I'd really like to switch to using Flickr instead of Picasa. Why? For one very important reason: I don't want to use Wine anymore.
No More Wine!
I am a serious computer user, and I will only use free operating systems, primarily Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu GNU/Linux, or FreeBSD. While these OSes can run the Gnome desktop environment which includes some great photo organizing software packages like F-Spot and Shotwell, none that I know of can synchronize with online albums.
Picasa 3, it would seem, is the only choice that allows me to upload directly to an online album, and then synchronize it with my own data storage system using a desktop application. And Picasa 3 is nice! Its fast and does a great job. I do have one big complaint about it though: it uses Wine to basically run a Windows application on linux.
Please Google, it shouldn't be too hard for you to come up with a more-linux-native version of Picasa!
It appears that Google is the only one that will do it, too, because, unlike Flickr (at least on the desktop and the network), there doesn't seem to be too many third party developers working on Picasa-centric software.
What's Stopping Me From Using Flickr?
Besides the lack of a native linux Flickr client? Not too much more, but definitely enough.
First off, there is a cool FUSE utility called flickrfs which can mount a flickr account as a shared drive - cool, huh? With that, it would be possible to manually synchronize online and desktop photo libraries. However, it is not compatible with python 2.6 and thus does not work on version 10.04 of Ubuntu at the time of this writing.
Secondly, there doesn't appear to be any rock-solid upload-to-Flickr integration with Android, the operating system which powers my awesome new Droid X cellphone and its decent quality camera. Not that developers aren't trying though, there are about a dozen apps I browsed in the marketplace which seemed like they might be getting there, but none sold me outright. And there were even a few truly sketchy ones that reportedly required photographers to grant the developers practical ownership of the pictures getting uploaded.
Certainly, Google is a big part of what Android is all about, they own Picasa, and therefor Flickr is the competition, but the same way I have to ask why Google doesn't step up with a native linux picasa 3 port, why doesn't Yahoo make an Android app for uploading to Flickr??
