Atomac.net

After a lot of consideration (that only took me about 12 hours including sleep time) I decided on moving all our photos from Flickr to Picasa Web Albums. I am sure you are dying to hear why I have made this decision, so I will clue you in.

While Flickr is a nice place to show off your pictures, join groups and maintain contacts, I for one really don’t utilize these features. My main goal is to have a place to host my pictures and separate them into albums when needed. While a Flickr Pro account has unlimited sets (or albums) and no bandwidth limitations, I honestly don’t want to pay for image hosting. If I absolutely had to I would obviously just host it on our own server using Coppermine or some other Photo Gallery CMS. Don’t get me wrong though, Flickr has served us well while we have been using it.

Now, Picasa Web Albums has 1GB of storage and no uploading restrictions per month like Flickr. While the layout isn’t as nice as Flickr I can have unlimited Albums. I for one am not going to be filling up 1GB of photo storage anytime soon, and as a Google owned site I am sure the storage space will continue to grow. I would like to mention hat Flickr has unlimited storage.

Both sites have their up and downs and it is a tough decision to make between the two my breaking point was the applications available to upload photos. Flickr has many available to it on all different platforms, but my main concern here is going to be Mac OS X, cause that is what I am using. Flickr has a nice 3rd party iPhoto Exporter but it is pay for. While I tried it and it is definitely worth purchasing, I am trying to keep my photo storage free. Picasa Web Albums also has an iPhoto Exporter, but it is free and not 3rd party. I keep my entire photo collection in iPhoto so this is a huge deal for me. Browsing through the iPhoto Library folder for pictures is tedious and frustrating.

There, you have my tiny little break down. I hope it was of some use for you in making a decision between the two very nice Photo Album sites. There are of course others, but Flickr and Picasa offer the best features and applications in my opinion. I am more than willing to answer any questions, just post ‘em in the comments.

Welcome to the new Aomtac.net! Well, I suppose the meat of the site isn’t so different, but I think the new look is pretty spiffy. I am slowly working on getting up all our nifty widgets. Some, like the Last.fm widget, need a little reworking in order to fit into the new side column. So, let us know what you think, just be prepared for minor tweaking over the next week.