Photo hosting is one of the most popular online services on today’s Internet. The most popular sites like Flickr, Google Picasa or Photobucket limited the free online space to a few Gigabytes at the most.

With the introduction of Google+ comes a change that could change the photo hosting landscape significantly. Google announced today that Picasa is now offering unlimited photo hosting for all of its users.

Here is how it looks:

• Google+ users: 1 GB of free storage space, photos of a maximum dimension of 2048×2048 do not count against the limit. This basically means that Google+ users can upload as many photos to Picasa as they want, as long as the photos do not exceed that resolution.
• Google users: Users without a Google+ account get the same free storage space but a lower maximum resolution that users can upload for free. The resolution that does not count against their photo hosting space if the maximum resolution is not larger than 800×800 pixels.

All photos that are uploaded to Google+ by the user are automatically resized to 2048×2048 on their longest edge. Both accounts have in common that videos of a playtime of 15 minutes or less do not count against the storage space as well.

Users who reach the storage limitation of their Picasa account will have their photos automatically resized so that they do not count against the storage limit.

Another interesting aspect is that this is not restricted solely to Picasa. All Google products and services that allow you to upload videos and photos benefit from the same rules. This includes blogger or Google Maps for instance.

The big question is this. Is the move towards unlimited photo hosting space a try to get Google account owners to switch to Google+, or is it less related? The thing that speaks against a promotional feature is the fact that users cannot simply sign up for a Google+ account at this point in time, as it is invite only. The thing that speaks for it is the close proximity to the Google+ launch, and the fact that Google needs to make their service attractive as possible to be able to compete with the heavyweight Facebook.

What’s your take on this?

Update: PhotoBucket got rid of photo hosting space restrictions exactly a month ago.

Flickr in a recent blog posting announced that they have created an improved way of sharing Flickr photos with friends on Facebook.

All that it takes now is to connect the Facebook and Flickr account to automatically post information about new photos and videos uploaded to the Flickr photo hosting site on Facebook.

facebook flickr

Only public images that are rated safe will be posted on Facebook after they have been uploaded to Flickr. Images marked as Friends/Family or Private won’t be sent. There is a ten minute delay to give the user enough time to edit the photo before it gets shared.

To connect Flickr and Facebook go to this page and follow the instructions. You are asked to log into your Yahoo account first. The following page is then loaded automatically.

flickr facebook connect

A click on the connect button loads the Facebook page with the Facebook account login prompt. A confirmation message is displayed in the end notifying the user that the two accounts have been linked.

link facebook yahoo

Information about new public photos that are uploaded to Flickr are from that moment on shared on Facebook. The only option to avoid that uploaded photos are shared is to set them to private or friends and family during upload.

There are basically two options to access Flickr if it has been blocked in the computer network or on the local computer system. The first option are proxy servers, the second an alternate url.

Proxy servers are used by millions of users a day to access websites that have been blocked in their computer networks. They are especially popular to access blocked social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace but also other popular websites like Youtube or Flickr.

Proxies tend to get banned fast by network administrators who basically need to check the traffic logs to find and ban the proxy servers used by company employees.

More interesting than using proxy servers – which can also pose a security risk if the user wants to log into Flickr – is the use of an alternate url that provides full Flickr functionality.

All that needs to be done is to replace www.flickr.com with www.flickr.mud.yahoo.com. The latter will open the same page that the default url would open and users can perform all activities on Flickr normally.

The alternate url might be blocked in some networks as well depending on the rules used to block the photo hosting sites. It will not work if the word “flickr” has been blocked in urls or page titles but it will work fine if the admins have only blocked partial urls like *.flickr.com. (via My Digital Life)

Downloading photos manually from Picasa takes time and users who would like to download complete Picasa Web Albums can use the Picasa Downloader to do so to speed up the process tremendously. The program will display all public photo albums of a Picasa user in its interface with the option to download individual albums with all containing photos to the local hard drive.

The user id of each Picasa user that is sharing a public Picasa Web Album is visible in the url structure of the album url making it very easy to copy that user id into the application to retrieve all photo albums from that Picasa user.

A click on the list button will retrieve all the albums of the Picasa user id that has been entered by the computer user. The photo albums will be listed by the program with their album id and album title. A single or multiple web albums can be selected and a click on Download will start the download of all selected photo albums and photos to the hard drive.

Picasa Downloader requires the Microsoft .net Framework and is available at the Google Code project page.

Flickr Drive Shell is a similar plugin for Windows Explorer which can display the photos hosted at the Flickr photo hosting service. The program will display a new Flickr Drive icon in the My Computer window in Windows Explorer. The service needs to be authorized which is done by entering the username in the popup window that is being displayed after clicking on the icon for the first time. This will lead to the Flickr website where the user needs to login to authorize the desktop application.

Flickr Drive will work like any other drive after the authorization. It provides access to the private photos of the user and access to the two public folders Today’s hot tags and Today’s hot photos. The photos are displayed as thumbnail images in Windows Explorer with options to interact with the photos that are displayed. This includes copying, printing and viewing photos, moving them or even editing them in the default Windows image editor.

