Lifehacker Faceoff: Google Photos Vs Flickr
Last month, Google and Yahoo made big changes to their photo storage services, Google Photos and Flickr (4.0), respectively. Both offer identical useful features: automatic photo backup, smart organization, online editing tools, and sharing capabilities. So which one should you use?
Back in January, we asked readers to vote on the best image hosting sites, and Google+ Photos (from which the new Google Photos grew) came out on top . But it was a bitter race against Flickr, which only got 67 fewer votes. A lot has happened since then. Google ditched the Google+ link and introduced free unlimited storage for standard definition photos and videos, while Flickr rolled out automatic uploading and smart photo organizing features. Let’s see how these two popular services now compare.
The basics: storage space, file formats, and cost
Google Photos: unlimited backups, but not full resolution. Google will back up all your photos and videos as long as they don’t exceed 16 megapixels or 1080p high definition videos. If you choose this unlimited storage option, Google will compress any higher resolution images and videos to meet these maximum requirements. Want to keep the original quality at full resolution? You can do this too, but it will be limited by the amount of storage you have in your Google account (which is shared with Google Drive and Gmail). For most people, that’s 15GB of free storage with the option to pay for additional storage if you need it.
Google Photos also supports more file formats, including RAW images. However, if you use the unlimited storage option, Google will compress your photos in RAW format, which slightly misses the point.
Flickr: Just 1 TB of free storage. With Flickr, you get a free set of 1 TB of storage with no resolution limits. However, there are file size limits: individual photos can be up to 200MB and videos can be up to 1GB. Video playback is also limited to the first 3 minutes. Also, beyond the paid monthly ad removal plan, Flickr has no way to get more storage (however, older Flickr Pro users continue to enjoy unlimited storage at full resolution for their paid subscription). However, according to PC Magazine, 1TB of full resolution space is likely to be enough for most people’s photos – enough to store over 500,000 photos in their original quality.
Winner: Draw It depends on how many photos you have to store, if you want unlimited video storage, if you need RAW support, or if you want a true backup of your photos in their original quality. If you don’t want your photos to be compressed and you want to back up your photos at their original resolution, Flickr is the best option. You will get more free space for full-resolution photos.
However, it is best to use Google Photos to back up videos as there is no length limit. And for most people who tend to take photos on their phones, view photos on screen, and print photos at regular sizes, Google Photos ‘high quality’ unlimited option should be good enough. (But you should still back up your photos to at least two other locations , such as a local external drive and an online backup service!) It’s nice that Google has the ability to increase storage space if needed, and professional / serious photographers will likely appreciate the support for RAW image files.
Getting your photos back and forth: upload and download
When you have amassed a lifetime of photos you don’t want to lose, it’s essential to have a reliable and easy service to back them up and download them quickly when needed. Both Google Photos and Flickr can automatically download your photos and videos via mobile apps or desktop download programs. These are painless ways to make sure you have copies of your photos stored in the cloud, but there are slight differences in how uploaders work.
Google Photos: good control over uploading photos. The Google Photos downloader for desktop has more features than the Flickr downloader, such as automatically uploading photos and videos from external media, uploading RAW files, and choosing between standard and full resolution photos. Mobile app settings also include features such as removing your geolocation from the photos you share, automatically grouping photos by facial recognition, and choosing specific folders on your phone to back up.
Flickr: Simple, but gets the job done (if slow). Flickr downloaders are simpler. On the desktop, you select the folders you want and let it do its thing. On a mobile phone, you can only use Wi-Fi or Cellular / Wi-Fi. That’s all.
I found the desktop Google Photos downloader to be much faster than Flickr, uploading 39,000 photo files in a few hours, compared to the two-day Flickr project. This is, however, likely because Google compressed the photos before uploading, while Flickr kept the resolution of all photos. Flickr’s mobile autoloader was also very slow (while I was writing this, it got stuck downloading 1 of 45 photos from my Android phone in the last two hours). Also, while these downloaders work mostly the same, Windows Task Manager tells me that Flickr uses about 8x more memory than Google Photos (49MB vs. 5.9MB), only running in the background.
