Photo Sharing with Google & Yahoo

I am continuing my discussion of photo sharing sites. Photobucket is ad-driven. Shutterfly has less ads and allows you to order prints. Snapfish offers a personalized photo product line. Today's photo sharing sites are sponsored by Google & Yahoo!

http://www.flickr.com/
Flickr is associated with Yahoo and uses one's Yahoo account info (login and password).

Wikipedia says this:

Flickr is a photo sharing website and web services suite, and an online community platform, which is generally considered an early example of a Web 2.0 application.

In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its innovative online community tools that allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means.

Stats at a glance for http://www.flickr.com/:

• Cost: Free with Yahoo ads, but limited bandwidth, limited archiving and the account disappears after 90 consecutive days of inactivity.
• Upgrade: $24.95/yr to upgrade to a pro account and get pretty much unlimited everything and permanent archiving and ad-free browsing.
• Storage: When you have a free Flickr account, you can upload 100MB worth of photos each calendar month. This is a bandwidth limit, and not an amount of space that you have on Flickr servers.
• Software: Flickr (free download)
• What sets this site apart: The ability to tag pictures with keywords and blog and photo integration.
  

http://picasaweb.google.com/
picasaweb is associated with Google and uses one's Google account info (login and password).

Wikipedia says this:

Picasa is a computer application for organizing and editing digital photos. In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa from Idealab and began offering Picasa for free download.

For organizing photos, Picasa has file importing and tracking features, as well as tags and collections for further sorting. It also offers several basic photo editing functions, including color enhancement, red eye reduction and cropping. Other features include slide shows, printing and image timelines. Images can also be prepared for external use, such as for e-mailing or printing, by reducing file size and setting-up page layouts. There is also integration with online photo printing services.

Stats at a glance for http://picasaweb.google.com/:

• Cost: Free with not too many ads but limited storage.
  Upgrade: 6.25 GB ($25 USD per year)
  25 GB ($100 USD per year)
  100 GB ($250 USD per year)
  250 GB ($500 USD per year)
• Storage: 1GB of free storage.
• Software: Picasa (free download)
• What sets this site apart: The ability to tag pictures with keywords, Picasa's web albums and simple photo editing.

Next time I will talk about Dotphoto. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_sharing for more info on photo sharing.

-Durk-