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Quick Comparision of Flickr/ipernity/PicassaWeb

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tomos:
Flickr free version - only 200 photos visible :down:
Picasa - file names available with click on more information
-ur1sn00per (November 03, 2010, 04:57 AM)
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wow, I didnt come across that anywhere about Flickr, definitely a thumbs down

I'll edit the first post with the info about Picassa.
The inability to sort was a problem for me in all the sites, but Picassa's default sort from old to new just doesnt make any sense to me...

ur1sn00per:
just remembered too ...
Flickr free was restricted to 3 Sets maximum for a long time. I've just found out this restriction has now been removed. This is a BIG PLUS  :Thmbsup:

JavaJones:
Flickr's recent (as in over the past year) photo display changes have improved its standing in my mind, but Smugmug still rules the roost for quality of presentation. Flickr always makes me feel like the photos being shown are crappier than they are somehow, just by nature of my dislike of their UI. Can't quite put my finger on it. But I guess it's (mostly) just me since it's so damn popular.

Picasa I like well enough, the features and integration with the desktop apps is great. The photo presentation is not the greatest, but IMO better than Flickr. The zoom function is not my favorite, but it's workable. Face recognition is nice. The social aspects aren't nearly as well developed as Flickr, I'll grant. For the moment I do use Picasa as my primary photo sharing tool.

Permissions are not so much a concern for me, but Jibz your use-case is rather interesting and inspires me to consider working that way in the future. I will look at whether Smugmug allows that.

- Oshyan

city_zen:
I know I'm late with this reply (hopefully not late enough to be accused of necroposting :)), but I wanted to add some information that may be useful if someone finds this thread through a search.
I've been looking for a while for a good Flickr alternative that doesn't suffer from Flickr's shortcomings (censorship, only 200 pictures visible for free accounts, etc.), and I've reached a conclusion: while feature-wise there are indeed good, even better, alternatives to Flickr, community-wise there are none.
So, if sharing your pics with as many people as possible and participating in active discussion groups and commenting other people's work is important to you, you'll just have to put up with Flickr.

BUT, if those aspects are not essential to you, there are some great alternative, both free and paid. In the "paid" category, smugmug, phanfare and a few other sites are reportedly very good, but I didn't research them exhaustively because I was looking for a free alternative to Flickr.
In the "free" category, there are quite a lot of websites. Unfortunately, most of them lack features present in Flickr and/or are almost inactive. Here's a non-exhaustive list of photo sharing website from wikipedia: List of photo sharing websites

Let me quicky point out that I'm ignoring websites like Snapfish, Shutterfly, Webshots, etc. in this comparison because, although they are very popular, they have a different target audience.

Zooomr seemed to be a good site, but it looks like it's closed and won't reopen.
Ipernity, which was one of the websites evaluated by Tomos, is particularly good and would be one of my top 2 choices if it weren't for the fact that it seems to have been abandoned at some point during 2010. No new developments have been announced and the developer team's blog has no new posts since September 2010.

There are some other alternatives, but I wouldn't like to make this post too long, so I'll just jump to what I consider the best free photo sharing website: 23
Yes, that's the name: 23
It has basically all the features Flickr does, and probably some more (albums, slideshows, groups, tags, comments, calendar, etc.). The only restriction for free accounts is that you can only upload 30 pictures per month, but they allow you to upload 300 the first week after you sign up, so you can transfer your pics from somewhere else. Although it too doesn't seem to be in very active development, it looks in a better state than Ipernity and Zooomr.
In particular, I think it does fulfill Tomos' ideal requirements:

My ideal would be with:
[*]decent slideshow style view but where one moves manaully from one image to the next
[*]manually sortable display - i.e. move this foto up/down forwards/backwards in the display - all sites seem to sort only by upload
[/list]
-tomos (October 25, 2010, 01:28 PM)
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If you're looking for a good alternative to Flickr, 23 is definitely worth checking out.

JavaJones:
Thanks for the recommendation city_zen. This continues to be an area of interest for me as well. I agree that Flickr is best for the community aspect, which is a bit frustrating as I still really dislike its whole system and approach. I think SmugMug being pay-only really limits its general community participation. Would be nice if they had a free, albeit very limited, option. Or maybe even something where they interface with other systems for storage (Picasa, for example) while presenting photos through their interface (Picasa, Flickr, and others have APIs that would allow this, although there may be legal restrictions). If they had free accounts at least you could get more people participating and commenting, even if they weren't particularly active uploaders. The lack of good social feedback on other systems besides Flickr is a real source of frustration for me. Even on Flickr none of my actual (real life) friends are active, so I've taken to just posting on Facebook for general comment/feedback/sharing, and then posting in Picasa for archival. I plan to remove my photos from Facebook regularly due to their evil, evil Terms of Service (which basically claims a non-exclusive right to use your photos for whatever they want!). I really wish there were a better, unified alternative. Maybe something with Facebook Connect so my FB friends could easily comment, but with better ToS than FB itself. Hmm...

I'm planning to move to a self-hosted gallery for archival soon. Looking at this: http://piwigo.org/ Just noticed it has some Facebook plugins too: http://fr.piwigo.org/ext/extension_view.php?eid=481 http://piwigo.org/ext/extension_view.php?eid=469
Have any of you considered self-hosting vs. the big hosted sites discussed here? If so, why did you decide against it?

- Oshyan

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