In 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).
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]
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?
Indijanac May 5, 2011 at 6:57 pm
I was just thinking the other day, where to upload my photos.
Since I’m just starting with photography, I think I’ll go for picasa.
jsm1963 May 5, 2011 at 10:14 pm
I find Picasa more user-friendly.
Tilen Hrovatic June 29, 2011 at 9:09 pm
Flick is better is you use PRO program. If you have the basic service both sites are quite the same and offer good photo service and storage.
RB July 14, 2011 at 9:37 am
Both are good. From one point of view, Picasa is geared more towards the average person and has cool features, while Flickr is more for artistic photographers.
Shivanand Sharma July 14, 2011 at 9:47 am
@RB: Good point!
Dan July 17, 2011 at 1:20 am
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!
Lakshmi Henry July 27, 2011 at 7:42 am
Spot-on! The 200 photo limit on Flickr makes it a pain. I think they’re really pushing the paid PRO account a little too hard, I mean 200 photos?! Come on!
Worse yet, when I tried to upload 150 pics on Flickr, it said I was using up too much MB (geez, I only have like a 5MP camera) so I had to reduce the quality.
Also worth mentioning that iPhoto has built-in support for Picasa, which i find a major plus.
ugly coyote August 22, 2011 at 10:03 pm
I have always wondered why Flickr is so popular, to me it seems inferior to Picasa. From the perspective of the user viewing the photos on the webpage, flickr seems like garbage. It takes a really long time to jump from one photo to the next, the thumbnails look terrible (too small, not resizable), and the way the thumbnails are organized into pages is so 1990′s.
By contrast, picasa loads a large number of thumbnails on the fly, lets you resize the thumbnails with a slider, lets you browse through photos with the left/right arrows with amazingly quick load times, dynamically resizes the photos to your window size you you get the optimal resolution for your window. For those reasons, I would say it blows flickr out of the water.
The main thing that flickr has over picasa is more of a social network experience. I think that’s the reason why a lot of artistic photographers like it. You post your photos in a more public way and tend to get critiques (or, more often, praise) from other people interested in photography as an artform. While picasa allows viewers to post comments, you are not likely to see the same kinds of critiquing on your photos in picasa.
Andy Rogers August 26, 2011 at 12:01 pm
It Boils down to Personal preference I have always found picasa easier to use from day dot try both products then decide
jsm1963 August 26, 2011 at 9:27 pm
Flickr banned be from adding – or deleting photos this month. I reached my limit. Picasa would just let me delete pics so I can continue.
Neelish September 4, 2011 at 5:19 am
Great comments – I was thinking of transferring my photos via Migratr from Picasa to Flickr – the main reason was I was thinking I can organise photos both with galleries and with sets.
I have done a bit of travel, and I love taking photos of churches. I would like to have my photos organised so I can view the a set taken on a particular trip, but also sets of similar themes – churches, interesting signage, etc etc.
I am resigned to paying for the pro-Flickr, but I really feel limited by Picasa’s “single gallery” system.
Noelene Kuzman September 7, 2011 at 8:19 pm
You have left Red Bubble out of the equation. Red Bubble is fantastic. I do not like Flickr at all. I have never tried Picasa as Red Bubble meets all my needs. I would like to see you do a statistics comparison on the three, or maybe even include Smugmug in the comparison.
Tony September 11, 2011 at 7:12 am
I prefer the look and feel of the Picasa site. It seems difficult to get to my page in Flickr, and there’s a limit to how many photos can be uploaded each month unless I upgrade.
Ernesto Ramirez September 20, 2011 at 6:25 pm
Also please notice that Picasa has new features and limits if you sign up for Google Plus. The most relevant is that you may be able to upload pictures of 2048×2048 in size without counting in your 1GB quota… This means you can upload unlimited high quality pics!!. This made me switch from my poor free Flickr account to Picasa. Also the speed of loading, uploading is much faster in google.
Tim Jasper September 26, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Picasa vs Flickr Advantages
Picasa
1) Flexible sharing (ie share with different circles)
2) Obvious integration with google+, gmail etc. (quick to access if you’re in gmail etc)
Flickr
1) Better integration with Aperture (albums sync) (ie allowing you to keep control from within aperture.
If apple add picasa support I’ll be saying goodbye to Flickr very quickly.
Mike October 6, 2011 at 9:16 am
I can never figure out what’s going on with Flickr. Seems like I can never tell what page will come up when I click on something, and sometimes it feels like I never see the same page twice.
Trying to find where I can post pictures of my kids’ soccer games. Lots of parents don’t want pictures where just anybody can access them. Is that easily doable on Picasa- where the parents can easily access pictures without them being available to the whole world? Or will they have to jump through a lot of hoops or something…
Kevin Lyles October 15, 2011 at 11:39 pm
I have both flickr and Picasa and struggle between the two all the time. If Picasa would just add a category feature (where you could group albums) it would be the best of both worlds. Picasa’s “single gallery” system is a real draw back. I would cancel flicker today it I could have galleries in Picasa.
Tianshi Gao October 17, 2011 at 7:59 am
I love all Google products, but in terms of the image quality, Flickr is better than Picasa. See the comparison here: http://benelling.wordpress.com/2008/04/20/flickr-vs-picasa/
ERNESTO RAMIREZ October 18, 2011 at 3:24 am
LOL That article is from mid 2008… we are nearly the end of 2011 and picasa is completely different now that integrates with Google+. So such comparison doesn’t apply anymore. Sorry. Thumbs up for picasa web.
