On Picasa Web Albums
I am currently evaluating whether Picasa Web Albums deserve to host my pictures. Picasa attracted me mainly because it is free of the major Flickr’s problem which is displaying the picture in 500 pixel size only, including slideshow. I mean yes, in Flickr you can click on all sizes, then on a size you want but that’s two clicks while I want an appropriate size picture to be the default. In Picasaweb, the approach is by far more superior: it just resizes the picture according to your browser window size. In slideshow mode, if you set the browser to full screen the picture will occupy the maximum of your screen allowing users with high resolution displays (such as modern laptops with around 2000 horizontal pixels) enjoy the highest resolution slideshows.
However, picasaweb being a younger project and maybe for some other reasons too, it is missing many things Flickr has, such as greater community and tagging. Read this comparison review for more details. But most important missing features for me are:
- Sharpening. In order to look nice on a computer screen which is a low resolution device comparing to photo prints, a picture must be pre-processed to increase its sharpness. The nature of this operation demands that it shoud be applied after the picture is scaled down to a particular size. Flickr seem to do it perfectly - its pictures look equally sharp in all available resolutions. Picasaweb seem not to apply sharpen at all. Moreover it uses lower JPEG compression quality than Flickr losing even more details.
- Picasaweb premium account is only available in the US. 250Mb of free storage is barely enough for 3 albums.
So I am still waiting for one of two things to happen. Either Flickr allows for larger (ideally customisable) image sizes or Picasaweb improves picture quality and expands its premium service into Europe.
I tried Picasa and didn’t like it. But then, being a Flickr fan, I am biased.
I don’t have a problem with Flickr’s 500 pixel default image size. In fact I like it so, and even if I have 2000 pixel resolution, I’d still prefer about 500 pixel for images that I am looking at.
Customizing the image size is even worse. When all images on the site are of the same size, it is very easy to get used to it and navigate/understand the site faster. Every custom size will require a “re-evaluation” of the page, which will definitely slow down the browsing. I am spending about two hours daily on Flickr, looking through about 4,000-5,000 images, and one thing I don’t want - is to be slowed down.
Also, I agree with your points - Flickr has an excellent community, and Picasa premium is way too expensive. With my 10,000+ images at Flickr for a mere $25 USD/year, I don’t think I could afford Picasa. Even if it had all the bells and whistles, it’d still be out of my budget.
But to each his own. If you like Picasa or any other site, do use it. Just make sure it has an RSS feed for the rest of us.
October 15th, 2006 at 2:44 pmOk, maybe per user customisation is too much, but look at Picasa - it uses floating layout instead of Flickr’s fixed-width one. Whatever album you are browsing an image fits the maximum of available width and I like it.
October 15th, 2006 at 2:56 pmOn a 2000xsomething laptop Flickr’s photo is a quarter of a screen horizontally - that’s awfully small, that’s almost a large thumbnail. You just can’t see the details. Picasa’s dynamic resolution approach is a far greater idea I think…
Since you have your own hosting, simply install Gallery2 and configure it the way you want.
October 15th, 2006 at 5:40 pmI don’t use either of the (at least for now), but I guess Picasa has a great advantage in that you can upload photos directly from their Picasa tool which is absolutely great for managing as well as fixing photos.
@Andre: Well, it might sound cool at first place, but when you have to deal with server down-time, traffic and so on… Yaks, I’d vote for a more stable service then.
October 15th, 2006 at 8:59 pmAlexey,
I don’t like the idea of dynamic resizing. What would be nice though, is for me, as a Flickr user, to set an option for the size of the images I want to see. Meaning that, the default could stay at 500 pixels, but if I use the wide screen notebook and want to have larger versions of images, I could specify so in my options, setting, for example, 900 pixels.
The key here is to let me, the Flickr user, control the size of the images that I want to see. The fact that I am running the browser at 2000 pixels wide, does not necessarily mean that I want images that large.
October 15th, 2006 at 10:19 pmAndre,
There is more to Flickr and Picasa than just application. There is a community of people who comment, group, discuss, tag, and do all sorts of cool things with images. I don’t know much about Picasa, but Flickr has some magically great way of bringing these people together and connecting them with each other.
But even on an application level, as Sergey said, there are advantages to online image sharing, such as maintenance and configuration efforts, bandwidth costs, uptime, backups, etc.
October 15th, 2006 at 10:23 pmSergey,
There are a number of tools for Flickr as well. They are probably not as great as Picasa, but they are there too.
October 15th, 2006 at 10:24 pm[...] If you haven’t noticed - I love Flickr. There are plenty of posts on this blog that support this statement. And I am not limited to this blog either. So, I thought, I’d just draw something to emphasize the point. [...]
October 16th, 2006 at 2:27 am