Online Photo Galleries - DIY, Picasa or Flickr?

A photographer will probably want to share his/her photos with friends, family or maybe everyone on this planet. I like to convert situations into JPEG files - which means taking photographs. That creates a need for online galleries as well.

My Ann Arbor gallery at Picasa

For long, it has been my way to do things by myself. I have coded (first static HTML, later dynamic) my home page and other web sites. I have also created a couple of scripts for generating simple photo galleries - I considered the plethora of features the ready solutions had as extra and unnecessary. For the most part, they were and still are.

However, as I bought a real camera and started to travel around the world, and also embedded myself more in the world of social networks, features as commenting, tagging (including geotagging) and integrating to other services became more important. I started thinking of moving my mobile phone camera shots to some online gallery - as my Samsung Galaxy S has an integration to both Flickr and Picasa (in addition to Facebook and others).

By some intuition, I dislike Yahoo. It is some irrelevant, obsolete portal from the 1990's, and a home to several obsolete social networking sites and technologies. Flickr is owned by Yahoo. Also, there is a more apparent connection between Flickr and its owner than Picasa and its owner (Google) - on Flickr, you get 100 megabytes of free gallery space per month but you can buy more. Picasa gives you 1 GB of total space, and you can use your existing Google account.

I may be a bit of a luddite, but I still cannot grasp the functionality of Flickr. It has interesting features but it lacks the traditional clarity of Picasa. Maybe Flickr should be seen as a photo community, not a personal photo gallery. For my purposes, it seems that Picasa is better. Also, the Picasa desktop application works quite well on Windows! Sharing photos is extremely easy, though you must adjust your style or organizing files and directories to its liking (something I really don't like).

Go see my Ann Arbor gallery at Picasa!

This was also the first post in my blog. As I am writing this, I have no idea whether this will also be the last one. Who knows?