Salam,
Well, this post although quite unrelated to food and travel which is my main niche but it was somehow reflect to this blog. As you know, this blog is all about Food and Travel, therefore, in order to give you better view of what I’m talking about, photos will play the most important part for any of my posts here. I had to put a lot of photos as I can to make the story more interesting.
And in order to cut my bandwidth usage and server load, I had to used external image hosting which is reliable, fast and easy, merely to give the best experience to the visitors and me. However there are hundreds if not thousands of good free image hosting out there, which causes difficulty for me to choose which one is the best among all. However, for today, I will just focus to 3 free image hosting which I think quite popular among users (as they come from a very big/well known company) and easy to use. The three are Flickr by Yahoo Inc, Picasa by Google and Facebook Photos by Facebook.
Lately, if you notice, I had changed my main image hosting from Flickr to Picasa. But why am I changing? Here is my reason:
Flickr.
I had used Flickr for quite sometimes in my previous post. In fact, I use it in my first food review for this blog, where at that time I’m using blogspot!~ =P Actually, the reason I’m using Flickr because it was easy for me to blog. My passion for blogging was limited by my available free time as I’m quite busy in real life, so I will need a very simple tools to help me blogging whenever I free. And as I can’t always get online 24hours/anywhere, I will need to use offline blogging tools like Windows Live Writer (WLW).
In WLW, you can add on a plugins that available on their site to make your blogging easier, where one of my favourite plugin are Flickr4Writer which helps you to import photos from Flickr and put it in your blog post. It really helps me a lot in terms of putting my photos which I had uploaded to Flickr using their desktop application, Flickr Uploadr.
Picasa.
Okay, before I tell you which one better to another and which one I mostly preferred, I will brief about Picasa first. After the introduction of Google Plus (G+) (One of Google efforts in creating their own social networks), Google had amazingly upgrades Picasa service.
Basically Picasa had 1GB 5GB (they upgraded their free user limit! Update: 1/2/2013) limit for it’s free users. There are also plugin for Picasa image in WLW which is Picasa Image Plugin. You may upload your image through their own Desktop Application or through their web. And to me, the web uploader is better in terms of privacy and simplicity as it was just Drag-N-Drop work. IDK why, but their desktop application is just too complicated for me to understand!~huhu
Image being upload in Picasa Web Albums.
However there are something about Picasa that’s really attract me.
First, is their quota limit. Okay, I will not write very detail on this, you may just compare it by reading here: Picasa Limit | Flickr Limit. As you can see, more or less, both are quite generous in terms of uploading and storage limitations. Both offer unlimited storage with certain limitation. It depends on what types of user you are, a heavy photo uploader or vice versa. However, I prefer Picasa as it has unlimited monthly upload quota and they allow me to see all my photos, either old or new photo.
Second, image resizing. Photo resizing in Picasa as easy as changing the image url structure. Yeah, you can change the image size just by changing the value in the url. Here is an example:
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-a1aqm6DldKo/Tom5eT2PavI/AAAAAAAAAzY/vZWe9XKsvUw/s640/IMG_0515.JPG
try to change the value in “s640” to any value (new value must below the original image value).
Example: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-a1aqm6DldKo/Tom5eT2PavI/AAAAAAAAAzY/vZWe9XKsvUw/s320/IMG_0515.JPG
and if you want the original size, just remove the value:
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-a1aqm6DldKo/Tom5eT2PavI/AAAAAAAAAzY/vZWe9XKsvUw/IMG_0515.JPG
In Flickr, as far as I’m concern, the photos will be resize into several sizes which already been set by the Flickr. So, to me, it was quite unpractical. Well, you can use html code to change your photo image size but it will not be as perfect as resizing the photo itself.
The same things happen if you want to rename the photo, just change the URL structure and amazingly the photo can still be seen:
Example: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-a1aqm6DldKo/Tom5eT2PavI/AAAAAAAAAzY/vZWe9XKsvUw/IMG_0515.JPG
to
Well, it’s quite amazing right? How Google Picasa makes your life easier!~ :hoho:
Third, image compression, the quality and loading speed. Okay this is the most important and I’ll combine all this 3 elements as it was quite related together. To done this, I uploaded exactly the same image to Flickr, Picasa and Facebook. I gather all the image in one post, then I tried to do a speed test by using web speed test service like Pingdom, GTmetrix, Webpagetest and Loads.in. And the result is quite shocking!! :matilaaa:
See the result below: (Shorter is better)
So, it seems like on most of the test, Picasa wins over another. And Flickr is more likely to be the slowest. This is why I love Picasa. Well, on the image compression and quality issue, Picasa is in between Facebook Photos and Flickr. In Facebook photos, the image will be compressed until it effect the image quality. Picasa still retain the same size of the image file while Flickr shockingly increase the size!!
Well, if you want to test it by yourself (in case you don’t believe me :nari4: ), here’s the link of the photos:
Picasa | Flickr | Facebook Photo
And this is the page I use for the speed test: Fadzioriq Test Blog.
Fifth, very simple organizer. Image can be easily managed and organized. Well, maybe I shall do a full review on Picasa later. In the mean time, why don’t you just explore it yourself~ :huuuuhhh:
In conclusion.
Anyway, I think I shall end my post now, coz it’s getting too long. I don’t want to break this into 2 parts because this is not a tech blog and you may just need to do a little bit of research if you want extra details~ :nari1:
Well, the upgrade done by Google to Picasa really attract me. However, I still loves Flickr because they have very amazing photographer community and I always look for inspiration there. But, as my main intention for hosting images are for blogging, Picasa really suits me. They offer fast loading time, non heavy compression, fair image quality and the community is growing fast as the introduction of Google Plus (G+). Extra point is that it has WLW plugin~
And Facebook Photos really degrading the image quality, which is to me, very bad!
What is yours favourite image hosting anyway? Tell that in the comment section, I would love to try it~ Thanks for reading anyway!! :bye3:
March 7, 2012 at 12:36 PM
great!
October 30, 2011 at 4:05 PM
i think ,there are many more image hoster to host ur image using shortlink , i donno . but still now, i use picasa 😀
October 21, 2011 at 1:52 PM
I love using Picasa too. Another reason you might want to add is, Picasa comes with a very cool desktop app you can use to edit, organise and upload photos.
I also love using the resizing via URL method you wrote about.
October 24, 2011 at 10:19 AM
haha, well, for me, don’t really like the Picasa desktop~because it was too complicated to me~~huhu.
And sometimes I’m afraid google can secretly upload my private image to picasa and display it publicly. I dunno, it seems like they can do it via the sync function rite?
in editing, I love photoscape more~ =)