There are other differences found when uploading photos. To upload all of your Google Photos, you can use Google Takeout and get a zipped file with all your photo albums. If you have Google Drive sync on your computer, you will also have easy access to all your photos. Plus, you can upload individual albums or collections that Google Photo creates for you. On Flickr, you only have the option to select the photos you want to upload, or individual albums as a zipped file – there is no simple “upload all” option. On the other hand, it is much easier to select multiple photos on Flickr than on Google Photos, which lacks the “select all” feature.
Winner: Google Photos. Google Photos offers more control over uploads, is faster (due to compression), and allows you to upload backed up photos right away.
Browse your photo collection: “Magical” organization and powerful search
Having a copy of your photos online is great for backup purposes, but you probably also want to easily view and enjoy them without spending the rest of your life organizing your photos into different albums. This is where the smart organization and display features of these apps come in handy. The biggest difference between the two is how they present your photos.
Google Photos: smart search, smart photo recognition and automatic albums. Unsurprisingly, Google Photos is great for finding your photos. When I, for example, type “beagle”, all the photos look like this:
(Photo deduplication is supposedly available on Google Photos, but it doesn’t seem to work for me yet.)
You can even refine your search with words like “playground AZ” or “playground NY” to quickly jump to the photos you’re looking for. However, a Google Photos search isn’t perfect. For example, there are photographs of hounds that I know are stored in the service that are missing from my search results, donkeys that are listed in the “dogs” section, and pools that are mistakenly identified as beaches. Still, the first results are impressive.
Google also automatically categorizes your photos into People, Places, and Items. (You have to place your mouse cursor in the search bar to bring it up, which isn’t very intuitive.) As with the Google Picasa desktop photo app, facial recognition is great. While you can’t tag photos with people’s names, clicking on a face displays most if not all of the photos Google finds that face (even if the face is very small, blurry, and in the background!). In the “Things” category, you can find a wide variety of items, from “parks” and “concerts” to “statues” and “ships”, depending on your photographs.
Google Photos also automatically groups your photos into collections (automatic albums) based on their dates and locations, so you can easily see all of your vacation or event photos in one place without having to do any work. Google Photos Assistant also automatically creates entertaining animations and slideshows for you.
Unfortunately, however, Google Photos does not preserve the file folder structure. So if you carefully organize your photos by year and month, or with specific folder names on your computer, you won’t find them on Google Photos. He just puts everything in one huge “folder” online. You can manually add photos to an album in the Google Photos apps, but it’s a waste of time if you’ve already done so on your desktop.
Flickr: smart photo filtering and multiple views. Flickr also recently added an automatic categorization feature, grouping your photos by topic. As with Google Photos, this is sometimes weird: dogs are put in the category of cats, and children are called birds. There are a few niceties about the Flickr presentation, though: it tells you the number of photos in each category, shows you privacy settings right away (and lets you change them with one click), and it also lets you sort by shooting date. , download date and privacy settings.
Flickr also stores your local folder structure in the Albums view, making it easier to view your photos if you have a specific way to organize them. You can also easily add tags to photos in bulk and link photos with other Flickr users.
Finding photos on Flickr isn’t as smart as Google Photos, though. Flickr was unable to find a suitable word for “beagle”, although it did identify several photographs of “dogs” and has collected over 6 million photographs of dogs from other Flickr users. (I’m not sure if this is useful or not.) However, you can filter by photo quality, such as color, size, orientation, and shooting date.
Winner: Draw I love Flickr’s better sorting and filtering options, but searching and identifying photos in Google Photos is more accurate. Flickr can better organize your photos as you can view your photos in albums like the ones you created on your computer, or add tags to your photos and filter them in a variety of ways. Google Photos is better for finding specific photos in your vast collection. Choose what is more important to you or what best suits your photography viewing style.
Decorating Your Photos: Online Editing Tools
Both Google Photos and Flickr don’t just store and display your photos, they also help you easily customize them with editing tools to crop, rotate, apply filters, and more.
Google Photos: Precise editing controls for the most basic functions. Sadly, when Google moved its photo app from Google+ to Google Photos, it ditched Snapseed’s awesome editing capabilities. This makes Google Photos more accessible to non-Chrome users (as the web editing tool previously required Chrome), but now online photo editing is not that hard. Previously, for example, you could selectively adjust certain areas of a photo and access a lot of adjustment tools (like tilt-shift and HDR), but now the tools only offer the basics: slider settings for light, color, pop, vignette. , cropping and filters, and a simple yet handy auto enhancement option.
