Tuesday, September 16th 2008

Flickr vs Picasa: The best of two worlds, please

I use Flickr for my photos. It’s great in many ways and gives me full control. I can use it both as an online backup and a simple way to show my photos. But it has one drawback:

It sucks for visitors.

What I mean is, it isn’t very easy to use if you’re not a Flickr user yourself. It takes a lot of thinking and guessing.

For instance…

• Sets is not a very intuitive word for albums. Also, the difference between collections and sets is impossible to grasp at a glance.
• Just something as simple as navigating between photos in a set is unintuitive. Make nice arrows over, or instead of, the navigation thumbnails to the right. Give the user a sense of direction.
• Why not have the Sets page as the default? Make the photostream an alternative.
• A set shows tiny, cropped thumbnails by default. There is a Detail page for sets which is much better – make this the default.
• Commenting on a photo requires that you’re a member. My family shouldn’t have to become Flickr members just to comment on my photos.
• Flickr is slow! Photos should be preloaded like they are on Picasa. Also, some AJAX wizardry to make better use of the screen would be nice. (The world has moved on from 800×600 screens.)

Picasa, on the other hand, get’s quite a few of these things right.

I guess user interfaces (or the lack of them) are Google’s forte:

• Clear arrows for navigating between photos.
• Albums are the first thing a visitor sees.
• Large, good-looking photos. (Admittedly, Flickr photos look superb, they’re just a bit small.)
• Thumbnails in albums are not cropped to squares. And the viewer can easily change their size.

At the same time, I don’t want to have to put photos into sets or albums, as one does with Picasa.

So here’s my appeal to Flickr and Picasa: I’d like the Flickr developers to make navigation easier and faster for viewers. And Picasa, get working on the power stuff that Flickr has. I’m thinking of things like the organizer (which is only second to Lightroom when it comes to … organizing).

I’d prefer it if Flickr made the move though, so I don’t have to upload all my photos to Picasa…

Posted at 18:41. Tags: Flickr. Categories: photography. Both comments and trackbacks are closed.

2 Responses to this post:

1. Robert Nyman says:

   September 24, 2008 at 18:28

   Yep, Flickr definitely sucks for visitors, most of the time.
2. Michael says:

   October 21, 2008 at 01:40

   Amen. We have been working to get some photos out there for our family and for 50 something non computer users flickr just doesn’t cut it. Non-intuitive navigation and the fact that you have to be a member to order prints are my main gripes. But Picasa – while easier on the navigation and printing just doesn’t look as nice and you can’t put your photos into sub albums. Oh well hopefully someone will come out with a nice hybrid soon.