Seeing so much happening in recent past in digital photography domain, each of us is loaded with options ranging from amateur to professional. Is it becoming too crowded of a domain, or each of the solution out there targets a specific task? I sit down and see Flickr blazing ahead in the space. Reason being its simple intuitive user interface. Its like ‘photo uploading for dummies’. The viral nature of Flickr helped spreading it. On top of that exposure given by Yahoo! laid a solid foundation underneath.
I still use the free account in Flickr, and it has now become my main channel of distribution for my digital photographs, plus images needed for my blog. 
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Would an amateur or a prosumer use Flickr for his photographs right off the camera (min ~ 2MB for a 5MP camera) ? I am not sure of the answer, coz I havent looked inside in the pro account. Most of the users in this segment use their local storage to store and use someone like PBase for sharing their stuff online. PBase is managed by Slug and Emily, and has grown from an amateur solution to a high quality professional solution now. Its the first choice with most of the professional/prosumers I know of. You can read about PBase’s growth here. Is Flickr targetting the same segment? No. I see flickr more as a fast way to share pictures and show them off or use them in some other online presentation/blog. The tagging in Flickr is another thing which differentiates it with other online storage areas. As per its tagline, its best used to search,sort and share yourp photos.
Recently Riya was moved in alpha II, and one of the main drivers behind the service is searching. Considering you have a library of 10000 photos, the service would assist you in tagging and searching your library by implementing image recognition algorithms on your pictures. Sounds wonderful. Catch is that you need to upload all your pictures online first and then you can get them tagged by the service. I am not sure if this limitation is in alpha/beta’s but this in release is not helpful. Users just cannot expect uploading their libraries just to get them tagged. If this is implemented as a client side application, it will rock ! This is where Riya can leverage the desktop share of Picasa. I recently talked why Flickr would be best for Riya, but that was in its current form, i.e online recognition.
So what do these services offer you, the end user? Answer is still same, no single service can get to your needs in entirety. No single service is atomic in nature. We might need to wait for another service to come up to quench our thirst here.
Technorati tags: riya,pbase,flickr,Picasa
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