Today, 13 June 2006, Google launched Picasa Web Albums. In case you’re not familiar with Picasa, it’s Google’s free desktop photo management software. Picasa is a quick download that makes it easy for people to organize and edit their pictures using something that’s simple and clutter-free. Google is now trying to bring that same experience to online photo sharing with Picasa Web Albums. The official Google Blog was the first to break this news on 13 June.
A blog post entitled Google Picasa Web Albums Review with Screenshots in computers.net does give quite a detailed description and screenshots of Picasa Web Albums functionalities. But what was more interesting were blog posts which compared Flickr with Picasa Web Album (I wonder why no one bothered to talk about WebShots, another photo online storage service). Picasa Web Album -vs- Flickr gives an unbiased comparison of the two services. Flickr vs Picasa Web Albums does give an excellent comparison between the two services in areas such as price, storage limit, and so on.
My Experience: Why am I so attached to Flickr? Well, that's because the application is built around the community aspects of online photo sharing. Allow me to elaborate. Everytime I logon to Flickr, out of habit I would go to the "comments you've made" link on my Flickr home page to check whether there are other people who have commented on the photos that I commented on. The nice feature here is that every photo that you have commented on will be shown here, together with the comments on the photo, as well as a link to the profile of the people who commented on the photo. This serves as a pseudo bookmark of the photos that you were interested in.
I especially like the links to the people who commented on the photo because I would spend hours just surfing the links of many people whom I do not know. If I like their photos as well, I would be able to make them my contacts (i.e. bookmarks to people I like to interact with in Flickr). I can also leave messages for these contacts. I am encouraged that the community in Flickr tend to be quite friendly and approachable. If somone commented on my own photos, their comments can be found at the end of the link called "recent activity". It has become quite a reflex action for me to click that link immediately after I logged on. You can also create discussion groups centred around interesting topics such as "Beautiful Sunsets". People on Flickr can then contribute their photos into the group's pool for everyone's enjoyment.
As can been seen, the strong bond within the community is truly rewarding as people get to share their photos, interact and become friends. So Flickr is not just an online photo storage website.
My verdict: Use Picasa Web Albums as an online photo storage service that is tightly integrated to Picasa itself. WebShots is another such online photo storage service. If you want to be part of a vibrant social community of people who loves photography and who loves to interact with one another, then Flickr is your best bet. For me, I choose Flickr.
4 comments:
flickr very silly leh. I uploaded my photos, but I only want a select group of people to view it. to do this, I have to send an invitation to users to sign up to flickr! why can't I have it simple where I just cut and paste these people's emails and issue them a one-time password or something like that. hmm...... Tim..
Hahaha Tim. Actually, if your photos were all configured as public, all you need to do is to email your friends the link. But if the photos are for friends or family, then you would need to invite them. But consider this, you invite them only once because the next time you upload photos for friends and family, they automatically get to see the set, no need for a second round of invitations. Hope this works for you.
good site
nice site
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