I’m a little stuck? Tell me what you think?
Currently I’ve got a little bit of a mess when it comes to photo management. I’m using Windows Live Sync to synchronize photos between my wife’s PC and my Mac. So when I take pictures and upload them to my MacBook, they sync over to her computer. The same happens when she uploads her pictures. It works really well this way. This means I don’t really use iPhoto to manage my photos because new photos will be added to my directory through synchronization and won’t import correctly into iPhoto.
The bigger problem though is distribution/sharing of photos. Recently I’ve been uploading photos to facebook as it’s quick and easy. However, I have family and friends who are not on facebook but they do frequent my blog. In addition, what happens when facebook becomes another myspace. I don’t really want all my photos on facebook if and when that happens. This also means I’ve got to upload photos to facebook and then upload them to my blog as well. It just seems like more work than it’s worth.
So, I’ve been looking into using Flickr or Picassa. It seems like the ideal solution. With pro accounts, I can upload most, if not all, o my photos to an online directory. Then I can embed/share albums to facebook or my blog. This way I’m storing my photos on flickr/picassa and just sharing them to other applications that friends and family use to see them.
So, which one do I use. It looks like both have good facebook applications and wordpress plugins. However, flickr cost $25 a year and I get unlimited photo uploads and photos can be as big as 20MB. Holy Cow. This seems awesome. Picassa on the other hand is a bit more expensive. They do not have unlimited storage, but an incremental storage capacity for incrementally more money. It looks like it can get pretty pricy.
So, picassa is more expensive; however, Picassa will manage your photos on your computer like iPhoto. In addition, Picassa will also do some decent photo editing. This is a nice toolset. I have Adobe Photoshop, but there’s something nice about a program that organizes your photos, edits your photos and stores them online as well.
What do you suggest? I’m thinking of using flickr for online storage but still using Picassa as a desktop client to edit photos and organize. I’m certainly open to ideas as I’m still not certain.
I have non-pro accounts to both, but being a Google fan, I tend to prefer the Picasa interface. Depending on how much you want to store, I guess it might get expensive.
I’d run it past Lisa H since she is an actual pro photog and see what she thinks.
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We are a Picasa family, but we don’t store many photos online. Only those that we are sharing are online, so we can avoid the prices.
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I fall in line with Jonathan. We store more stuff locally than not and I like the Picasa tools to work with local photos. If we share much, it’s to share privately with friends/family. If you do a lot of pro work or share a lot of photos, you may even want to look beyond Picasa or Flickr. There are some great services geared more towards people who do serious photography and are even free with large file/upload limits. (I’d have to search to find the posts on this, but they are out there)
I was doing some research and it looks like there is a plugin that allows you to use Picasa to manage your local photos and publish it to a Flickr account. I may have to look more into that.
If you’re doing a lot of photo uploads, I’d recommend going with Flickr’s premium service.
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