Photo websites: That settles it!

Google Pho­tos Blog: Announc­ing Picasa 3.0 and a new ver­sion of Picasa Web Albums!

With Picasa’s announce­ment of the updated Web Albums site, I’ve set­tled on it for my own pho­tog­ra­phy needs. Their “name tags” fea­ture is incred­i­bly well-done, I can arbi­trar­ily tag my pho­tos addi­tion­ally, and they’ve added other com­pelling fea­tures that have sold me on it.

Pre­vi­ously, I had been using Flickr. By the time I joined, it seemed to be the pre­mier com­mu­nity for pho­tog­ra­phers, and it offered the most fea­tures I wanted: licens­ing pho­tos, tag­ging, flex­i­ble man­age­ment of albums/sets, RSS feeds for nearly every­thing, and super-cool mash-ups with other sites.

Sep­a­rately, a lot of peo­ple have been using Face­book for pho­tos (at least those of people-based events and such), namely because their per­son tag­ging is very good: boxes around faces and noti­fi­ca­tions of tagged pho­tos. (Flickr has tag­ging, and you can sep­a­rately add boxed notes to pho­tos, but it has no way to con­nect that directly with peo­ple.) While not a pho­tog­ra­phy web­site per se, it is cer­tainly a great way to share pho­tos easily.

Picasa Web Albums has been a nice project, and I had used it occa­sion­ally, but not very often. The inter­face hasn’t been the best, it felt very closed off from any sort of com­mu­nity, and it seemed to be wed­ded to the appli­ca­tion Picasa (which has a pretty shoddy track record on Linux). I can (and do) man­age my pho­tos quite well via F-Spot, but there was a lot I couldn’t do with­out Picasa (the application).

But in one fell swoop, they’ve knocked down the com­pe­ti­tion. The name tags fea­ture is so nice, it’s actu­ally fun to use; in about an hour I tagged about 700 pho­tos with my exist­ing Gmail con­tacts. I’ve also tagged my pho­tos with some other key­words, in case you really want to see what pho­tos of roller coast­ers I’ve taken. Lastly, I can release my pho­tos with Cre­ative Com­mons licenses, so neat things can hap­pen.

The sum of these fea­tures is what dri­ves Picasa’s new Explore page. You can see pop­u­lar tags, loca­tions, and fea­tured pho­tos. There’s even a (mediocre) game where you guess the loca­tions of photos.

All in all, Google has a good prod­uct and it breeds good com­pe­ti­tion in the photo web­site space. You can see my pho­tos on my Picasa pro­file.

(PS: If it seems like I’m talk­ing slow, that’s because I’m sap­ping my band­width upload­ing four albums at a time. )