Marketing: Flickr or Picassa?

[Frank Petronio]

In terms of "getting your work out there" which do you think is a better choice? Flickr or Picassa?

I like the Picassa interface a little better I think. But I think Flickr has a much larger audience.

Which is easier for stock photo buyers to find using Google? (I would think Picassa but Flickr is such a big brand....)

I'm mainly looking for ad agency-designer type photo buyers who might troll for interesting pictures. I keep reading on Photo Editor and PDN and such about people buying/selling higher-end photo usage from these so-called amateur sites.

Also, while I know they only take jpgs, as a worst case scenario for cheap back-up, having a couple hundred of your best images in yet another place makes sense to me, even if they are only smaller jpgs. What is the "maximum" size you can post on either site?

And finally, of the two sites, which do you think does a better job protecting images from misuse and theft? I know it is impossible to prevent but which one goes further?

[Wallace_Billingham]

flickr has a much larger user base, they do frown on you however using the service to sell anything or yourself. My guess is that your odds are better to be struck by lightning or win the lottery than to have someone stumble on your stuff on flickr or picassa who would actually buy something unsolicited. It could happen but don't count on it. If you want to sell stock you best bet is to use a stock site.

If you buy the pro membership on flickr which costs like $25 a year you can upload and store an unlimited number of jpegs of a maximum 10mb in size.

Both are pretty equal as far as detering image theft but then again anything online is going to be equal as if it is online it can be used.

I buy two pro memberships a year on flickr. One that I use as a regular member and the other that I keep private and use as an online backup. I export all my keeper images as JPEGs using the highest quality possible while keeping them under 10mb and upload them all to flickr on my backup account. The nice thing about doing that is that you can get to them from any computer anywhere in the world that has an internet connection, and since I use Lightroom to add meta data to all my files I can use flickr to search for what I am looking for.

On my personal account that I use I only upload images that are no bigger than 600px on a side.

The good or bad thing about flickr is that the whole system is very search engine friendly. I have some images that have hundreds of thousands of hits because of online searches. This is good in that buyers might find them, it is bad in that people might steal them

[brian mcweeney]

I'm waiting for one of those ad agency art buyers to find my stuff on Flickr and pay me lots of usage money, but alas that hasn't happened. Not even beer money! As far as stealing goes, I plaster my copyright over the images and keep them smallish.

[William McEwen]

Frank, a portrait photographer friend of mine went to the park and shot a bunch of pictures yesterday because we've had a wonderful snowfall.

She posted a few on Facebook, and now she's inundated with "how much for a print/send me your prices" requests on Facebook. You just never know.

[Dirk Rösler]

And finally, of the two sites, which do you think does a better job protecting images from misuse and theft? I know it is impossible to prevent but which one goes further?

Errr Frank, you did know that Flickr lets you blog any Flickr photo on any weblog? Is that theft/misuse, mmmh? Well, these sites enable and encourage "sharing", that's the whole point.

I use Flickr quite a bit for marketing, it works quite well and I get some traffic and sales. Also we have recently started using Tumblr and that is working well too. I'd say do a combination of all these including FB and Twitter etc. and then see. It's like fishing with many rods

[Matus Kalisky]

Picassa must be the better choice. I have some stuff over on Flickr and got no sale proposals yet ...

[LaurenJade]

Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media. As of October 2009, it claims to host more than 4 billion images.

Picasa is a software application for organizing and editing digital photos, originally created by Idealab and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my house" and "pic" for pictures (personalized art). In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa and began offering it as a free download. At the time of the acquisition, the company's management team consisted of Lars Perkins as CEO, Mike Herf as CTO, and Dan Engel as VP Market Development.

[bobwysiwyg]

Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media. As of October 2009, it claims to host more than 4 billion images.

Picasa is a software application for organizing and editing digital photos, originally created by Idealab and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my house" and "pic" for pictures (personalized art). In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa and began offering it as a free download. At the time of the acquisition, the company's management team consisted of Lars Perkins as CEO, Mike Herf as CTO, and Dan Engel as VP Market Development.

Picasa also provides an on-line album capability, similar to others, if you choose to use it.

[BradS]

I cannot imagine a real photographer, somebody whose trying to make a living at it, being well served by posting his work on flickr (and I think what I say here applies as well to Picasa, et al.).

it seems like 90 percent or more of the images on flickr are fuzzy, camera-phone, arm's length self "portraits" of narcissistic teens and twenty-somethings.

Flickr is at best a place to facilitate theft of your images. The stuff that does get legitimately published from there is largely produced by rank amateurs who are elated with such compensation as may to feed their ego but not feed the family...if I'm not being too subtle.

I think a real photographer would be much better served by a legitimate stock agency and a well done professional website.

[Jack Dahlgren]

I'm not as negative as BradS, but flickr is more about sharing your photos than presenting them. The user interface is cluttered and not very attractive and often does not present your work very well. I use it to store and share images, but if I were going to sell something, I'd want to present it in a cleaner view.

Here is an example of a simple blog to display photos:
http://zo-d.com/photography/

Compared to how the same things show up on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jack-d/4382320855/

My site is nothing compared to many of the nice sites people have set up to showcase their photographs.

But if you want to have your work "found" by people maybe a hybrid approach would work? A small photo on Flickr (tagged with good keywords and description) with a link to your real site...