PicasaWeb by Google vs. Photobucket
The other day I was browsing a forum and came across a nice album of someone’s pictures. I then realized
the place that was hosting the pictures was a Google site. I looked into it, and found out that Google has a free photo-hosting service, called Picasa. I’ve been using Photobucket for many years, and have thousands of images over there, and have really enjoyed them. One thing on Picasa that caught my eye right away was the Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Mac. It basically allowed me to upload several hundred of my pics off my computer onto my Picasa Album in a matter of a couple a minutes. They give you 1 GB of free storage, which is quite nice. I’m guessing thay number will eventually go up.
One thing that would make it a little nicer is if could more easily link directly to a photo. They don’t really provide you with a direct link to images. Anyways, it is a great, free service, and I’d recommend checking them out if you need a place to host your photos.
I came across this through a google alert I have set up (for info on a Mac version of Picasa). If you are looking at someone else’s photos, there may not be a direct link (not sure). But on your photos in your albums, you can do a direct link to the album, the pictures (invarious sizes), and I think maybe a slideshow but I am not sure. I used photobucket for awhile. I like picasa web albums much more. The free download of picasa is great as well. So much so that I use my new Mac for everything but photos and keep my old PC just for my photos.
You can link to a picture using a ‘Link’ provided on the right hand side of the picture, however, it isn’t a direct link. It is a link to the picture inside the album. For example, the link provided to a Picasa image I uploaded it given as this:
http://picasaweb.google.com/pjkcards/JustStuffOctober2008#5261955630950190274
That is not a direct link. It instead directs you to http://picasaweb.google.com/pjkcards/JustStuffOctober2008, and then bounces you to position ‘5261955630950190274′ on the page. In Photobucket, I can get a direct link to an image such as http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v113/pjkcards/8-1.jpg, as well as the image embedded in my album: http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v113/pjkcards/?action=view¤t=8-1.jpg
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Google provided an easy way to do this. And there is a good reason for it, so there isn’t too much hot-linking going on.
Ah, I see what you mean. It isn’t really an option as far as I know. While it is tedious, you could always right click the picture for properties and use that link.
http://lh6.ggpht.com/pjkcards/SQY4xG6nDMI/AAAAAAAAAPk/uxJIe12M8Ek/picasa.jpg
I have never tried this so I am not certain how well/long it would work if you had multiple hits. I just link to the photo using their links. For my small scale usage it’s all I need.
Hi Niki. Yeah, I have just used the direct link before. However, like you said, it may not last too long since it appears Google is avoiding the use of hot-linking anyways. I figure I will just host all the images that are posted somewhere by me on my server, and use Picasa for my albums.