Saturday, November 17, 2007

Comparing Photo-Sharing Sites

I've been researching today on what web site I want to use to share photos. I compared Flickr, Shutterfly, Snapfish and Picasa. Here's what I found:

Flickr - more community-driven
  • a Yahoo! company - can use yahoo id to sign up
  • can search for photos without logging in or becoming a member
  • comes in other languages
  • can invite family and friends to view photos
  • basic accounts are free
  • can organize photos by tagging them or using collections and sets
  • can make stuff like cards, photo books, dvds, etc.
  • map function - map where you took your photos
  • tons of ways to upload photos

Shutterfly - more product-driven

  • free unlimited photo storage
  • picture sharing
  • pick up prints at Target stores
  • lots of photo products
  • order prints
  • Shutterfly Collections - 2 web addresses used to share photos with friends, add comments, and add other photos
  • Shutterfly Studio - upload, organize, edit, share, order, and create

Snapfish - product-driven

  • owned by HP
  • 20 prints free with first upload
  • unlimited storage
  • photo sharing
  • lots of products
  • must register or log in to view other pages than homepage

Picasa - community-driven

  • owned by Google
  • photo sharing
  • over 1 GB of storage
  • friends can download photos at same resolution to print
  • download other friends' albums to keep a copy for yourself to view and add comments

So, I've decided to go with Picasa. It's simple to use. I'm a fan of Google. Plus I don't need to order prints. And if I do, I'll choose Shutterfly, because I've used them before. Flickr is overwhelming to me, there's just too much going on with the web site. I like that it's people-friendly and has a large community, but I don't want that. I really like the fact that with Picasa your friends can download a photo of yours at the same resolution to print or whatever. That won me over.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Try using Pixamo a bit- I use it along with Picasa (I too am a Google fan, but Picasa webalbums isn’t up to par on the privacy settings!). I use Picasa for backing up family photos and Pixamo for securely sharing them. Pixamo always has the original full resolution photos saved for you too. You can embed your photos on your blog, and even the associated tags and other metadata. It is very cool and new features keep getting released.

Misty Beier said...

Thank you Brendan for commenting. I will definitely look into Pixamo since it saves the original resolution.

James said...

My experience with Snapfish has been pretty negative. I originally found it too product-driven for what I needed, but since then they've proven to be very unresponsive with their customer service. I found it difficult to delete my pictures and so far impossible to remove my account. I recommend people stay away and use Shutterfly for getting prints.

Misty Beier said...

@james
I also recommend Shutterfly. I've used them for about a year now and I like their speedy shipping. No problems, yet. Knock on wood.

John Dyhouse said...

You haven't mentioned image cave or photobucket?

is there a reason?

I use photo bucket for hosting pictures for my webs-sites and Flickr for archiving.

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Unknown said...

I like flicker. I just post my photos there. Don't do much of the other stuff. . .