8degrees of vaughan rowsell

Picasa vs Flickr

December 23, 2006 at 8:59 pm In Rants, stuff I like, No Comments

Here is my first play with Picasa to see how easy it is to use vs Flickr. So far Picasa is impressing me…

My First Picasa Album

My First Flickr Set

What is Picasa? I first stumbled across Picasa yonks ago on my search for a nice tool to organise pics. I was on a PC at that stage (okay, so I am a reformed PC user) and it was a brilliant program to sort your pics, tweak them, tag them, mix and match them. I could yank my pics from my digital camera and find all sorts of hidden jpgs around my hard drive and consolidated them all. It was great, and it still is, well I assume Google haven’t made it worse. However I am on a mac now (hallelujah) and have iPhoto, which is much much better. However Google now has Picasa Web Albums, which to all extents is Google’s version of Flickr. They have just release some mac tools, I was intrigued so I took a look.

Picasa Web Albums

In true Google style, Picasa Web Albums is lightweight and simple. You can upload, tag and group your pics with ease. It is really very very simple. You can add video too which is the first step on the way towards the obvious merge of Picasa and YouTube. I was very pleased to easily find the mac Picasa tools, and to find they worked really well. Although there is no Picasa photo management software for the mac as such, there is a export plugin for iPhoto and a Picasa Web Uploader app which makes it easy for you to click and drag your pics up to your Picasa Web Albums account. Super simple and super easy.

Flickr

What is Flickr? Where have you been? Flickr is definitely the incumbent in the whole web photo sharing space, and if you were not aware it is now owned by Yahoo! Flickr is reported to be by far is the most popular, (however see graph below) but does it make it better or does that give it baggage? Due to one reason and another, but generally due to living under a rock for the last 12 months while I slogged my guts out working, I haven’t had the chance to play and explore the world of Flickr. So you could say I have an open mind to photo sharing. So I went and signed up and got terribly confused. Probably because I setup my Picasa Web Album first, which was pretty straight forward, but I just struggled with the Yahoo! style interface which at best baffles. There is no consistency with the navigation or links and Yahoo!’s interface design is something I have griped about in the past. I just can’t use it. I had Picasa set up in minutes, and had even found the downloads of the mac tools for Picasa, but yahoo had more options, more links and terminology that just conflicted with what seemed natural to me. As you move from one tool to another, the navigation can completely change leaving the user lost.

On the positive side, I found there was more features oriented to sharing pics through the online community. However after investing half an hour in Flickr, I found myself frustrated. I had to use a third party tool to get the pics out of iPhoto and up to Flickr. the tool was payware and limited you to 5 uploads. It also failed to authenticate with Flickr from time to time and refused to reconnect.
The Slideshows

Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/63814767@N00/sets/72157594431788518/show/

Picasa – http://picasaweb.google.com/vaughan.rowsell/MyFirstPicasaAlbumOn8degrees/photo#s5011039879104216066

The slideshows on both are good. Flickr uses flash and Picasa, following Googles strategy to use JavaScript tools wherever they can, uses some pretty nifty xhtml and JavaScript. Flickr’s player looked a little dated and Picasa had a much cleaner interface. Flickr’s Flash player had nice transitions between the pics, but the Picasa player did not, which was odd considering they used fade effects on the navigation (perhaps a mac Firefox thing). Flickr’s one didn’t resize with my browser and Picasa’s did. Picasa’s won me over in the end because it was simple, flexible and I like to know what its code is doing (geek!).
So where does that leave us? There were so many more things I wanted to cover but this post is already 12 paragraphs longer than I expected. So in quick summary, I have found that I am leaning more towards Picasa. Now is it because I have my web 2.0 tent pitched firmly in the Google camp? Is it because I don’t have the patience for Yahoo!s infuriating interfaces? Is it because Picasa plugged into my iPhoto nice and simple? Well, yes! It is because of all of this I am backing Picasa as the web photo album of choice, and not only because of these fickle reasons but also because I know that Google will make it something better. Simple.