Flickr vs Picasa

I'm fairly new to the web photo album crowd and recently decided to try out two of the biggest names in the business: Flickr and Picasa. Really the only way to figure out the winner was to set up accounts and give each a try with an album and see what they can do for the user and what they can do for the author. Over the past month I've given each a try and seen first hand their benefits and their shortcomings.

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Flickr is owned by Yahoo (Picasa by Google). One of the big corporations in the internet business that has been around forever, though may be on the way to getting bought out by Microsoft. Regardless, Fickr does seem to be run by the original founders and keeps a somewhat loose tie to their parent owners as far as user experience goes, which brings me to my first issue.

1. URL Accessability
With flickr, the website is just flickr.com. And to get to your album, you can simply go to flickr.com and login, or type flickr.com/username. With Picasa, you can't. You have to go to picasaweb.google.com/username. While that may not seem like that big an issue, they could have simply forwarded picasa.com/username to the same location saving keystrokes. And why do they not have the login screen on picasa.com? You actually have to remember the link to get to it. Retarded.
Winner: Flickr

2. Page Load
One of the biggest issues that I found with Picasa. Is it is soooo sloooow. It's amazing that Google has such slow response times with it and can't fund better hardware and bandwidth. Sometimes images won't load at all or load at 56K telephone line speeds. Pitiful. Flickr was much more responsive and has shown that they know what they are doing and have been in the business longer.
Winner: Flickr

3. Sets vs Photostream
I'm not really sure where I stand on this one yet. Picasas way of displaying photos is by different albums/sets. Flickr is more of a "photostream" meaning that pictures don't have to be tied to a certain set (though they can be). They are just organized by your most recent pictures wherever they are taken. I guess it depends on how you take pictures to determine which is more user friendly. I'd have to give the edge to Flickr since they give you the option to not place a picture in a set if you don't want to?
Winner: slight edge to Flickr?

4. Viewing Style
In one sense I prefer Picasa's way of viewing the photos. Depending on the resolution of your browser window, they will display the image as large as they can. And with ONE click you can see the full size image. Flickr defaults to a somewhat small view of the image and you have to click twice to get to the full size image on a different page (first the zoom icon page, then the size you want), which then makes it very annoying to navigate going out and back in, out and back in, to see all the photos at a decent size. Where flickr IS better is that when you view a large scale image, you don't have to drag the screen around like you're looking through some peephole as with Picasa. In the end, they both fail in my book.
Winner: Neither.

5. Software
While I haven't used the software NEARLY enough to get a full impression on it, I think Picasa has a very handy Desktop interface to your photo albums. They show their strength in searching old photos and organization and "coolness". Flickr does seem to have very handy online software to help batch edit and organize your photos.
Winner: Both

6. Photo Storage
Again, this is personal preference, but I think flickr has it right here. Though they may regret that in 20 years. Picasa has a set storage limit of 1GB of space. Considering average picture size, that'll give you about 20 albums of 50 pictures each. That's really not that much space if you plan on adding 5-10 albums/year. Flickr does it differently. They give to a monthly alotment that translates to 100MB/month. In one year you've already surpassed the amount of space that Picasa offers.
Winner: Flickr

Conclusion: Now, I've been a Google fan for awhile and I gave Picasa my first go because I trusted that they could deliver, but when i kept having issues I had to try something else. And Flickr is clearly the winner. They provide the most space, the fastest user experience, the easiest access, easy batch editing, and seem more stable and less of a beta project like Picasa appears. If Flickr could find a way to easily view full size images without having to do some painful navigation, then they'd be set. Until then I'll just have to be annoyed...