I, like many folks, am a regular user of Google’s Picasa. I am also an avid fan of Yahoo’s Flickr. And being that both of the parent companies of these two fine services are locked in a steel-cage death match for worldwide Internet dominance, I am not going to hold my breath for a plug-in that will enable me to easily upload photos from Picasa to Flickr.

In searching for a straight forward work around to more easily upload photos from Picasa to Flickr when a) I just want to share and b) am not too concerned about photo quality, I found a python script via Lifehacker, which is way too much advanced coding for me to deal with, and a work around where I can email photos to Flickr via Gmail (emailing photos is a default option in Picasa), a seemingly far easier option. In reading the email option article, I went and tried out this option with great success (more details on Flickr’s email uploading functionality can be found here, here and here). It seemed far easier than dealing with Python code. I think it degrades the quality of the photo slightly, but for purely sharing purposes, it does the trick.

I also saw a couple of things that I’d like to humbly add on to this article:

1. Brilliantly, Flickr has now enabled you to tag photos that you upload via email. Simply include the syntax in your subject line or body: tag: tag_1 tag_2 tag_n and automagically, your photos will be uploaded and tagged on Flickr. Slick, very slick.

2. By default, the Picasa/Gmail email solution reduces the photo sizes to 480 px wide. To upload photos to Flickr as close to the original size of your digital photo, fire up Picasa, go to Tools > Options > Email and where it says “When sending more than one photo, resize to:” select 1024 px. You will still see a slight dip in photo quality when your photo is uploaded to Flickr, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. The photo won’t be the original size but you really don’t need massive 6 megapixel photos sitting up on an online photo sharing service anyway, unless you are a pro or semi-pro photographer.
3. Finally, now that you can effectively use Gmail to upload photos to Flickr, a minor issue arises in that you can rapidly use up lots of disc space sending these big files via Gmail. Now, Gmail does have endless disc space, but for those that are find it important not to waste useful disc space, here is a little add on pointer: Set up a filter in Gmail, where all emails sent To your personal Flickr email are automatically Deleted. Simply go through the Gmail Filter wizard, putting your Flickr upload email into the “To” field, and then select “Delete It”. From there, every time you send a bunch of photos to Flickr via Gmail, the “sent” email is automatically routed to the Delete tag in Gmail. All the information contained within the email is brilliantly copied and integrated into your Flickr account, so there is no need to keep those emails. Next time you clear out your old emails, those memory hogging emails to Flickr are quickly and painlessly deleted as well.

So those are my few additions to the articles I found on hacking Picasa and Flickr with Gmail. Its not the prettiest solution in the world, but for a quick and easy way to get photos from Picasa to Flickr, its pretty hard to beat.