Photos in the Cloud: Picasa Web Albums

So, after trying out both Flickr and Picasa, I decided to go with Picasa Web Albums for my photos-in-the-cloud solution. Yes, that is yet another bit of my life that I am entrusting to Google. And, yes, I'm fine with that.

Why did I go with Picasa? Because Flickr, though really awesome, only lets me make three albums (or 'Sets') in its free version while Picasa lets me make as many as I want.

I do have a 1GB web space limit with Picasa but that's more than enough for my purposes. Heck, I'm using only 22MB at this time! And once I get a digital camera, take lots more photos, and find that I need more space -- though that won't be for a while because I don't take that many photos -- I can always buy some from Google. Quite cheaply, too. And it'll be shared with my Gmail space, which is awesome. My videos, meanwhile, will go on YouTube so I'm good there as well. And my audio is on SkyDrive so that's not an issue either.

Of course, I could have gone with something like SmugMug, which has no limits on web space or number of albums, and I could have installed an open source photo gallery on insanityWORKS.org, which can then be fully customized, but I didn't. That's because I quite like Picasa's web implementation (it's easy to use and I love it's geo-tagging capabilities) and I really like the Picasa 2 software that you install locally (both its photo organization abilities and its easy-to-use image editing features).

So, behold: my Public Gallery on Picasa Web Albums.