I was just fiddling with some pictures at home and using Picasa to manage them when I found an answer referring to a Picasa Web Albums API. The official documentation is over on Google Code and it already looks like some companies are creating some pretty exciting stuff using it. Picasa has always been a very attractive proposition to me for three reasons:
- It is free
- It has fantastic functionality which passes images to companies like the excellent Photobox incredibly seamlessly
- It has an export facility which not only lets you create web pages but also an XML dump of the selected folder
Picasa Web Albums are pretty nice too, and although integration with Flickr would be better (as if…), this API seems to bring Picasa into “almost a serious player” as an image storage solution.
I’m using Picasa in a strictly amateur way, but I think if I was running a small museum with not much budget I’d be very tempted to look at it as a solution for managing the publishing of pictures onto the web. If there’s anyone out there in this position I’d love to hear from you. Is Picasa useable for this, or does the Flickr route – although very different – tick more boxes? Or are there other, better solutions?
The terms and conditions of Flickr don’t allow this, although George Oats said at the talk she gave at the National Maratime Museum a while back that they have tended to turn a blind eye to Museums and not for profits using Flickr in this way. She hinted that their may be a commercial model for corporate & institutional users at some point in the future
It’s interesting that Flickr (and also YouTube of course..) are not in the space of “just” providing hosting, but also that there is some flexibility for NFPs. It would seem a natural business model to me for Flickr (and YouTube, and others..) to provide a commercial framework for this but I guess for now we just watch and learn…
What’s interesting is that – given Flickr provide a strong API – they don’t actually *know* where or how these images are being used. In fact you could argue that just by providing this API functionality they are *exactly* doing what they say they don’t – providing image hosting for 3rd party websites…