Managing Images for a WordPress Blog: Picasa or Flickr?

Question

(Moderator's note: The original title was "Is it good to use picasa web album for images in wordpress blog?")

Is it good to use Picasa web album for post's images in WordPress blog? What are pros and cons? Which one (Flickr or Picasa) is more suitable for blog post's images?

Answer 1

Both @George Wiscombe and @anu have good suggestions. To elaborate though, I'd say it depends on one of the following criteria:

1. Do you plan to write programs using one of their API? If yes, review their APIs and pick the one you are most confortable with. Here are their APIs:

   • Flickr's App Garden API
   • Picasa Web Albums Data API
     
     

2. Is Free important to you? - If free is important to you and you will be uploading more than 100Mb of images per month but not maintaining more than 1GB at any one time them go with Picasa.

3. If you Free is not critical but As Cheap As Possible is important Google sells 5Gb additional for US$5/year, each 5Gb. Flickr doesn't limit storage but instead limits uploading bandwidth, and is $25/year for unlimited uploading.

4. I'm pretty sure there are More 3rd Party Tools for Managing Photos for Flickr than for Picasa, so if you think 3rd party tools are a killer feature, go with Flickr.

5. If none of those other issues are important and your are just going to grab the image URLs to link to them, just choose the one you like the most.

BTW, if I were choosing I'd choose Flickr. I also wrote this to show up a few weeks ago to show someone How To Automate a Daily Picture Blog using Flickr. You might find it to be helpful too:

• Automating a Daily Picture Blog

Answer 2

In terms of functionality / ease of use there isn't much difference both have a selection of great plugins. I've only really had experience with the Flickr API but it was really easy.

The downside with Flickr is that if you do not have a 'pro' account you can only have 200 shots available in your account (when you over run this they are hidden). A pro account is $25 per year.

The downside with Picasso is that it doesn't have the same community that flickr has. If you're clever on Flickr you can drive traffic back to your blog by being involved in flickr groups / commenting etc & mentioning your site in your image descriptions.

Answer 3

It really depends on what you're trying to achieve.

If all you want to do is serve up your own images, then both are about the same - flickr has a limitation on the free account, picasa's free offering is limited to 1GB of images. You might as well look at photobucket as well.

If you're after something more (eg tag based image aggregation, some community around your images, etc), then flickr is probably the better bet, although you'll find you may need up upgrade to the pro offering.