For a while now I’ve been a little envious of people using Flickr to have fancy photo galleries online. I’ve almost used it a couple of times, but for me the whole idea of using a web site to manage pictures just didn’t work. I’ve used Picasa as my photo library and I wasn’t prepared to move away from a desktop-based client to handle my (more than 1GB worth of) digital photos.
When I bought my Mac Mini I was hoping iPhoto might be amazing, and I was considering using it and .Mac to host photos. iPhoto just didn’t work for me either, and I kept using Picasa, and my Photo Blogger Blog (which Picasa integrates fairly nicely with) to publish the odd photo now and then.
But a Photo Blog isn’t the same as an online photo album, and what I really wanted was for Google to add online features to Picasa so that I could manage a web photo library from a desktop client.
Someone at Google must have been listening, since they’ve done just this, and its free. The first 250MB costs zilch, and if you want more its $25 / year for 6GB of storage. That means I can have my entire, full resolution, photo library online, share subsets of it with the world, and yet still have a local client for editting, viewing offline, etc. Flickr, your time is up [1].
My online Picasa gallery is at http://picasaweb.google.com/mike.b.roberts and this replaces my Photo Blog.
[1] OK, Mac-weenies will still use Flickr because Picasa doesn’t have a Mac client yet. But you can still upload/manage photos using the Picasa web interface, and I doubt it will be that long before a Mac-Picasa is released.
Mike Roberts