Image by Bruce Clay, Inc via Flickr

Image via CrunchBase

Recently my Flickr Pro account was about to expire and I faced myself with a quite simple question: Should I renew it or not? Google gave a new life to Picasa (possibly renamed to Google Photos one of these days) by launching Google+, has been growing steadily and has gained lots of popularity among photographers which have embraced it quickly as its social network, actually most of my Google+ followers and activity is related to photography.

The truth is nowadays I don’t use Flickr as regularly as I did, Google+ became much more interesting these days, and when my Flickr Pro account was about to expire I considered not to to renew it and move to Picasa. The option wasn’t abandoning Flickr, still is the largest photography community around, but changing the center of my photographic online presence to Picasa. I truly was tempted, but in the end it wasn’t enough to move.

The Lazy factor

Probably the less significant but a still valid reason , I would move a large amount of photos around, that would be painful and time consuming.

Google+ still has some annoyances

The Google+ has evolved a lot since its launch, all Google products are or will be tightly integrated, but still are some rough edges: user experience between Picasa and Google Photos isn’t coherent, although the contents are the same. Flickr feels more fine tuned and mature.

Flickr has a great integration

Flickr was one of the first services to make API‘s popular and the result is that currently you have thousands of apps or mashups and you don’t have to go to the website to actually being using it, you can easily take your data and integrate it in many ways: the archives section of my website is built over Flickr API.

Traffic

Flickr is huge and even on a slow week I can easily get a few hundred hits a day, and some of it ends up in my site, Google+/Picasa still can’t match this.

For now I’ll stay at Flikr, at least for another year, but I’ll still can be found at my Google+ profile.

Related articles

• Flickr vs Picasa (notratched.net)
• Flickr vs Google (garydenness.co.uk)
• Google+ May Not Kill Facebook But Flickr Should Be Worried (pixiq.com)
• Will Google+ Become Another Flickr-stlye Feeding Ground For Photo Theft? (digital-photography-school.com)
• Google Sends Picasa Users to Google+ Photos (searchenginewatch.com)