Comments on: On Picasa Web Albums

By: Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov » I love Flickr

Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov » I love Flickr — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 01:27:29 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: Leonid Mamchenkov

Leonid Mamchenkov — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:24:19 +0000

Sergey,

There are a number of tools for Flickr as well. They are probably not as great as Picasa, but they are there too.

By: Leonid Mamchenkov

Leonid Mamchenkov — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:23:05 +0000

Andre,

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.

By: Leonid Mamchenkov

Leonid Mamchenkov — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:19:37 +0000

Alexey,

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.

By: Sergey

Sergey — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:59:48 +0000

I 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.

By: Andre

Andre — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 16:40:29 +0000

Since you have your own hosting, simply install Gallery2 and configure it the way you want.

By: Alexey

Alexey — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 13:56:34 +0000

Ok, 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.
On 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…

By: Leonid Mamchenkov

Leonid Mamchenkov — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 13:44:12 +0000

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.