Difference between Flickr.com, Picasaweb.com and Photobucket.com
Photo Sharing and hosting has become an indispensable need for today’s ‘Netizens’. Be it the bloggers, amateur photographers or common users, everybody has their own reasons for sharing and hosting photographs. This is where the various image hosting and sharing websites come into picture. While bloggers need their blogs’ images to be hosted somewhere, amateur photographers might want to show the world their photographic skills and other users may wish to share photographs with their family and friends. Here we will compare three renowned image hosting and sharing websites which serve this purpose – Flickr, PicasaWeb, Photobucket.
Services
Flickr.com is a yahoo owned website that offers its users video hosting, image hosting and editing services. Besides it is a community where you can interact with other users, comment their pictures, etc. The website is not only being deployed to share and embed personal photographs but also for hosting blog images. As of now, the website claims to have over 4 billion images being hosted on their servers! Flickr also provides a photo editing tool Picnick embedded onto website. Picasaweb.com (Picasa Web Albums) is a photo hosting website owned by Google. It does not offer video hosting services. Google provides a desktop application ‘Picasa’ through which you can share and organize your photos on the Picasa Web Albums. Photobucket.com is an image and video hosting website presently owned by Seattle. It is often used for hosting images to be displayed on website such as eBay, MySpace, etc.
Privacy and Sharing
In Picasa Web Albums, You can choose to keep your pictures as private or share them publicly. Private pictures are not shown in the search results and can be shared only through the URL (which contains authorization key) that is known only to the uploader. The URL can be sent via email and the like to the persons with whom you want to share your photos. Proper Authorization and Authentication mechanisms ensure the users’ privacy at Photobucket.com. Password protected sharing, and guest level access authorization methods are used to share the private pics. You can also render the photos as public which would not require any authentication. Flickr has a ‘guest pass’ system for the non Flickr members to view private images by the Flickr users. Public images can be seen without authentication.
Membership and Storage Limits
Flickr offers two types of membership – free and pro. The free account holders can upload 200MBs of Photos per month. If a free account stays inactive for 3 months, it is automatically deleted. The pro Flickr accounts can upload unlimited number of images and videos every month! Picasa Web Albums allows users with Google accounts to store up to 1GB of images. Additional Space with a min. of 16 GB can be rented which will be shared with your Gmail service as well. Photobucket also offers free and paid accounts with limits of storage for free accounts being 500 MB and that of paid account being 25 GB.
Summary
Flickr
- Yahoo owned photo sharing website
- Video hosting is also supported
- Photo editing tool is also embedded in the website
Picasa Web Albums
- Owned by Google
- Not meant for video hosting
Photobucket
- Presently owned by Seattle
- Video hosting is supported