Photos can be easily copied to the associated Flickr user account which can then be accessed from the Flickr website normally. This is actually a very comfortable way of adding files to Flickr. Flickr Drive Shell is available as an executable and source at the developer’s website. The program is compatible with Windows Vista and Windows 7. (via Techie-Buzz)

Users who want that option for all Flickr photos – even those that do not offer it by default – can install the AllSizes userscript to do so. AllSizes will add the All Sizes link to every photo that is hosted at Flickr.

It furthermore extends the original functionality with these features:

• Quickly choose between any of the available sizes
• Better HTML to post photos on blogs and Flickr discussion threads
• Appends ‘(by *Username*)’ to the title and alt attributes
• Gives ‘Untitled’ for untitled photos
• Download images, copy the code to your clipboard, view the image
• BB Code for posting photos on forums and bulletin boards
• Video still images can be accessed as if they were photos
• Shortcut keys for quick actions
• Default settings can be modified
• Automatically checks for updates

As you can see in the screenshot above it will overlay the photo at Flickr with the options that it provides.Different photo sizes can be selected, downloaded, copied to the clipboard or viewed. It is also possible to display the original all sizes page of Flickr instead. AllSizes is a userscript that should work in all web browsers that support userscripts.

Flickr Uploadr is a computer program that is available for Windows and Mac users. It can be used to easily upload multiple photos from the local computer system to the popular photo hosting website Flickr. The photo uploader offers a clean interface. Photos can be added from the build in file browser or by dragging and dropping them into the interface.

Flickr Uploadr will automatically display thumbnails of each photo that has been loaded into the software. A click on a photo will display various tags in the right sidebar. It is for example possible to change the title, description, tags or safety level of the photos. Other options include hiding the selected photos from public areas at Flickr and defining which user group is allowed to see the photo.

One interesting option is the ability to selected multiple photos at once so that information can be changed for all of them at once.

Flickr Uploadr requires permissions and a logged in user to work. The program will automatically open the Flickr website and display an authorization prompt for the software after login. The program needs to be authorized only once. for every Flickr account.

Flickr Uploadr will display the disk space for the remaining month and the full size of all photos that have been added to the photo uploader software.

A final click on Upload will initiate the transfer of the photos to the Flickr account.

Flickr Uploadr is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OSX 10.4 and 10.5.

The Flickr Search results now display a small bar above the actual photos that have been found that can be used to change the view of the photos from the default small view to medium, detail or slideshow. Sorting can also be changed from relevant to either recent or interesting.

Small and medium photo search results display a small i icon in the lower right corner when hovering the mouse over them. A click on the icon will open a detailed view of the photo in the foreground. Another click on the photo will close that foreground image.

A right sidebar on the search results page is now showing groups, photographers, tags and locations that are closely related to the search term. Those items can be used to explore related photos, photographers, groups and locations.

Some searches do now include information on top based on the search parameters of the user. It is for example displaying if the search was only performed in the Creative Commons section and dates if a date filter has been set.

[source Flickr Blog]

All that needs to be done is to open a photo on the Flickr website. You notice the information that are posted on the same page like comments by other Flickr users or groups the photo has been added to. If you scroll down the page you will eventually come to a section called Additional Information in the right sidebar of the website.

This section contains information about the location and date the photo was taken, the number of views and the digital camera. The Taken With A [digital camera model] row will provide the information for registered users and guests alike. This seems actually like a very good way of researching a digital camera before purchasing it. If you got a few models that you would like to compare you can go to Flickr and check out the Camera Finder section of the site.

This section lists the most popular cameras used by Flickr users and provides information about many other digital cameras and brands as well.

Guests and registered users can browse the photos at SmugMug in various ways including by keyword and author. Photos are displayed in galleries with no apparent way of downloading them to the local computer system. The right-click is blocked by default. Advanced Internet users know that this is little protection as there are numerous ways of downloading the photos despite this. To mention two: Photos are saved in the web browser’s cache which means it is possible to simply copy them from the cache to another directory. Another option is to look at the source code which contains the direct link to the image hosted at SmugMug.

More comfortable than this is a software program that can download complete albums more or less automatically. One of these applications is Album Fetcher which can be used to download albums as a guest or registered users. All that needs to be done is to enter a user ID as a guest in the application’s interface. The program will then automatically fetch all albums by that user and display them in the interface.

A few options are available for changing the download directory, photo size, enabling video downloads and importing IPTC data. Album Fetcher is easy to use and compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. The developer mentioned that users have reported that it is also working under Wine in Linux and Parallels in Mac OS computers.

The script will display a small ORG overlay in the upper left corner of each thumbnail which is the clickable direct link to the full image on Flickr. This does not work on all thumbnails but on most. Not working thumbnails are for example those where the uploaders prohibited direct links.

A click on the ORG overlay will open the image in full size in a new tab in the web browser. Users might want to edit the allowed websites and pages of the userscript to add websites that they visit regularly where Flickr thumbnails get posted. The author of the script did include a handful of sites including Flickr obviously.

Surprisingly though not all Flickr pages are included in the website list. You might want to add an entry like http://*.flickr.com/* to the list of allowed sites to include all pages on Flickr.