Tianshi Gao October 18, 2011 at 3:30 am
My only point is the difference of image quality, which unfortunately still applies (I did an experiment very recently, and had the same conclusion as that 2008 article). In terms of other aspects, especially the user experience, Picasa is definitely way more better than Flickr, but if you are really serious about the image quality, I have to say that Flickr is better. Hope Picasa will improve their image compression algorithm in the future.
More Photos October 28, 2011 at 11:58 pm
Fact check: Flickr does NOT allow unlimited photos to be displayed. Read the weasel words on their terms & conditions, you’ll see they only display your most recent 200 photos. That’s not the same as unlimited. At all. You can upload all you want, but no one can see them? Sounds like something a greedy marketer with a law degree would gleefully make up to mislead people. No thanks!
Verify it yourself at http://www.flickr.com/help/photos/
jsm1963 October 29, 2011 at 2:16 am
As I discovered this summer, if you reach your limit on Flickr you cannot even clear up space until the following month. I don’t think that’s the case with Picasa (I don’t think I’ve ever reached my limit there).
Ofek October 31, 2011 at 2:22 pm
I’ve been using Flickr for a year and a half now and ever since the beginning I found Flickr services very efficient in every aspect I’ve been looking at (Flickr, btw, also has Picnik software on the site).
As it was not mentioned, Flickr also has a paid version which is called “Pro” and costs 20$ a year, for completely unlimited storage space. On the other hand, free users have a limited space of 200 photos in their photostream (meaning, it will only show the newest 200 photos, but if you convert to pro all of the other photos will come back since they are kept online, just can’t be viewed).
zalam February 4, 2012 at 6:09 pm
what about Pbase ???
This is one of the best original photo sharing websites, which still ranks on top by Alexa. In the few hundreds.
If anybody familiar, how would you compare Pbase to Picasa or flickr ?
Yamashita February 26, 2012 at 3:04 pm
I already used both, that are good services with nice features, but recently I moved to Tabday.com, that offer a better way to organize my photos.
Karen March 31, 2012 at 11:10 pm
Flickr has a 200 picture limit, unless you upgrade to Pro.
mike April 4, 2012 at 6:55 pm
With Flickr it seems like you have to get a yahoo acct or go through facebook I really don’t want a yahoo acct or to go through facebook- am I wrong? I use Safari and have no desire to change to yahoo
jsm1963 April 4, 2012 at 10:42 pm
Isn’t Safari just a browser?
mike April 5, 2012 at 2:59 am
Yes- but I get my email etc from another service and don’t want to switch that’s all. Also another time I tried to sign up they wanted me to set up yahoo as my home page. Maybe they have changed.
david donaldson April 9, 2012 at 12:48 am
There is no doubt in my mind picasa is far superior and easy.I tried flicker .What a nightmare trying to upload photos,even with their uploader.Total photos uploaded after 2 hours ZERO.I could not even upload photo for profile..
Hamster April 10, 2012 at 11:30 am
But you don’t need to change your email or indeed change anything at all! No switching of anything needed.
All you’re doing is signing up for a yahoo account in order to log in to Flickr. Nothing else needs to change *at all*.
You do *not* need to set up Yahoo as your home page. Furthermore there’s nothing stopping you subsequently changing your home page to anything you wish.
Kenny Bain June 17, 2012 at 3:16 am
Flickr although free is actually more limited than Picasa – without a Pro account you are limited to only 200 items (photos) to upload in total which is quite a restriction. It is not possible to add more items above this even once the monthly counter has been reset on the upload limit
Grace June 19, 2012 at 11:01 pm
After you reach the 200 limit, you can still continue to upload pictures. Flickr just hides your older pictures. You can still use it, but you can only view 200 pictures at a time. If you upgrade to pro, they will show you all the pictures you have uploaded in the past (if you did not delete them).
Mary June 20, 2012 at 2:16 am
I’m out here looking for opinions on the different places, because I just upgraded my flickr account to a pro account so that I could create a collection of a recent photo trip with sets of the different places I photographed on that trip. I needed more space to do that, and it seemed worth the $25 to me because there were people NOT on flickr with whom I wanted to share the collection. Got it all finished and tried to share – only to find out that you CAN’T share a collection! Only sets. *sigh*. So, I tried to share my photostream, thinking that the person(s) I shared with could find the collection in the complete photostream, and though it wouldn’t be as concise, it would still work. Negative. The new photos added to the recently upgraded Pro account do NOT show up when the photostream is shared. Only the older pictures. I tried the “Help” section – nothing, except that collections can’t be shared. I tried e-mailing “Help” and got only canned responses. So. If photos are in a collection in a photostream, are they blocked from viewing? AARRGGHH!! I decided to switch to a different service. But WHICH one?
Tim June 20, 2012 at 9:24 am
Mary. If you are a gmail user the easy answer is Picasa.
If you are not a gmail user, consider signing up as the integration of google offerings including Picasa is great.
Jane December 16, 2012 at 11:24 am
I’m a Google fan, but every time I integrate my Picasa photos to my blog, they get blurry (especially when I resize them). That’s the reason why I prefer Flickr over Picasa.