Picasa Web Albums v Kodak EasyShare

One way or another, you will have to pay in an ongoing fashion for the privilege of storing your pictures.

There’s nothing more satisfying than being able to put all your vacation, family reunion, baby or party pictures online and have friends and family be able to peruse those pictures at their leisure and order prints if they want to. The web is the photo album of the digital generation – it humanizes the web and gives it higher purpose. One thing you don’t want to do, though, is spend hours and hours formatting and uploading pictures. In the days of film, a camera would typically hold 24 to 36 prints. But modern digital cameras hold hundreds of pictures. You simply don’t have time to crunch all those pictures manually. Thus, you have to have tools to help ease the burden. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of photo gallery websites. Some are very basic, others are a lot more sophisticated. I’ve tried several of them, including Kodak EasyShare Gallery, Wal-Mart, and Walgreens, but I’ve settled on (drum roll please) Picasa Web Albums from Google. However, Walgreens still fits into the schema (which I’ll explain soon). I’m sorry if I didn’t get to your favorite online gallery, but there’s simply too darn many to review them all.

Because I already know and love Picasa, it seemed only natural that I would at try out their gallery service, as it integrates very nicely with Picasa. However, I didn’t want to just settle, so I did a head-to-head comparison of Picasa Web Albums with Kodak EasyShare Gallery. I uploaded the same gallery to both places and sent out an invite email to various family members, who aren’t necessarily the most computer savvy people, to see which one they liked better. After interviewing these family members, I found out that both services were equally easy to use (although one person thought they had to register with Kodak’s site before viewing the pictures, which implies their site might be a little more confusing than Google’s). Overall, though, everyone in my little test sample was easily able to use either service, so that didn’t help me with my final selection.

Pictures take up a lot of room, and even though both services are free to use, they do eventually want some money out of you for taking up their hard drive space. Kodak’s model is a little difficult to understand at first. Basically, you can upload as many galleries as you want, but you have to purchase at least one thing – it could be as little as a 15 cent print – from each gallery within one year of loading the gallery. At first I thought buying one picture a year would be ideal – my family members would easily take care of that purchasing cute pictures of their grandkids. But it’s the account holder that has to do the purchasing, not a gallery visitor. That means that you have to buy a print out of each of your galleries every year for the rest of time (or at least until you don’t care if the gallery goes away). If you’ve got a significant number of galleries uploaded, that could get onerous. Google, on the other hand, is a lot more straightforward – they give you 250 Megabytes of space for free (which, according to their documentation, works out to about 1,000 pictures, or about 10 galleries each containing 100 pictures), and you can purchase more space on a yearly basis. Google’s prices are $25.00 per year for 6.25 Gigabytes of storage, $100.00 per year for 25 Gigabytes of storage, $300.00 per year for 100 Gigabytes of storage, and $500.00 per year for 250 Gigabytes of storage. If you do the math, the 6.25 Gigabytes of storage Google gives you for $25.00 per year comes to around 25 times the free space they give you – or about 250 galleries (25,000 photos). If you purchased 250 pictures at 15 cents each from Kodak, in order to keep your galleries alive, that would be about $37.50 per year, plus you would have to go through the motions of purchasing one item from each of your 250 galleries every year – that’s not such a good deal. Looking carefully at the cost started tipping the scales in favor of Google.

In both cases, it’s possible to game the system. With Kodak, you could simply re-upload your gallery after the year has gone by, and with Google, you could simply get more GMail accounts, which would provide you with more free space. I don’t see a legal reason why this would be a problem, but I suppose if everyone gamed the system, both Kodak and Google would give up on the gallery business and you would be searching for a new home for your pictures. So, I recommend paying your fair share – besides, you won’t feel like such a cad. After giving it a lot of thought, though, I’ve concluded that you definitely don’t want to use an online gallery as your photo backup mechanism. First, the gallery shrinks the pictures before they are uploaded and they don’t keep the high-resolution original. Second, your gallery might one day go away, so you want to be sure you’ve backed your photos up onto a DVD or something similar.

One way or another, you will have to pay in an ongoing fashion for the privilege of storing your pictures.

Ease of use is what separates the wheat from the chaff. Both Kodak and Google have a program that you download and install in order to manage your galleries and upload pictures. In Kodak’s case, it’s called Easy Upload for PCs, and in Google’s case it’s called Picasa. After installing and configuring both programs, I think the “Easy” in Easy Upload for PCs is a bit of a misnomer. There’s nothing terribly easy about using Easy Upload, and it continually caused an error on my system each time I booted up. Beyond that, it sucked up way too many system resources, and wasn’t all that easy to use. Picasa is much easier to use, a lot more intuitive, and far kinder to system resources. Based on the upload client alone, I had to go with Google’s solution. One important feature that Picasa supports that Kodak EasyShares does not is being able to load video to your gallery. Unfortunately, Mac users will have to wait for Google to add support for video, but PC users can enjoy it now.

Another important feature of a gallery is the ability to get prints off of it – all this technology is great, but eventually, Grandma wants hard-copy. Kodak EasyShares makes it pretty easy, and that was one thing in its favor. Their whole website (and client) is built around getting you to buy products, which is their bread and butter. The only issue I had with Kodak is that they didn’t do business with a photo development entity in my neck of the woods. Unfortunately, that is why I had to fully abandon them – otherwise I’d recommend going with them for your prints. If I am going to order prints, I might as well send them to a photo development place near me, where I can avoid shipping costs and get the job done same-day. Picasa Web Albums, on the other hand, uses a variety of places including Kodak EasyShares, Wal-Mart, Walgreens, and others to handle hard-copy printing. This makes Picasa Web Albums ideal because you’re not tied to a specific company to do your prints. Case in point, I signed up with evil Wal-Mart to get my prints (which I needed rapidly due to the encroachment of Christmas), but their 1 hour in-store printing site was down. Then I signed up with Walgreens, sent my prints over the wire, and was able to pick them up after work. Given my easy experience with Walgreens, and their market saturation, I’d recommend them as your hard-copy printer if you have one nearby.

So if you’re looking for a relatively inexpensive solution to your online gallery needs, once again Google comes to the rescue with Picasa and Picasa Web Albums.