It wasn’t long ago I was waxing lyrical about Picasa and Picasaweb. Not to be accused of sticking to my guns though, I’ve switched to Flickr, and there’s a few reasons why.
Firstly, I’ve decided to give iPhoto another go. Although I have Picasa running on Windows XP under Parallels on my iMac, it’s nice to just use an OS X application. Also, a lot of my worries with using iPhoto have gone away now I’ve tried it on a ‘real’ machine (I need to post a rantette about my Mac Mini another time…) Picasaweb does have an iPhoto exporter, but it’s not the same tight integration it has with the main Picasa application.
Flickr’s integration with iPhoto isn’t any better than Picasa’s (in fact, you have to pay for the 3rd party FlicktExport utility if you choose to use it (which I did)), but since I was changing one part of my photo solution, it was worth looking at all of it at the same time.
The big plusses for me about Flickr are really 2 things – the community and the new capacity / bandwidth limits for ‘pro’ users.
The community aspects are great because I can see what my friends & family are up to, provide feedback, and they can do the same. This is good for me as I experiment with my still new digital SLR. Flickr provides some great web feeds that I use to keep track of what’s going on.
The new capacity / bandwidth limits are also compelling – unlimited on both counts. This allows me to upload the full size images for all the photos I really care about keeping, and at the same time share those full size images with anyone that cares.
Flickr’s still not perfect though. The slideshow behaviour is pitifully poor, and was almost a show-stopper for me. They really need to sort that out. Also, the UI I think could do with a few tweaks to make it as usable as the Picasaweb interface.
Now I just have the task of going through all my photos, finding the ones I care about, cleaning them up, collating them into sets, and uploading them – that’s a fair size project to keep me occupied in the new year.
Mike Roberts