Well I’m trying to come back from the blogging hiatus that I’ve been on. It seems that throughout my week all of these “That would be a great blog post” ideas pops into my head. I usually commit that idea to Twitter of simply let it evaporate – I’m trying to make an effort to get these back in the blog. Thanks for bearing with me.
I got an email the other day telling me that my Flickr Pro account is about to expire and that I need to pay the $25 to renew it yet again. I’ve been a Flickr Pro user for 4 years, and $100 later I have decided to throw in the towel and push my chips toward Google.
When I became a pro member in 2006, Flickr was one of the hottest sites around. Everyone was posting to Flickr, making it an awesome repository for photos. They released some pretty cool features to keep things interesting (I particularly loved their geo-tagging feature), but over the last couple of years Flickr has been pretty stagnant. It’s funny because one of my RSS feeds I track is “Flickr News”, and my feed reader was telling me it was a “dinosaur feed” since it hasn’t been updated in so long.
Along came Picasa. When they released their latest version that enabled the Person-tagging and facial recognition, I was hooked. I migrated my personal collection for 40,000 photos and spent hours tagging faces. In some ways it became an addictive game: see who Picasa thinks is who, see who has been tagged the most (me with 3,161), see how big your list of faces grows (263 people). Picasa (Google) was really smart because now I’m seriously invested into their program. Sure I can take my pictures and move onto the next shiny object, but then I would lose all the work I put into getting these faces tagged.
With Google enabling the people tagging into the web albums, the next logical step is to put my photos there. When you look at the storage options and see that 80GB of storage is $5 cheaper than a Flickr Pro account, the choice becomes clearer.
So goodbye Flickr. It has definitely been fun, but I think it’s time to move on. I’m going to keep my pictures on Flickr and will see about updating what I can with a free account, but I’m putting another one of my eggs into the Google basket. Scary and lemming-like? Yes, but can you blame me?
Below I’ve embedded the first album I’ve uploaded to Picasa, our Valentine’s Day trip to Vegas. It’s funny because I remember when Flickr wouldn’t allow embedding of slideshows for the longest time.