech-savvy, but it is possible, and have to be considered a plus for Flickr.
Picasa will only accept JPEG’s, and if you use the desktop application, it will convert everything to JPEG’s before uploading to Picasa. Unfortunately, this means that you can’t store your RAW or PNG files on-line using Picasa, which is a very big minus for professionals using Picasa for storage.
When displaying images publicly, Fickr displays 75×75 pixel thumbnails, and increases to 100, 240, 500, and 1024 pixels. Picasa simply keeps them according to the sizes uploaded.
Uploaded 720p HD video’s in Flickr Pro accounts can playback at 720p HD quality, but Picasa has no HD. Picasa’s video playbacks at a maximum of 640×480, therefore it might be better to use YouTube.
COMMUNITY:
The Picasa community is quite small, leaning on the quiet side. Discovering new images, and people, are a bit slower or laid back.
Flickr users enjoy faster responses when getting feedbacks, especially when questions are asked and needs answering. Groups are so abundant and active, making the experience overwhelming at times.
Getty Images recently tied up with Flickr, allowing Flickr images to be searchable through Getty’s stock photosite, which you can allow or disallow.
ImageKind also has a tie up with Flickr.
ON-LINE INTEGRATION & PRIVACY:
Unlike Facebook and Picasa, Flickr hasn’t changed much in the past several years. Instead, new features come to Flickr via third party developers. Picasa, on the other hand, is backed up by Google’s technology and innovation, making it almost seamless when updating or integrating with Buzz, Twitter, Blogger, GMail, etc. Flickr users can do some stuff that Picasa does, but not as smooth.
Both Flickr and Picasa offer adequate privacy, make sure that you go through ALL settings to make sure, and don’t ever trust the site’s defaults. If you want more security and privacy, including not allowing right-clicking saving, then you should seriously consider using Smugmug instead.
SAFETY:
The photos you upload to either Flickr or Picasa are sent to multiple servers worldwide. Therefore, in an unlikely event of, say, a catastrophic server farm fire, wherein all the hard drives were singed to ash, you can be assured that somewhere out there, on planet Earth or beyond, are many servers with your photos in them. This beats owning domains with unlimited storage, because not all domain server companies have storage systems as vast as Google and Yahoo does.
CONCLUSION:
Storage & Uploads: Flickr wins! – Unlimited storage and uploads for only $24.95 a year.
Image Quality: Picasa wins! – “As is” images displayed, albeit less security.
Video Quality: Flickr wins! – 720p HD quality video playback.
Community: Flickr wins! – 27 million users vs 500,000 users.
On-line Integration: Picasa wins! – New features always added, and still newer ones coming.
Showcasing: Flickr wins! – 27 million users, plus tie-up with Getty Images and ImageKind.
Privacy: It’s a tie!
Safety: It’s a tie!
OTHERS:
SMUGMUG is a purely paid site which you can test for free for a month. They have an excellent service and technical support team. If you are stuck, or have a question, just send an e-mail and it will be answered in a few minutes, or less than a day, and that’s really really fast! Storage is unlimited for JPEG, GIF, and PNG, at 24mb per file, or 48 megapixels. If you want to store other file types like RAW, TIFF, PSD, and any other type, up to 600mb size per file size is allowed when you opt for the SmugVault, an added feature offered by Smugmug for an additional monthly fee. You can sell your photos many different ways, from downloads, to printing on many types of paper, or t-shirts, and mugs, etc. Smugmug boasts having server farms on at least 3 continents, which I read about over a year ago before joining Smugmug, so that fact may be different today.
If you have a Flickr account, you can easily re-copy your photos to Smugmug via a web site-to-site transfer.
ZENFOLIO is about as popular as Smugmug, with very similar features, but they don’t have a good support team. In fact, all the questions I’ve asked them haven’t been answered yet by their staff. Therefore I cannot even give you simple details about accepted files and maximum sizes, etc., which is why I opted to use Smugmug instead. Although, those I know who use Zenfolio seem to be happy with their services. Zenfolio is also cheaper, therefore their users are paying less than they would if they joined Smugmug.
PHOTOBUCKET is a photo hosting site. If you want to share your photos to many different on-line systems without complaints from the other photo sites, then maybe Photobucket is what you want. Free users have a 25gb maximum bandwidth use, and can upload only 1mb photos. The Photobucket paid account gives you 5gb of storage, and an unmetered bandwidth capacity. Paid users can also upload 2mb size images. Photobucket is not known for their security and privacy, but you don’t need Photobucket for security anyway.
FACEBOOKis the most popular social site on the planet today. I believe that if you want to showcase, nothing beats Facebook! Facebook has recently removed their number of photo uploading limits, but there is still a maximum allowable 200 photos per album. You can of course create an unlimited number of albums, so that kinda defeats the 200 photo limit altogether. The maximum size of Facebook’s stored photos is now at 720 pixels. Regardless of what size photo you upload to Facebook, they resize them to 720 pixels, making storage of original files useless, but at least it’s still up there to be seen and saved, just in case you lose the original file!
I hope this article can help you in selecting the best photosite for your needs. Feel free to contact me for anything, and if I can help you, I will. 😎