Flickr Finally Has Competition - Cheaper Storage on Google Web Albums

I’ve been using Flickr for quite a few years now because it’s a great website for photo sharing. Perhaps most importantly to me, it’s offered super cheap online storage – less than $25 for unlimited storage. However, offline I’ve been using Google’s Picasa software to do all my photo organization – tagging, captioning, touch ups, sorting into albums, and recently geotagging and face recognition. The one thing that I’ve really wanted was a great way to sync between Picasa and somewhere online – but for cheap. Google was charging $75 for 40GB, which is about how much photo data I have that I’d like to backup – way too much. Now it’s $20 for 80GB. Sweet. I’m in the process of uploading everything now.

Not only does Google’s Picasa Web Albums sync data between online and desktop, it syncs tags and captions. Now I can upload my photos and tag them from anywhere with an internet connection if I get the urge to organize. Then I can sync those changes back down.

So far the main thing I’m missing from Flickr is the post to blog feature. I’m finding a ton of plugins for Wordpress that supposedly help with this, but I just want one good one. I tried one already called Goldengate that used up all my PHP memory. No thanks. I tried another I don’t even remember already that was just terrible. I’m sure a good one is out there, and once I find it, I think I’ll be ready to switch over from Flickr completely.