Comparing Flickr Picasa Web and Photobucket

Difference between Flickr.com, Picasaweb.com and Photobucket.co

We will compare three renowned image hosting and sharing websites which serve this purpose – Flickr, PicasaWeb, Photobucket. Flickr.com is a yahoo owned website that offers its users video hosting, image hosting and editing services. Besides it is a community where you can interact with other users, comment their pictures, etc. The website is not only being deployed to share and embed personal photographs but also for hosting blog images. As of now, the website claims to have over 4 billion images being hosted on their servers! Flickr also provides a photo editing tool Picnick embedded onto website. Picasaweb.com (Picasa Web Albums) is a photo hosting website owned by Google. It does not offer video hosting services. Google provides a desktop application ‘Picasa’ through which you can share and organize your photos on the Picasa Web Albums. Photobucket.com is an image and video hosting website presently owned by Seattle. It is often used for hosting images to be displayed on website such as eBay, MySpace, etc. 

Privacy and Sharing

In Picasa Web Albums, You can choose to keep your pictures as private or share them publicly. Private pictures are not shown in the search results and can be shared only through the URL (which contains authorization key) that is known only to the uploader. The URL can be sent via email and the like to the persons with whom you want to share your photos. Proper Authorization and Authentication mechanisms ensure the users’ privacy at Photobucket.com. Password protected sharing, and guest level access authorization methods are used to share the private pics. You can also render the photos as public which would not require any authentication. Flickr has a ‘guest pass’ system for the non Flickr members to view private images by the Flickr users. Public images can be seen without authentication.

Membership and Storage Limits

Flickr offers two types of membership – free and pro. The free account holders can upload 200MBs of Photos per month. If a free account stays inactive for 3 months, it is automatically deleted. The pro Flickr accounts can upload unlimited number of images and videos every month! Picasa Web Albums allows users with Google accounts to store up to 1GB of images. Additional Space with a min. of 16 GB can be rented which will be shared with your Gmail service as well. Photobucket also offers free and paid accounts with limits of storage for free accounts being 500 MB and that of paid account being 25 GB.

I personally like the Picasa Web because I use Google for everything and it just works for me, but I have a Flickr account also. All of them are good but it's all about what works for you.