FebruaMaximumPC 2008 02

W

ay back in the day—the 1990s!—photography was a cumber-

some hobby that required trips to the drugstore for film pro-

cessing (or the creation of a home photo lab), long waits for prints, and

a collection of photos that inevitably ended up stuffed into shoeboxes

that themselves ended up stored under the bed. Digital cameras have

simplified this process, but for many people those shoeboxes have

been replaced with hard drives full of images.

Luckily, myriad photo-sharing sites are online, allowing you to

save and share all those pics. Here, we pit two online photo-sharing

sites in a battle, longtime-favorite Flickr and Picasa—Google’s down-

loadable photo editor, which now includes online sharing.

Flickr vs. Picasa

ORGANIZING

An online home for your photos is no better than a

shoebox if it doesn’t offer a strong selection of ways to organize your

pics. Both Flickr and Picasa allow users to tag and geotag images, as

well as create sets. However, with Picasa, that’s about the extent of

your organization options. Flickr, on the other hand, lets users place

sets of photos in larger collections, allowing you to create sets and

subsets on a given topic, and the ever-growing Flickr community has a

large array of groups focused on just about any theme you could pos-

sibly imagine, so you can add your images to public (or private) groups

and share images of a similar theme with like-minded individuals.

WINNER: FLICKR

UPLOADING

Picasa will automatically

grab every image on your

machine, so even if you

forget where you stuck a

photo, this app will find it.

And the straightforward

interface makes uploading

new images little more than

a two-click process. It’s

also simple to print, email,

or upload images to your

blog from the main page

of the Picasa app. Upload-

ing photos to Flickr is also

easy, with bulk uploading

now possible through the

site itself rather than a third-

party app. Still, Picasa’s

search function and its vari-

ety of export options allow

it to handily win this round.

WINNER: PICASA

FLICKR

http://www.flickr.com

SHARING

The photo of that vivid Hawaiian sunset? Share it with

the world. The pic that memorializes the keg stand you took two hours

later? Perhaps it’s best kept from public view. But there’s a lot of room

in between these extremes. Flickr allows for four levels of privacy, letting

you put your photos in the public view for all to see or limit availability to

friends, family, or just yourself. Additionally, you can send guest passes to

people who don’t have Flickr accounts, so they can see your pics without

having to sign up for the service. Picasa, however, has only an all-or-

nothing option, so you’ll have to choose whether you want to keep your

family pictures private or make them available for all the world to see.

WINNER: FLICKR

head 2 head TWO TECHNOLOGIES ENTER, ONE TECHNOLOGY LEAVES

round 1

round 2 round 3

BY TOM EDWARDS

ONLINE PHOTO SHARING

14 MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC | FEB 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com