Flickr: More Editing Options. While Flickr’s photo editor isn’t quite as complex as Snapseed, it is powered by Aviary but does more than just basic functionality. In addition to the usual filters and brightness controls, you can add stickers or text and paint overlays to photos, quickly whiten teeth and remove red-eye in photos, adjust warmth, fine-tune focus, and more.
In addition, in the new Flickr Camera Roll, you can select multiple photos and batch process them to change sharing permissions, copyright protection, dates, photo titles and descriptions, and tags. You cannot edit metadata in Google Photos.
Winner: Flickr. Google Photos caters to the most common editing needs, but Flickr editors offer more on both the web and mobile.
Publishing Photos to the Public: Sharing Photos
Google and Yahoo know that most people store photos, not only for their own eyes, but also for their friends, family, and possibly the Internet in general. They both make it easy to send your photos somewhere else, but Flickr is much more of a photography community than Google Photos.
Google Photos: Basic Sharing. Select a photo, group of photos, or an album and you can quickly post it to Google+, Facebook or Twitter, or get a link to share by email or elsewhere. Google Photos also shows a list of the links you’ve shared, so you can re-share or remove the link, but otherwise there’s nothing else to do when it comes to sharing.
Flickr: Based on photo sharing. Since its launch in 2004, Flickr has been showing off your photos and videos. In addition to the general link for photos and albums, Flickr allows you to manage the groups of people who can view your photos, and allows other users to comment on your photos, tag them, and / or follow you to receive updates about your uploaded photos. … You can share your photos on Facebook, Twitter and Tumbler, and connect Flickr to third-party apps to get more out of your account. You can set the attribution of your photos and see how many views they got.
Winner: Flickr. Flickr has a very strong user community that includes both professional and casual photographers. Community features are one of the strongest arguments for a service.
Bonus: unique features and other features
Google Photos and Flickr share so many features in common that small differences might make you choose one over the other. Brief summary:
Google Photos automatically creates albums, slideshows, and collages. It also lets you create your own animations and awesome photos. (Also, as mentioned above, it supports images in RAW format and offers virtually unlimited storage.) Google Photos – it’s like a personal assistant when browsing your photos and highlights the best in digital collections. Best for exploring your photos.
Flickr offers a print service so you can quickly turn a photo into wall art on canvas or a photo into a photo book. It offers more ways to view, edit and publish your photos. Flickr is like a user-friendly interface for your photo database, which gives you control over how to submit and publish photos from that database.
Of course, these are not the only two options for storing and publishing your photos online. In comparison, some of the more popular tools include:
- Amazon Prime Photos: You get free unlimited storage with no permission restrictions on Amazon if you are an Amazon Prime user, but it has fewer features and is not as intuitive to use as other services. The desktop download app didn’t work for me (I gave up after a few hours of waiting with no progress), but if you’re a Prime user, you can check it for unlimited full resolution storage – a unique proposition.
- Apple iCloud Photo Stream and Photo Library: These apps and services are exclusively for Apple users, but with them you can sync photos from your iOS device with the new Mac OS X Photos app and store your photos for free for 30 days.
- Dropbox + Carousel : If you have enough space to store your photos in Dropbox, the Carousel app offers a convenient way to view all of your photos. However, this is not a good price to pay as only 2GB of free space and 1TB of storage costs $ 10 per month.
- Microsoft OneDrive : Microsoft offers a generous 30GB of free online storage for photos and other files. OneDrive automatically groups photos into categories and has a decent display of your online albums, but there are no editing tools here, and like the other alternatives in this section, photos are not a priority for the service.
I currently use both Google Photos and Flickr because I don’t think there is such a thing as backing up too many of your photos. I think Flickr is more of a true backup of my photos (and I still have 963GB of free space to use), and Google Photos is the best way for me to “discover” old photos buried in my decades of photos. -accept. In the end, as usual, choosing between these services depends on your usage needs. There is a lot to love about both of them, and a lot to be expected in future versions of these apps.