I have posted photos on flickr for many years now, and in that time have amassed over 16,000 pictures – some are just cheesy little camera phone VGA size pictures; but since late 2008 I have owned a DSLR and have been taking photos using a 10 megapixel CCD.
As you can imagine – this has set my photostream in a very high kilobyte count… in fact I would hasten to say gigabyte. In total, I have 14 gigabytes of photo data on my flickr photostream!
Now recently, flickr hasn’t evolved. It’s interface isn’t the best, and I find it clunky at times. I have used Picasa side by side for a while now and the Picasa interface knocks spots off Flickr; but the community hasn’t been there in the same way.
Then along comes Google Plus…
Google really have got their heads screwed on right. Where facebook becomes bigger and clunkier by trying to do everything itself, G+ outsources things like photos and videos – after all, Google do own Picasa and Youtube (although – note – you CAN post videos on Picasa). The community is suddenly there – but instead of comprising mostly of people you don’t really know – as is on flickr – it now comprises of your friends and family.
Picasa has an amazing face detection system which also swings things for me. The more photos you identify people on, the more it learns what they look like; such to an extent that I now upload a band photo and it tags all the members for me without me even having to do a thing.
Yes, I therefore am migrating my ENTIRE photostream to Picasa storage. It’s no more expensive than flickr ($24 a year) although unlike flickr it does have a size limit (which I will still be miles off!) and the size limit is upgradeable (subject to paying out more money), and the virtual cloud drive of Google is also shared with Google Apps and Google Mail… but I don’t mind. I like the cloud. I quite like the Google cloud (although I do also use Dropbox, just in case).
Anyway, for you tech heads – I am using a nice piece of software called Bulkr to download stuff… and just Picasa to upload back to the Google cloud. I do wish Google would do a photostream import, but I should imagine Flickr would object to massive raids on their Yahoo! owned file storage.