PicasaWeb to Flickr

AMFBlog_FeaturedImage_FlickrPicasaWeb

It’s been a hard decision, but I’m abandoning a Google service.

Back when it was just Picasa, I would export galleries to HTML and put them into my website. It was great. Picasa did the resizing, the flowing div tag creation — it was just great.

Then it became even better. In summer 2005, Google came out with a cloud-hosted service: PicasaWebAlbums. This was the way to go. Google was integrating Blogger, PicasaWebAlbums, and even Gmail. I was going “all in” with Google and its services. Within a year I’d maxed out the space for hosting, so I powered up and paid for more space for hosting albums. Because of the ongoing growth of space, I haven’t had to power up again. I’m not shooting and exporting photos as fast as Google’s space grows.

So why now am I switching?

Social functionality. Flickr is what photographers (or at least aspiring, amateur/semi-pro photographers) use. Entire communities are built out of it. To get feedback, to learn from others, to organize and college — Flickr seems like it’s best fit.

To be fair, I should admit that Picasa has made huge strides in making albums collaborative and sharable, but their organization tools are definitely lacking. I shoot for lots of different audiences — most of whom don’t want to have to sort through albums from each of the other types. (Ironically, church members often don’t care about looking through some of my classmates’ ordination photos). While I could have created separate Google accounts for each of the areas, that’s definitely overkill.

Also overkill is how many pictures I put up in the galleries. While 300 individual snapshots might be good for those wanting “the whole event” — I’d rather burn them a DVD and just pick my favorite 15.

The transition isn’t quite complete (I haven’t taken down all of the Picasa albums yet), but I expect it to be by year’s end.

And who knows — if it becomes too cumbersome to use Flickr I may switch yet again. Competition in innovation is an amazing thing!

PS – This was a personal decision. I still recommend to all congregations that they use PicasaWebAlbums. Not only are they more collaborative, but they’re also more friendly for non-techie parishioners to use.

Speak Your Mind