Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Picasa-Hello Vs. Flickr


B&W Version of San Raphael River Posted by Hello
(Click on the Photo for a larger Version)

Just Trying out some free photo editing and publishing software from Google. I changed this photo to Black and White, using Picasa, and then posted here using its companion piece called Hello! Hello isn't quite as user friendly as Flicker to publish photos to the Internet. However, the companion piece, Picasa, offers some pretty nice photo editing and organizing software, which Flickr does not offer.

The photo editing and organizing abilities of Picasa are really quite good, especially considering it's free! If you are considering whether or not to purchase photo editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop, I would recommend that you try out Picasa first. It may do all you need to do. If you are a professional photographer, or graphic designer, you'll need all the tools of Photoshop, but for most amateurs, I think Picasa will do just fine!

Hello!, on the other hand is less intuitive, and not as straight forward when it comes to posting photos on a blog, or to post photos on the internet. If you ask me, it is kind of a weak link, and still needs some work. I checked out Hello! when I first started blogging, and found it to be cludegy and awkward. I can tell they have made updates to Hello, since I last tried it 6 months ago, but its still not as nice to use as Flickr.

Flickr on the other hand, is quite simple to use. You can easily upload a photo to Flickr, and if you want to post it to your blog, you just click a button, and it's done. No mess, no wondering what to do next. It's all pretty seamless. Flickr is also more of a community as well. You can post your photos to be seen by the public, or to be seen by family or friends, or it can be completely private, so that only you can see it. It also lets you organize your photos in to albums (or "sets") and you can attach "tags" to your photos, which are searchable for later recall.

Recently Flickr was bought out by Yahoo! So we'll have to see how integration with Yahoo will affect Flickr in the future. But for now, I would highly recommend Flickr for blogging, and Internet sharing of photos.

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