Conclusions

Among the five tested services there were a great many similarities which makes picking any kind of clear winner nearly impossible. Picassa, Shutterfly, Snapfish and Kodak EasyShare all had similar issues with a lack of full integration between online and offline clients, and they all had similar mechanisms for sharing images.

Flickr is a bit of a different animal, since it does not have an offline client directly associated with it like the other four sites. Its lack of some form of integrated image enhancement tool also places it in a different category than the rest of the tools tested.

The single click auto-fix feature that each of the sites had (except for Flickr) is a useful feature, but don’t expect any of the sites to be a substitute for a full fledged image editing program like Adobe Photoshop. All of the auto-fixes work somewhat similarly, by adjusting contrast and brightness. I suspect that for the pictures that they really want to "pop," most users will dig deeper than just the auto-fix.

Pricing on storage varied somewhat across the five sites, with Shutterfly, Snapfish and Kodak EasyShare all promising "unlimited" storage as long as you buy something once every twelve months. Flickr goes up to "unlimited" if you pay US$24.95, while Picassa is downright expensive in comparison, with storage pricing ranging from US$25 to US$500 per year.

The issue of image download options is something that helps to differentiate the sites as well. Without the ability to download some form of the image, the user is essentially locked into whatever printing option the service is providing. Sure you could always just right click and then do a "File, Save as", but the resolution is likely not going to be as high as what the original image had. Flickr is the only service among those tested that offered multiple download sizes, though resolutions of greater than 1024x768 are only available to Pro users. Picassa, on the other hand, provides the image in whatever size it had originally been uploaded as, even to its free users. For that single fact alone, Picassa is a standout choice among the pack. Without the ability to download full resolution images, users lose a great deal of flexibility.

That said, no one service as tested really does it all, and no one service tested totally falls flat either. For pure community photo sharing power, Flickr is the strong favourite. Google is likely to continue to invest in Picassa, making it a service to be watched (and used).

As for Shutterfly, Snapfish and Kodak EasyShare, the fact that Shutterfly and Snapfish offer local pick-ups on prints might give them an edge, though Kodak could easily add that feature as well, I suspect. Shutterfly, Snapfish and EasyShare also all claim at least one thing that neither Flickr nor Picassa do - unlimited storage as long as you buy pictures at least somewhat regularly.