Photo storage: Facebook vs. Flickr

Recently, I’ve begun experimenting by uploading pictures onto both Flickr and Facebook. In the past, I’ve summarily denounced Facebook as a photo-sharing platform, but I was curious as to the different exposure I would get by sharing photos in a place I know where more of my friends would see them.

My main reasons for hating on Facebook were the limited dimensions (maximum of 604 pixels on the long side) and thus not being able to make printable pictures from those photos; the incredibly slow browsing from picture-to-picture; and finally the idea of technological convergence – where your photo-sharing, status updates, public conversations, blog posts, and everything else in this new age of the Internet is grouped into one central location – never sat well with me. Facebook addressed the slow picture loading by implementing an amazing prefetching algorithm, but the other concerns still stand.

I got thinking about this issue when I was talking with one of the senior PMs for Windows Live Messenger when I interviewed at Microsoft more than a month ago. He was a traditionalist like me and just couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of public Wall posts and he hated the idea of technological convergence. Why have one application that can do everything poorly when you can specialized applications that do everything well? We moved onto the topic of Flickr and Facebook as a photo-sharing application and he presented an idea that I never thought of before: Facebook was just for sharing pictures of your friends getting sloshed, while Flickr was a more serious photo-sharing platform or one that you could show pictures of your children to your grandmother. Essentially, Facebook was hip and new, while Flickr was old and stodgy.

And come to think of it, I agreed with him. Personally I’d rather not have pictures from the n-millionth club or bar night, with the same group shots in different clothing, cluttering up my Flickr account. Those can be reserved for Facebook. At the same time, I want my artsy fartsy photos to be available to as many people as possible through Flickr (even though it’s hard enough as it is to get anyone to notice anything with so much digital noise out there) and not be limited to my friends on Facebook.

So with that in mind, I offer my rambling opinions on the pros and cons of Facebook and Flickr, presented in an unordered, hopefully logical manner.

Facebook:

1. Maximum long edge of 604px: I used to think of this as a big deal because I used to print pictures on a semi-regular basis, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized all the pictures I was printing were the same. There were the “before and after taking shots” photos, the “let’s all put each other in headlocks” photos, and the countless group photos from bars and clubs nights. There photos just add to that digital noise I mentioned earlier, but it’s hard to think of a bar / club night without them now. So these photos really don’t need to be printed, nor would I want to print them anymore, so the maximum dimensions imposed by Facebook aren’t really limiting (and they probably save them a bundle in bandwidth costs). This then raises the question of why are people buying anything bigger then 0.3MP (640 × 480) cameras?
2. People commenting on your photos that would not normally comment on Flickr photos: I’ve noticed this time and time again. People like to be able to view a photo and immediately comment and then move on. I’ve had people comment on my imported blog posts because I suppose it’s convenient, rather than surfing to my domain and inputting their name, e-mail address, website, and comment. The Internet has fueled the ADHD of today’s generation, and Facebook just perpetuates it.
3. Not everyone has a Flickr account, but everyone has a Facebook account: This is the ultimate question that anyone in the software industry asks: how do I unseat the king? When I was interviewing with Microsoft’s social networking team, the PM genuinely believed in his team, but realistically, unless Facebook sells off your user information (more so than they’ve done already), then they will continue snowballing down the hill of unlimited potential (and profit). So, with everyone having a Facebook account, the exposure for non-artistic photos will have a bigger user base. And even artistic photos will be exposed to your friends, I suppose the ones whose opinions you care about more…?
4. Comments are displayed in an easy-to-read format: When a photo album is commented on, it’s great to see all the comments in one giant list. What would be even better is if you could add to the ongoing conversation without having to navigate to the picture’s page.

Flickr:

1. Greater exposure, but you have to sift through the noise: Flickr’s huge user base allows your photos to be seen by millions of people around the world, if it actually gets noticed. Only recently has one of my pictures that didn’t have anything sex-related (the Internet is for porn, after all, right?) been noticed and this is after 3,000+ photos. Then again, I suppose the other photos weren’t great, but it just makes you feel good on the inside when your photos are viewed and commented on.
2. Stats, stats, stats: I love seeing when people view my photos a lot of times; I love seeing when people favourite my photos; and I like seeing pretty graphs on the stats page on Flickr. Facebook does not cater towards my inner nerd the way that Flickr does.
3. Unlimited photos in a set, or no set at all, or all sets in a collection: Flickr’s photo management techniques are far superior to Facebook’s, yet the majority of the people I know still choose to create multiple photo albums on Facebook for the same event. It irks me whenever people are like, “Let me upload my 300 photos into 5 different albums.” Is there a reason Facebook imposes a maximum of 60 photos per album? Is it that they want to limit you in not uploading your shit photos? My brother uploaded a picture of himself, including all 3 or 4 outtakes. Why? The whole point of digital was to be able to only take good pictures. If you want to do a photo dump, go to Flickr. My personal mantra is that I will photo dump to Flickr, but upload the 60 or less gems to Facebook. Counter-intuitive since I hate on Facebook, I know, but that’s the way the dice rolls.

So that last point is what I’ve decided to do: upload 200 (still good) pictures from a weekend trip to Flickr, but highlight the especially good ones or the group / people pictures and upload those to Facebook for more communal dissemination.

Ironically, neither Facebook nor Flickr have developed the ultimate in social / community interaction – common events. Here’s the abstract: I go to a party and my friend goes to the same party. All of us, including the host, have an assortment of digital cameras. We snap photos merrily and then go back to our computers, upload them all to Facebook or Flickr, and then they drift off to the nether regions of the Internet, never to be seen again.

Here’s what I propose (which is sort of accomplished by Flickr with tags already, but not nearly implemented to the degree I would like it): In Facebook, whenever you create a photo album, you can link albums of your friends so that you can view all the photos from the same event in chronological order. This is somewhat available in the form of photos uploaded to an event, but events are essentially non-persistent after they occur, whereas photo albums are. This way you can see all your photos from your friends and your own and how they relate in one giant storyboard of the night.

In Flickr, it’s the same thing, except that you should be able to auto-generate a unique “event tag” and share that same event tag with your friends from the same event. This is currently available to Flickr users, but it’s not utilized that way, as far as I know. I would love to have everyone that I traveled with last term to upload their photos with the tag, “Waterloo W08 Co-ops: Eurotrip, Amsterdam, Netherlands”. Clicking on that would be able to aggregate all similar pictures, which, to me, would be the ultimate in “social networking”.