Why Flickr rocks??

Yes, how come Flickr rocks? There are many image hosting, photo sharing services out there, so why does this one rocks? There are some simple reasons for it, which I’ll state here from my personal experience.

Sometime back, someone(can’t remember who) pointed me to Photobucket & asked why I used Flickr(I hadn’t upgraded to Pro account then & was limited by Free account’s limitations). Then somewhat later, Abhinav pointed out Shutterbook to me and said that I should try it out, it was in beta at that time I managed to get a free premium account.

So taking a first look at Photobucket, I’d say the service literally sucks!! :sick: Why would one want to go with it, either as a free user or a paid user, I don’t know, when there are services available which are 100 times better than this. By a look at their account comparison, you can see that the free users get only 50MB of disk space in all along with a pathetic monthly bandwidth of 2500MB, and they are supposed to be an image hosting & photo sharing service!! The next thing that is pathetic about this service is that they have file size limitations of 512KB!! If your files are any bigger than this then they’ll be automatically resized to this size, resulting in loss of quality & detail!! Someone tell them, we are talking about digital photos taken from a camera & its not good to assume that the photos will be taken from a camera phone!! I shoot at 4.1MP from my Kodak LS753 and it never gives photos of size less than 800KB.

Coming to the paid subscription of Photobucket, we see that it costs $25 for a year & for that you get an increased disk space of 1GB, unmetered bandwidth(so nice of them), the maximum image size goes to 1MB, and some extras are thrown in like no-ads version, FTP uploads & premium support. Now if you can do without FTP, then this service is not worth your single dime!! :tdown: :tdown:

Next, we see Shutterbook. This one’s a new service, a nice Flash interface and easy uploads etc. I tried it out during its beta and it was nice, much nicer than Photobucket I should say. But now that its out of Beta, we should look at free service first. Its free service is very limited, allows only 200 photos if you are a free user. The site doesn’t details much on the features of free & premium accounts, but you can check out its FAQs to get a bit of info. Now if you are willing to shell out $49 per year, you get a storage limit of 20GB, password protect your albums, add music to each album, edit interface colour schemes etc., not much but still better than Photobucket!! I had a bit of problem with tagging & updating tags of photos, maybe its fixed now, I’m not sure. The interface as mentioned earlier, is all Flash & though looks a bit cluttered & unusable(no opening photos in new windows), its still quite ok, as you can check out my Shutterbook albums. Though flash interface also gives you somewhat copy protection of your photos, but don’t count on it if you want to prevent un-authorised copying!! It still leaves quite a bit to be desired in my opinion & the premium service is expensive!! :tdown:

Now, the star of the show, Flickr. There’s something about this service that has thousands of loyal users and its still drawing more, though its now a Yahoo! company!! Taking a look at the interface & all that jazz, its a mix of AJAX and Flash, the photo management interface is cool!! The free account comes with a storage limit of 20MB per month. Now that’s something to be taken notice off, you are not limited to a fixed storage space, its just that in any particular month, you can upload only 20MB. That’s quite good since virtually you have unlimited storage!! There’s no limit on bandwidth but ads are displayed on all your Flickr pages. And these people are more realistic & sensible in what they are providing, that’s why, photo limits on free accounts is 5MB per photo!! But the snag with free account this that you can create only 3 photo sets(albums). Another snag is that your photo stream will display only the last 200 photos on Flickr, meaning that if you have more than 200 photos, only the last 200 will be accessible on Flickr, however if you have the URLs of photos, you can view them all since they are not deleted. And there’s a catch, if your account remains inactive for 90 consecutive days, it’ll be deleted!!

But if you are willing to spend $24.95 per year, you can upgrade to a pro account which will give you 2GB of monthly storage limit, unlimited photo sets(albums), permanent account(no deletion), ad free surfing, 10MB individual photo limit. Bandwidth is not limited on either plan. Quite a bit of extensive FAQs are available for Flickr. :tup: :tup:

If you are in USA, then Flickr started some new offerings which might be of interest to you, like ordering prints of your photos, archives on DVDs, posters or calendars from your photos or real US postage stamps created from your photos. I’m personally waiting for them to start delivering to international locations, so I can order a US postage stamp with my photo on it, it’ll be quite cool to show to your friends that you’ve your face on a real postage stamp!!

So in the end, if you are thinking of signing up with a photo sharing service, I’d highly recommend Flickr, and you can see that yourself as well that it certainly is better, for both free and paid users!! And if any of the users of Photobucket are reading this, I’d say its time you switched, unless you are content with what you are getting!!