Flickr or Hello/Picasa with Blogger.com

I wanted to compare using both Picasa/Hello and Flickr to post to my blog on Blogger.com. I posted the below picture of Kay & Jagger from Picasa/Hello and I posted the cat pics from Flickr.

It was pretty painless to upload images and post to my blog in both cases, as long as I didn't care how the post ultimately appeared. My thoughts briefly (I need to hit the post office for tax day *grin*):

• The user path to Blogger.com was cleaner in Hello/Picasa than the path in Flickr, i.e., faster to get to the result. Good to see there is some conversation happening between product teams in GoogleLand. :)
• I had to download software to use Hello with Picasa in order to post photos to my blog. Flickr is all online obviously. Since I'm happiest with users paths in MS PictureIt! for simple edits to my photos, like resizing or getting rid of red-eye, Flickr is a better tool for online photo management for me than Picasa/Hello ... Picasa doesn't have functionality to resize a photo (I think) unless I email/blog through Picasa or I might use it. I kept wondering why I needed more software on my laptop connecting to the net and passing data from my machine out into the world. It makes me uncomfortable since I don't know exactly what Picasa/Hello passes out when publishing whereas with Flickr I'm just giving a pathname and uploading a file and I can control whether my MS software has access to the net as a separate problem.
• Although I didn't try it out, Flickr appears to support other blog hosting sites while Hello/Picasa only supports the Google solution.
• Both tools seem to assume one picture per post. Um yeah. Most people have sets of pictures nowadays. Better to embed Flickr in my blog template and then I can have slide shows and all. Picasa/Hello doesn't offer enough to give me this functionality at all.
• I don't like it that both utilities assume I want the item *really* published rather than saved as a draft. I want to have some impact on the ultimate results. Since both tools autogen everything in the post for me based on their assumptions, typically I want to screw around with layout and stuff which would be why I want a draft rather than automatically publishing. If you can't give me more creative freedom and control, at least give me the option to save as draft.
• When Flickr publishes a photo, they add an auto-gen'd unique identifier to the filename ... I had to find the filename in the HTML of the post in my blog. Picasa/Hello appears to auto-gen some unique folders but preserves my filename ultimately ... again I can only find the URL in the blog post. Obviously they need a way to perserve uniqueness but this behavior leaves alot to be desired in both cases because URLs to my uploaded photos should be more easily discoverable. At least tell me where you stored my files so I can write my own HTML to refer to it.

So provided Yahoo! doesn't mess up the world in Flickr-land ... and since neither blog publishing functionality really stands out and Flickr is much better for managing photos, I'm going to stick with Flickr for now.


Kay and Jagger. Just cool.