I am in the midst of writing an article that is going to compare online photo services plus a few freebie photo clients.
It occurred to me that in order to make for a better article, it would be good to ask the audience: Why do you use what you use and what features are important to you?
Your online options
With online photo management you’ve got several choices (and if I missed any please feel free to mention one or more in the comments):
- Picasa
- Flickr (which connects with Yahoo! 360)
- Zooomr
- Windows Live Spaces
- Photobucket
- MySpace
- .Mac/MobileMe
Your client options
I personally find it absolutely necessary to have a locally installed program to manage my photos so I can tag, categorize and upload to the web easily.
For the ones of note, this is what I could immediately find:
- Picasa
- Windows Live Photo Gallery
- iPhoto
- F-Spot (Linux)
Once again, if you know of any that are readily available for download, please feel free to post a comment or two.
Of the ones listed above, the only one I haven’t tried is F-Spot (although it looks really good).
It also just happens to be that F-Spot is the only one that can connect with the most online services (Flickr, Picasa and so on). And yes, this means Linux scores a win once again for its ability to connect with the most stuff.
Windows Live Photo Gallery will connect to Windows Live Spaces and Flickr.
iPhoto only connects to the .Mac service to the best of my knowledge.
Picasa only connects to Google’s Picasa service to the best of my knowledge.
What do you use? Why do you use it?
Is there any particular reason why you would use one online service over another? Do you even use a photo managing program?
At the present time I’m using Windows Live Photo gallery because it appears to be the only Windows client that will connect up with Flickr easily.
But before I fly out that article – your opinion counts. What do you use?
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For photo management I’ve used Picasa and Flickr. I like Picasa’s ease of use and quick learning curve. I use Flickr mainly to show off my photo’s. It’s easy to use and uploading is a cinch.Flickr has added some online editing stuff which I haven’t dived into just yet. Usually when editing or touching up photo’s I do it off line with Picasa before uploading them. I highly recommended them both to other’s too most of whom thank me afterward.
I tried most of the above and didn’t like them for various reasons (eg. I wanted people to be able to get the full res image, but didn’t want to pay; I have many GB of photos, but didn’t want to pay; etc, etc, but didn’t want to pay). So I installed a free web server, opened up the relevant ports, got a free domain from dyndns.org and used their software to update it with the PCs dynamic IP address, and wrote an AJAX application to show the photos and allow tagging. Any editing I do locally on the PC. I don’t have to upload anything anywhere. I like mine better.
Then I got really carried away and installed FTP servers at home and at my sister’s so we now have automated offsite backups of our photos.
I use both Photobucket and Flickr. I find them both easy to upload to and are great at allowing me to organize my photos into albums or groups.
Another service I use is Imageshack, but I use them primarly as a quick photo upload and share site since they can host pictures without any logins needed.
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