Alex Hardy

I’ve been looking for a solution to getting photos online. I’ve noodled around with Flickr, Picasa and Ringo but I’ve pretty much dismissed Ringo because I’ve not found a satisfactory way to upload images in bulk.

Since the Mac is my weapon of choice, I import and organise my photo collection with iPhoto. Picasa looks like a very capable equivalent for Windows users, but it’s unavailable for the Mac - presumably because Google chooses not to fight a preinstalled app. They support it instead, by providing handy free Mac tools in the form of an iPhoto export plugin and a standalone uploader application.

The Picasa Web Albums website isn’t bad for a relatively new offering and is tempting because it means I can just use my existing Google account. It does lack a lot of things though, like tags*, visitor comments and is presented with Google’s usual design style - which is minimal to say the least.

In the other corner, Flickr provides links to third party tools that do the same job, although the iPhoto plugin charges a £12 registration fee.

I think Flickr wins for me because it can easily be incorporated into an Automator workflow: a Photoshop actions pack and Flickr upload plugin are freely available. This will be useful for a freelance project that I have on the cards…

For my money, Flickr is a cooler website and the Photo Album WordPress plugin is the icing on the cake. All I need to confirm now is that my phone identifies itself properly to iPhoto as a Sony Cybershot - that would be sweeeeeet **

Expect to see my humble attempts at photography on these pages in future!

[CORRECTION] *Picasa Web Albums does have tags.

[UPDATE] **It does indeed!

Posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 3:16 pm under Photos, Toolbox. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.