Speak: Facebook photos vs. Flickr vs. Picasa vs. Smugmug

As some of you know, I have been pondering about the different ways of showcasing photographs. What are the differences between the different sites? Are the paid subscriptions worth it?

The different sites are built with different philosophies, and hence they have different strengths by design. So let me tell you the punchline right away.

You will get the largest audience for your pictures on Facebook. Google's Picasa Web is the best free site out there. Smugmug is the best paid site that I have found thus far.

Flickr is a great site too, but there are sufficient limitations with its free service that it should really be considered a paid site. Other free sites like Kodak Gallery (originally Ofoto) and Snapfish are poor.

Facebook photo (Free)
You will get the largest possible audience for your photographs on Facebook. With extensive name tagging, your friends will wander over just to see what new pictures you have of them. However, the picture quality is also extremely poor. The site is meant for sharing connections, not displaying photographs. For those of us who do not sell our photographs, or who cannot find a sufficiently large enough audience to sell the photographs, Facebook (sadly) remains an option.

The snippet from Lily's website show a recent birthday party. Image display quality is poor, organization is so-so, but each photo can have its tag. With a large community of friends, these photographs can propagate very far.

Flickr ($25 per year for Pro)

I see people using Flickr in two dominant ways. The first is a photo blog, a continually story on the lives of your family or yourself. Take a picture, post it up, write a little comment. It's like a stream of consciousness with images. The following is a screen snippet from my friends Don and Cheryl. They post beautiful pictures of their family.

Flickr is also a social network tool. It has name tagging, as well as labels, so that things are easily searchable. The main drawback of Flickr's social network compared with Facebook is its reach; Facebook simply has too many users on it, no matter how poor the pictures are. So Flickr suffers from having a smaller community to network to.

A second use of Flickr that is quite popular is showcasing the very best work by a particular person. This next snippet is from b|w, a fabulous photographer and friend. I don't know how many shots he takes on any given outing, but it looks like he displays the top 1 or top 2 out of the entire collection for that day of shoots. Flickr does a nice job of displaying the photographs in rich colors, and there is a photo stream preview typically on the right side.

Flickr is actually quite disorientating to me. It is structured like a stream of thought, rather than a collection of subjects. It is great if you are looking for single photos, or trying to figure out what has changed since the last time you were at this person's site. It is poor if you are a first time visitor trying to figure out how all of the photographs fit together. There are collections called sets that collect photographs together, but even then the place to display the sets are much smaller than Smugmug.

Picasa Web (Free)

I rate Google's Picasa Web as the best free option out there. Picasa, the desktop software editor and organizer, is a fabulous tool that I use all the time. Picasa Web is not as thrilling. This following snippet is from Jaume Cusido's public album. It shows a collection of shots that are logically associated. It's free, and if you click on each individual picture it shows the bigger version of the picture.

It is an excellent website for the cost. However, I feel that Smugmug still does a better job of displaying photos and making a wider array of tools available. The pictures on Picasa Web is not as crisp or as brilliant as Flickr or Smugmug.

Smugmug ($40 per year for basic, up to $150 for professional)

The most expensive photo display website of the bunch, it is also the prettiest. It does not require your visitors to get an account before seeing the pictures. Smugmug has lots of tools to organize the photographs into logical groups, has geographical tagging to put pictures on a map, can print on paper, mugs, books, T-shirts, and much more.

The following snippet is from GeoHsia, who is on assignment around the world at this moment. I like Smugmug's elegant black background, but there are plenty of other themes to choose from. The site does not charge based on the number of photographs uploaded, but rather on the volume of traffic your site generates. Let me pause and say that it is doubtful 95% of the users will ever hit that limit.

Smugmug also has lots of ways of showing different sizes of photos. It will also resize itself to fit the screen resolution you are using, so that the display looks right for a netbook, or an iPhone, or a 24" gigantor LCD screen. Slideshow is easy to activate.

Smugmug lacks social networking, however. The community base, though fanatical, is too small. It can link to Facebook and other sites easily enough, but such network is not native.