Pat got me a new camera for my birthday this past October so I have been trying to take more pictures lately. One of my new years resolutions is to take more pictures! As a result, I’ve been trying out Yahoo’s Flickr and Google’s Picasa over the past couple of weeks. With Picasa recently added support on the Mac and Apple announcing iPhoto out-of-the-box Flickr integration, the feature sets from the desktop are pretty much identical. Both support (or will support) face recognition, tagging, and exporting.

For the web galleries, I really liked Picasa’s layout over Flickr’s. The web site is a lot more simplistic and easy to navigate. Maybe it’s becase I’m so familiar with other Google services. Flickr’s slideshow is so awesome though. Viewing your photostream through Cooliris is such beautiful eye candy.

I started with the free accounts. Google gives you a gig of space for the free account and you can create as many albums as you want. Flickr’s free account gives you 100 mb of upload per month and limits you to three sets.

For me, it really came down to pricing. In order to get more disk space for Picasa, you have to purchase more storage. Starting purchase goes for $20/yr for 10gigs up to $500/yr for 400GB. This storage is actually not specific to Picasa but is shared by all other Google services that need to use extra space. Flickr offers a Pro account, which gives you unlimited storage space for your videos and photos and allows you to create any number of sets and collections, for $24.95.

Given the number of photos I want to upload and my budget, I went with Flickr. Today, storage is so cheap. For $25 bucks, I should be able to get unlimited storage for a service like photo sharing. I’ve started to upload some photos I’ve had for awhile and never really shared them with those who would most enjoy them. It’s been really fun going through old pictures. My photostream can be found here.