Flickr and other photo services - which do you use?

[nickao]

I have over 10,000 digital pictures. Before I joined flickr(4000 pics posted) they would just stay on my computer and were a hassle to retrieve. Actually, no one ever looked at them before I used Flickr. Like moms photo albums the pics were sitting years with family and friends never looking through them. With Flickr that has all changed.

I love the yahoo flickr service. I can have access to all my pic(sthe ones I upload) and can control who sees them  and when. Plus any picture I have there I can have made into a T-shirt or cup, calender, mouse pad, business card, greeting card,etc with a few clicks. Emailing the pics is a breeze too. The best thing  is the clients LOVE to see progress pics as I  am working on the projects.

I have a lot of friends I met on flickr and most are photography buffs. I have met many woodworkers the world over on flickr also. If you have a bunch of digital pics I suggest you join a service like flickr, I am sure there are many more. Could you see me uploading 4000 pics to the forum, its just not feasible.

I emailed many of you on the forum with a flickr invite, about half took me up on it. The people that did take me up on it and joined the FREE service have access to over 4000 of my project and family pictures. Cruise through flickr if you have time, not just my pictures, but the entire site. There are many great turners and furniture makers as well as almost every other art or craft you can think of. And of course photography as flickr definitely caters to that.

Flickr has a free service, but for 24.95 a year I get unlimited bandwidth and am very happy to pay it. The friends I have made and the ease my friends and family can see my projects and family pics makes it well worth it.

If you post on this forum and you want to see some of my work on flickr, PM me.


What services do you use, if any, other than flickr?

Nickao

 

[nickao]

I was looking around the web to try to see what others used as their picture service here, is what I found:

I guess Picassa is flickr's head to head competition. Picassa is owned by Google.

When Google launched Picasa Web Albums in June 2006, we wrote a detailed review comparing Google's offering with Flickr, a Yahoo! owned service. Flickr clearly emerged as the winner in Round One, but lot of things have changed since then. Both Google and Yahoo have updated their online photo sharing services in the last few months and so we decided to do a comparison again - Flickr vs Picasa Albums Round II.

Photo Storage Space and Uploading Limits

When you have a free Flickr account, you can upload 100MB of photos each calendar month but the counter is reset ever month and the overall storage space is therefore unlimited even for free Flickr accounts. With Picasa Web Albums, you get only only 250MB of free storage space.

Cost & Benifits of a Pro Account

Picasa Web PricesA Flickr Pro Account is available for US$24.95 a year and you get unlimited storage space and unlimited bandwidth. A $25 yearly subscription on Picasa Web Albums will get you only 25 GB of extra storage space and if you pay $500 per year, you get 500 GB of storage space in Picasa Web Albums. Unlike Flickr, there's no unlimited space option in Picasa Web.

Limitations of a Free Account

For free users, Flickr will limit the number of photos that are displayed to just the 200 most recently uploaded photos though the older photos won't be deleted. Also the large size photos are automatically resized to 1024 pixels at the time of uploading. Each photo that you upload to a free Flickr account must be less than 5MB in size.

Picasa Web Albums won't resize your high resolution pictures even if you are a free user. They limit the individual photo size to 10 MB.

Picasa
Uploading Photos Online

Both Picasa Web and Flickr offers basic tools for uploading pictures online but Picasa Web Album users have an advantage here - they can use the Picasa Image Editor to upload their photos directly using the software. No such "official" tools exist for Flickr yet that can enhance images and also upload them.

Downloading Pictures from your Photo Galleries

Download Web Photos from PicasaWhen it comes to downloading images from the web to your hard disk, Picasa Web Albums wins by a large margin again thanks to Picasa software. Users can select the Picasa albums / pictures that they want to download and the software will automatically download the entire set in a single click. A useful feature that you will miss in Flickr.

Other Unique Features of Flickr

? Flickr allows anyone to add notes on your photos or annotate them.

? Flickr easily lets you search public photos of other users by tags, descriptions or even based on Camera models.

? With a Flickr pro account, you can replace one photo with another keeping the tag information, picture description and comments intact. May come in handy when someone is using your photos without credit.

Picasa vs Flickr - Who's the winner ?

Google has definitely paid lot of attention to Picasa in the last few months - they have added support for tags, introduced pro accounts for international users and significantly enhanced the Picasa desktop software.

However, Picasa Web is very expensive - Flickr offers unlimited storage space for $25 an year while Google wants you to pay a dollar per GB.

Picasa software definitely makes life extremely simple for managing your online Picasa Web Album account but other than that, we really found no convincing reason to switch from Flickr to Picasa Web Album.

Flickr clearly walks away as the winner of Round II as well. In Flickr, you feel like being an integral part of some community, something which you would never experience inside Picasa Web Albums.

I picked this up on the web, I did not write it.

Nickao

 

[johne]

Nickao,

Do you still make backups for yourself? Or do you rely on Flickr alone to store your pictures.

 

[nickao]

Definitely have  backups of everything. But in my house fire the backups meant nothing, the hard drives melted. So having the pics online is a great safety feature. I lost 20 years of portfolio pictures of work I had done since I was 18. Since 2003 I have been building back up, but I will never be able to show my work for those years.

Nickao

 

[bruegf]

I like pbase (www.pbase.com) over the others.  Not free, but very inexpensive.

Fred

 

[nickao]

I went through pbase and there are nice quality pics on there!

It seems you only get about 2000 pics for 23.00 though - Flickr is unlimited for 24.95.

I think the quality of the actual pictures on pbase may be slightly better than flickr .

Looks like a  nice service!

Nick

About Flickr

 

[nicolespag]

Hey Nick,

I use Flickr too, but I hate that I have to pay for photo storage when services like Picassa exist.  I use Picassa too from Google, but find the interface pales in comparison to Flickr.  Maybe this new service by Adobe...I posted something above before I saw your post might be a solution.  Though I usually find it's the community that makes me stay at flickr, oh and the ability for me to email pictures from my phone

There are a few other services out there that friends of mine use, the one that is coming to mind is called Smugmug. Seems similar to Flickr but I haven't had a chance to play with it much.