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5 Major Differences — Flickr Vs Picasa & Which One Is Better

photo sharing sites — Flickr vs PicasaIn the digital age, online photo-sharing has become a buzz word. Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Photobucket, etc have facilitated sharing the photographs online. Primarily conceptualized as photo-sharing and organizing services, Flickr and Picasa have emerged as the two most popular platforms for storing, organizing and social sharing as well.

While Flickr is a service powered by Yahoo, Picasa Web Albums is Google’s initiative to encourage usage of online services for storing, sharing and growing online communities, there are a subtle differences and personal choices which make one better than the other.

Be it Flickr or Picasa, both the services are strong and offer scores of features that it becomes difficult to have an inclination towards just one of the two. While Flickr is widely used by the photographers to maintain their photo-streams, Picasa Web Albums on the other hand being a Google service enjoys the benefits of integration of various Google services like Picnik (for editing the photographs) and Blogger for publishing the photographs on the blogs.

Even though the primary purpose of both the services is to facilitate online sharing and organizing, there are some features and USPs of each which render them a distinct identity.

Picasa vs Flickr — Storage

Both the services are good at providing free space for storing the images. While Flickr seems to provide unlimited free storage, Picasa limits the free space to 1 GB.

  • Flickr: Flickr offers 100 MB free-space on monthly basis, the counter is reset every month; which translates into unlimited free space.
  • Picasa: Picasa offers 1 GB free-space to the users and uplifts the limit at the rate of $5 per year for 20GB (to 1TB for $256 per year).
    Picasa Web Albums powered by Google

Upload Limit

There are certain restrictions to the size of uploads when it comes to using free services offered by Flickr and Picasa.

  • Flickr: You are restricted to upload the image file not more than 10MB for free version (and the limit of 20MB for pro version) and 2 videos not exceeding 150MB (or 90 sec in length).
  • Picasa: With limited space, the option to use the space is yours. There is no limit as far as the size of the files is concerned. While it gives the benefit of for photos less than 800×600 pixels and videos less than 15 minutes in duration. They do not count towards your 1GB quota.

Distribution And Licensing Of Images

Flickr facilitates the distribution of images by offering the image at varying resolutions. When you upload the images, Flickr automatically re-sizes your images to thumbnail, small, medium and large and also offers you the facility of licensing the images for commercial use or to be used as creative commons. Picasa on the other hand offers just the original version of image and all the images are licensed as copyrights.

Search Efficacy [Picasa Or Flickr]

Flickr powered by Yahoo
Along with sound Flickr search (which enables you to search through tags, sets, groups and photo streams), it is surprising to see that Google Image search indexes the Flickr images while leaving the images uploaded to public web albums created in Picasa Web Albums.

Community Building Features

Picasa makes it easy to share the photographs with family and friends and provides the facility of inviting comments or creating public photo albums to which even your friends can upload the albums. Flickr on the other hand thinks in terms of building the community of people with similar interests and professional instincts at large. Flickr enable the users to create group pools to share the work with the experts. Picasa is very basic and immature from professional point of view but a strong contender for personal and private use.

Flickr OR Picasa — Final Words

Picasa and Flickr both provide the features of efficient online photo-management and sharing application, it is really difficult to rate one service better than the other. Picasa enjoys the benefits of Google services and products like Picasa desktop application, Piknik (online image editor), etc and provides the features for creating slideshows and collages, for which Flickr provides tools and there are other third party tools as well for enabling the same features in Flickr.

BTW, which one do you think is better —  Flickr Or Picasa Web Albums?

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36 comments… add one
  • Shivanand Sharma Jul 14, 2011 @ 9:47

    @RB: Good point!

  • Dan Jul 17, 2011 @ 1:20

    Like many of these reviews and polls, conclusions are subjective: what are you using it for? I’d not that while the free Flickr essentially allows unlimited uploads, I believe they only display the most recent 200 images. That’s important to know.

    I am redoing our family photo organization and trying to find the best solution.I am leaning toward Picasa for the cheap and very expandable storage, clean interface and general ease of use. That said, I don’t dislike Flickr so much as it is more confusing to me – but more features can do that.

    Bottom line is that it really depends on what you want to do. I would love to see more comparisons like these focussed more on actual comparisons and less on author opinion. That said, this article is good – a couple others I have read elsewhere today have been awful and so biased as to be unhelpful. So, thanks!

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