How to Best Upload and Share Your Bushwalking and Hiking Photos

Where should I store my photos taken with my iPhone or digital camera? What is the best app to use to share them with my friends? Which app offers the best value?  Should I get a paid account or will the free version be sufficient? How do popular apps Flickr, SmugMug and Picasa compare?

I have spent some time reviewing the options for uploading photos for viewing and have made a summary below.  Storage of photos is best done on a DVD or a removable hard drive; your hard drive is only for the short term.

Alternatives: How to sync, share, and publish with third-party tools

"...., a free Flickr account lets you upload 100MB of media per month (with unlimited total storage); a $25-per-year Pro account gives you unlimited photo and video uploads, as well as numerous other features. Smugmug presents your photos more stylishly than Flickr; accounts with unlimited storage start at $40 per year. "

PICASA

iPhone apps:

Web Albums - A Picasa Photo Viewer, Uploader and  Manager By Scott Sykora
iPicasso -Picasa web albums

Want Picasa on your desktop?

Picasa 3.8 Mac (beta)
Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Mac
Picasa vs iPhoto
Comparison Picasa 3.5.1

Want both? Then you can import photos from iPhoto into Picasa using RSS feed and then upload to the web.

Better Ways to Share

• Create online albums to share pictures by email without large attachments.    
• Print with ease, print pictures at home or online
• One click lets you copy your pictures to a memory card so you can display them on your digital frame.
• Make a video with your digital camera and then upload to YouTube™ with just one click.
• Upload directly to Facebook™ with a few simple clicks.
• Upload top Flickr

Compare Flickr with Picasa

My summary below has beeen compiled from several excellent blogs on this topic.

Picasa vs Flickr : Ultimate giants of photo sharing, which service is better for you?
by Rahul on June 23, 2009
Photo faceoff: Flickr vs. Picasa ( a little dated)
16 August, 2007 by Chris 
5 Reasons Flickr Runs Circles Around Picasa
by Adria Richards 14 September 2009
Flickr, Picasa and SmugMug Shootout
Jarel Remick on March 25th 2010

Both Flickr and Picasa have tagging, search and social networking so you can share with friends and see what they have uploaded, although Flickr has more options. Both provide RSS feeds so you can track what your friends are doing. Flickr allows RSS feeds based on tags

Account

• Flickr requires a Yahoo account. The free account has adverts.There is a Pro paid account. Free vs paid Flickr account
• Picasa requires a Google account, and integrates with other Google apps

Developer tools

• Lots of APIs for Flickr. None for Picasa

Storage

• Picasa gives you 6Gb for $20/yr. Any storage purchased is shared amongst your other Google accounts
• Flickr gives you more (limited without the pro version) for $25/yr

Ease of upload

• Optimised settings
• Flickr limits bandwidth per month (100Mb)  while Picasa limits storage
• Flickr 200 photos max most recently uploaded for free users. Don't get deleted just hidden until you delete some. Flickr: No limit. Upload infinite photos and videos. But there is limit of total 100MB of photos and 2 videos every month.
• Picasa: A free user can create up to 250 albums, total 500 photos and videos per album, i.e. total 1,25,000 photos.
• Upload from mobile: Picasa easier than Flickr
  

Size limits

Free User

• Picasa Photo: 20MB and 50 Megapixel Video : 1GB Total Capacity : 1GB
• Flickr: Photo : 10MB Video : 150MB Total Capacity: 100MB/month  
  
  Paid users
  
  
• PIcasa Photo: 20MB and 50Megapixel Video : 1GB Very expensive beyond the 80Gb/$20 per year 
• Flickr Photo : 20MB Video : 500MB Total Capacity : Unlimited. Much better for professional photographers Total Capacity : Options of 20GB, 80GB, 200GB, 400GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 8TB and 16TB.
• Google storage can be upgraded at any time so you can start with the minimum 20Gb at $5 p/year and upgrade as you need it.
• Paid version of Flickr is without ads.

Search

• Flickr: by location, keywords or tags, and then most relevant or most interesting.

SEO

"Flickr allows it’s images to be indexed by Google, Google Images and Yahoo which extends the reach of your photos well beyond the Flickr.com website. All you need to do is properly tag and describe your photos for them to grow wings. You can include URL links in the description as well and I do that often to link my screenshots back to blog posts I write." (Adria's blog)

Community/ Social networking

Flickr better. Photo pools. Unmatched social networking till now. Very easy to comment on other's photos and add as a contact. There are several groups and discussions going on. Lots of people comment and discuss each other's photos. This social networking aspect is one of the biggest and major attractions of Flickr which Picasa will find it very tough to beat.

Video formats

• Picasa 3GP, AVI, ASF, MOV, WMV, MPG, MP4, M2T, MMV, M2TS
• Flickr AVI, WMV, MOV, MPEG (1, 2 and 4), 3GP

Web presence

• Much better exposure to public on Flickr

Display

• Picasa : unlimited albums, but no sub-albums
• Flickr : 3 sets plus photostream of up to 200 photos
• Both have Slideshow

Desktop

• Picasa  has an excellent utility to organise and edit photos prior to upload. 
• It automatically gathers all media files on the hard disk and provides easy navigation for the user. Just a click of the 'Upload' button will upload hundreds of photos to the Picasa Web Albums. 
• Other options available are 'Blog This!', ‘Print’, ‘Email’, 'Movie' and 'Collage' maker. 

Other features

• Edit tags, captions, titles. Include EXIF data including gps location for both
• Slideshow yes for both
• Abbreviate URL link for emailing. Flickr better
• Subscribe to comments
• Favourites
• Publish to blog (Picasa) through desktop software, Flickr within web app

Licensing

 "Flickr makes it easy to “share” your photos and give people the right to use your photos in a way where you get credit for the images and they can use them on their websites. This is known as Creative Commons. There are several types of CC licensing and you can read to find out which option fits you. I usually choose, “Attribution with non-commercial” (Adria's blog)

Privacy

Picasa:

• Public
• Unlisted (send album link, no sign in required)
• Private (by invitation) 
• Post to only friends without need for an account.  Picasa integrates with other Google apps such as Gmail

Flickr: 

• Public (visible to everyone) Visible to friends (visible to people whom you add as friends, viewers need to be signed in and added to your contacts as friends before hand, a disadvantage)
• Visible to family (visible to people whom you add as family, viewers need to be signed in and added to your contacts as family before hand, a disadvantage)
• Private (only visible to you)

While Travelling

• Remember that if you wish to upload your full size photos while on holiday that is an entirely different scenario
• Uploading full size photos is very slow from a hotel room
• Buy some extra storage cards for your camera or burn them to DVD at an internet cafe, by inserting your card ( lock it first) directly into the desktop.
• Once you have uploaded you may not be able to get the full size photos back.

Any other ideas? Please comment.

This article by Bush Walker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.