As the capabilities of cameras in terms of image and video capturing have developed, image and video hosting and sharing platforms have also developed. Flickr is Yahoo’s video hosting platform and online community and Picasa was google’s image viewer and digital editor which was discontinued in 2016.
Flickr vs Picasa
The main difference between Flickr and Picasa is that Flickr was owned and operated by Yahoo whereas Picasa was owned and operated by Google. Flickr is still up and running whereas Google discontinued support for Picasa in favor of Google Photos which became its successor. Flickr is more widely used than Picasa.
Flickr was launched in 2004 and was designed by Ludicorp. It is a very popular photo-sharing platform for amateurs and it has a very active community of members. It limits free users to 1000 photos and up to 3 minutes of video. The pro members enjoy unlimited storage and videos up to 10 minutes in length.
Picasa was an image storing, editing, and sharing platform which was created by Idealab in 2002 but was later acquired by Google and curated for almost a decade before it was discontinued in 2016 when Google decided to focus on Google Photos. It featured facial recognition and albums with a user-friendly interface which made it very popular.
Comparison Table Between Flickr and Picasa
| Parameters of Comparison | Flickr | Picasa |
| Storage | A free account is restricted to 1000 photos and older photos are deleted. | Picasa used to limit its free users to 1 GB of storage. |
| Video resolution | It plays back video in the quality is was uploaded up to 1080p full HD. | All video is limited to 320 x 240 or 480 x 360 resolution no matter how it is uploaded. |
| Launch Date | It was launched by Ludicorp in February 2004. | It was created by Idealab in 2002 and was acquired and released by Google in 2004. |
| Photo Size | Users in Flickr can upload photos of up to 200MB to Flickr. | Users had the ability to upload photos of only up to 20MB. |
| Organization | Photos are organized into sets and collections in Flickr. | Photos are organized into albums using tags and dates. |
What is Flickr?
Flickr is a high-speed media and file hosting platform that also functions as a media viewer and player. It is currently owned by SmugMug but the credit for its popularity and innovative features goes to Yahoo who developed it from 2005 to 2017. Flickr hosts a very strong internet community that interacts about and through photos.
Flickr functions as a social media platform rather than an image viewing software only, and the users get a public profile on which they can host their photostream, which is a user’s public portfolio of images. Although the free Flickr users get ads on the user interface, a subscription can be paid in monthly or annual installments to get an ad-free experience.
The pro users also get unlimited image storage as compared to the restricted 1000 images that free users get. Flickr also has groups in which people interested in the same topic can create communities about that topic and share images and videos about them.
Flickr is very efficient in organizing photos using sets and collections. The users can also stage photos and all the photos on the public platform using that stage are bundled together. Flickr is open source in nature and anyone willing to contribute can contribute to the software and help develop it.
What is Picasa?
Picasa was an image and video viewer that also included the functionality to edit photos. It was created by Lifescape (under Idealab) in 2002 and it was purchased by technological giant Google and released as free software in 2004. Picasa was a revolutionary step in the photo hosting industry as Google introduce several innovative features which made it have an edge over the competition.
The last version of Picasa was released for Windows on 9 October 2015 and after that Google discontinued support for the software along with the Picasa website in favor of Google Photos which is an image hosting, sharing, and viewing software by Google that is in use currently.
Picasa had a very advanced graphical user interface and also featured facial recognition. Picture Collage, Group by faces, Timeline photos, etc. were some of the other features that made Picasa popular and which can still be seen in Google Photos. Picasa was also the first to introduce Geotagging in photos in 2007.
Picasa was really easy to use and upload photos to and its organization system was also really simple to understand. In editing, users had the option to crop, color correct, and change basic properties of images such as clarity, sharpness, grain, shadows, highlights, etc.
Main Differences Between Flickr and Picasa
Conclusion
Flickr and Picasa were both really good options for image broadcasting or simply as image viewers but only Flickr remains now and even that is waning in popularity after the introduction of Google Photos, the successor of Picasa, which offers cloud storage, advanced face detection, and comprehensive software support by Google.
Picasa was less restrictive in its use as compared to Flickr but was available and used majorly only on Windows-based devices. Both the platforms offer the functionality of choosing the photostream of images, namely public or private. Competition between the two platforms continued until Yahoo sold Flickr to Oath and Picasa was discontinued by Google.
References
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