A reader asked me yesterday what I thought of Flickr, Zooomr and Picasa Web. He’s been using Yahoo! Photos, and as you may have already heard, they’re shutting down and merging their photos with Flickr. Existing Yahoo! Photos users will get the option to transfer their photo library directly to Flickr, and new users are getting sent to Flickr already. I thought this would be a great topic for a separate blog post. Here are my thoughts.

Each site has features that differ from the other, and I could literally write pages on how they’re similar or different. But, I’m not going to. Instead, I’m going to summarize what I think are the key points that make each site interesting, and let you figure out which one you want to use.

Before you read further, ask yourself this:

• What do you want to do with your photos?
• How do you see yourself (as a casual user of cameras, a budding photographer, or a serious, dedicated photographer)?

Flickr

It’s the 800-pound gorilla in the photo sharing market. It has a slick interface, it’s polished, works well, and is indeed addictive. Unfortunately, some censorship issues surfaced lately, and a few famous Flickr users had their photos deleted by Flickr staff for reasons that are still unclear. Although Flickr’s CEO apologized in each instance, the damage has been done.

Flickr also has some annoying limitations. On free accounts, you can only upload a certain (small) number of photos, and unless you upgrade to Pro ($24.95/year), you won’t be able to upload any more. [Updated 10/25/07: I see that this has been changed. Free users now have a 100 MB monthly quota, and no limit on the total number of photos.] Even after you upgrade to Pro, you’ll bump up against more limitations if your JPG files are over 10MB each, which happens quite often when you shoot with a late-model DSLR and upload at full resolution with the intention of printing that photo in a large size.

Use Flickr if you want to engage actively within the big and friendly Flickr user community, get comments on your photos, join groups and submit photos to them — in short, partake fully of the social community of photo sharing.

If you’d like to read more about Flickr, I’ve covered them in these posts:

• Why I turned off comments at Flickr
• The Flickr XP Uploader
• Flickr tightens image security
• How many of my photos were stolen?
• Zooomr: the site that keeps on giving

Zooomr

Updated 10/25/07: I’ve revised my assessment of Zooomr, although I’ve still left my original text below. To see what I’ve got to say about them now, read “Taking a break from Zooomr“.

Want to try out something new, something with the potential to rock the stock photography business? Then try Zooomr. It’s new, it’s innovative, and it’s been built by a single person, a now 19-year old developer called Kristopher Tate. Zooomr’s charismatic CEO is Thomas Hawk, an obsessive-compulsive photographer from San Francisco who shoots about 200-300 photos every day, and whose goal is to have 500,000 processed, finished photos by the time he dies. Add to this the fact that both of them are readily available via IM, email or video chat almost daily, and you’ve got one very interesting company!

Kris and Tom want to turn Zooomr into a stock photography website that takes the middle ground between microstock agencies and established agencies like Getty or Corbis. They feel that photo prices at microstock agencies are much too low for photographers, and they agree that the tight control exercised by the traditional stock agencies doesn’t allow up and coming (and talented) photographers the chance to sell their work. They want to create a Marketplace at Zooomr that will sell photos at an average price of $100, and pay 90% of that back to the photographer. This is in stark contrast to what photographers make at other agencies, where they might get at most 40%.

Zooomr combines some of the social networking features of Flickr with the ability to sell your photos as stock. It’s also localized in a ton of languages, so if you don’t speak English, there’s a good chance that you’ll find a version of Zooomr that works for you. If there isn’t one, just email Kris, and he’ll let you translate Zooomr into your own language, then make it available to everyone else in your language as well.

There are a lot of dedicated photographers using Zooomr, and the quality of the photos that the core group of Zooomrites puts out is really something you have to see to believe. There are no limits on uploading photos at Zooomr, for either free or Pro accounts. Their Pro accounts are also less expensive than any other photo sharing site, at only $19.95/year. However, the site is still very much in Beta release, meaning that some features do not work, and you may will get the occasional bug to experience plenty of bugs. If you don’t mind this, then join. I personally use Zooomr and love it. I’ve been using it since August of 2006.

If you’d like to read more about Zooomr, I’ve covered it extensively on my blog. A good place to start would be this post. I’ve got links to all of my other coverage of Zooomr right in there.

Picasa Web

This is a service that Google has created in order to allow users of Picasa, their photo organization software, to publish their photos on the web. You can create private or public galleries and order prints. You can then share slideshows online, and email links to those slideshows or galleries to your friends. This service would probably be easiest to use for the regular person. It works right from Picasa, and it’s simple.

The storage space is rather limited. Users get 1GB of space, and the chance to buy more if they choose. 7GB of storage costs $25/year, and the price goes significantly higher after that. I suppose this is just fine if you choose to resize your images when you upload them. At 800×600, your photos will take up a lot less space than if you upload at full resolution. This is why I say that this works for most people. The process is easy: download the photos to Picasa, then choose the ones you want to upload. Upon upload, the default option is to resize, so that’ll get done automatically. Once they’re up, notify your friends, and you’re done.

Obviously, the simplicity and lack of space is self-selecting. More serious photographers will want more, and that’s where Zooomr and Flickr come in. But if your mother or aunt or grandmother wants to put up her pics of the kitty or grandchildren playing in the yard, send her to Picasa. She’ll be very happy, and you won’t have to get on the phone and do a lot of photo sharing tech support. However, if that same grandmother or mother gets a hankering for photography, and starts talking to you about macro photos and what camera to get so she can photograph her flowers better, or if she asks pointed questions about DSLRs, then you’ll know she’d be happier using Flickr or Zooomr.

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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