Live Spaces Photos or Flickr?

I was glad to see indications that Microsoft is going to increase competition with Flickr. I have a Flickr account and a Windows Live Space and welcome competition.

Here's how these services compare to me as a hobbyist.

Cost of service	This is free. Can't beat that. But I would not mind paying for some Pro account if it delivers the right features.	I pay for a pro account but the price feels right for unlimited uploads and sets.
Upload Limit	500 pictures per 30 days is too few especially when starting the account and using it to store/back up all pictures.	Of course unlimited uploads are good. I'm willing to pay for it!
Image Size/Type	I want to upload the original file. Regardless of the file type or size. No jpg optimization or other hocus spocus please.	I can upload the original file of whatever picture I have and trust Flickr not to modify it in a way that would impact quality.
Download Experience	My friends can download entire albums.	Can't download an entire set and I don't want to have trust this 3rd party tools developed by people I don't know.
Client Tools	Windows Live Photogallery is a good start. Add better, faster, upload AND download and synchronization features and I'm happy.	Which tools??? Somebody at Yahoo needs to realize that its OK for a Web 2.0 company to build a rich/fat client application. We won't make fun of you for this!
Service Details	It's difficult to find out what the terms of service are exactly. Which file sizes are supported? Can I get a pro account, etc...	All clear to me.

So please heat up the competition. Get the fundamentals right (file size, upload limit) and build some awesome client tools to start with. After that, invest in those nice to have Web 2.0, social web features (post to facebook...). Oh, and move fast!

If Windows Live spaces fixes some of the stuff I mention, I'll probably switch. Provided I have a tool that extracts my sets from Flickr and loads them into spaces albums. I know, I'm needy!

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 14, 2007
  You realise that Live Gallery will also upload to Flickr?

• Anonymous
  November 14, 2007
  Actually, there is at least on client tool to be used with Flickr. I use Flickr and Google's Picasa. The Picasa2Flickr plugin (http://lifehacker.com/software/featured-windows-download/upload-picasa-pics-to-flickr-with-picasa2flickr-264834.php) does a nice job for me!

• Anonymous
  November 14, 2007
  Hi Barry, yes, I realize that. In fact I'm using it daily as I'm still in progress uploading all of my pictures to my Flickr account. It's taking ages and I hope that one day the tool will put my tags from Photo Gallery into the FLickr tags and not just for the last picture of the set I'm uploading. So yes, there are some tools and thank you 'soe' for sharing more but it's still a bummer that Flickr apparently doesn't invest in that themselves.

• Anonymous
  November 14, 2007
  Yea, the upload to flickr is very very slow; and weirdly does it in reverse order (one assumes because it uploads oldest first - which means when they get to flickr the newest is the first in the collection, not really what you want)

• Anonymous
  November 14, 2007
  Hi, there are some firefox extentions availabe to upload pictures to flickr. I guess one of them is UniversalUploader. http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/07/29/firefox-universal-uploader/

• Anonymous
  November 15, 2007
  Actually, I also use Windows Live Photo Gallery to do (almost) all my Flickr uploading.  It always includes all my tags, as long as I try to move to the next image first (so it saves everything).