January 29, 2007
Sharing your photos
A few years ago, I had a photoblog. I tried a few different systems trying to find one I liked. Before that, I had a photo gallery (also using a half dozen scripts to trial it), and I’ve also had a Flickr account.
I love taking photos, and I love sharing them. I’m not sure why I find it so hard to find one method of sharing them that I am happy with. There’s plenty of options out there, but none that make me really excited.
Most gallery systems make them look very ‘file and directory’, where you see a stack of thumbnails, click on the thumb to see the larger image, and at the same time, see all of this EXIF and other data, which I personally don’t need to see.
Gallery Software (web based)
Coppermine
Gallery
Gallery Software (offline and web)
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
Google Picasa
Then there’s photoblogs, which typically show you a large image, and you click on the image to see the day before, and before that. There’s also the standard blog layout, with an emphasis on the photos, and maybe some text. You can even go the free hosted versions as well.
Popular Photoblog software
Blogger.com (hosted)
Movable Type
Pixelpost
Wordpress
Wordpress (hosted)
There’s Photo sharing community sites popping up everywhere now, after the success of Flickr, however they typically have adwords or banners or some form of advertising to make up for the fact the majority of them are free. Flickr does not allow any layout changes, so that’s off my list (I mean, who doesn’t have a Flickr account?).
Examples include:
Flickr
Photo Bucket
SmugMug
Twango
Zooomr
Then there’s photo printing sites, which allow you to share and have galleries, however their main purpose is selling you prints, hats, etc. They typically all look the same, and they are fairly heavy on the sell.
Examples are:
Kodak Gallery
PhotoSite
Shutterfly
Snapfish
Webshots
What I have been currently working on, is getting a Wordpress theme to my liking, set up to look more ‘photoblog’ than blog. Knowing me, I’ll change it in a few months, however now I’m working on getting the photos uploaded, and then I’ll share what ended up working for me.
How do you share your photographs?
Image: An Australian Flag tattoo on my 3 year old daughter for Australia Day.
January 29th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
At the moment I’m going with Flickr and Gallery2 on my website. Gallery is actually quite good, although when my hosting company changed servers a month ago and changed (and broke) a number of settings, my gallery went down and took forever to fix up with my rusty PHP.
I’m starting to like the community aspect of Flickr - mainly because no one really bothers to look at the photos on my site! But the lack of customisation on the layout is annoying. So I’m finding that I’m updating both, which feels like a bit of a waste of time.
I’m now trying out FAlbum, a Flickr plugin for Wordpress that lets you pull your photos from Flickr and arrange them nicely in your own site. Still your typical thumbnail deal, but not having to update both places and not having to host all the photos is a good enough solution for me. If only I could get it working properly!
January 30th, 2007 at 9:57 am
I have started experimenting with a phototblog and posting a photo a day. Using a fairly basic WordPress blog and hosting the photos on photo sharing sites.
Only used flickr and zooomr so far. There are differences between the two services, zooomr gives you slightly better features (trackbacks on photos, google maps) and cheaper price (Pro account free if you carry their byline on your blog hosted photos) but it lacks the community of flickr (and I get more traffic on the photos through flickr than through the blog).
January 30th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Miles, you are making a very interesting point dealing with the various photo sharing options. We, at KoffeeWare, come up with a different solution. KoffeePhoto could be considered as a desktop centric solution with peer-to-peer online mirroring and sharing. In other words, the software runs on your computer for obvious ergonomic advantages and the files are mirrored onto the KoffeePhoto network using peer-to-peer technologies. The KoffeePhoto network consists of the connected computers at a given time (not only the computer of the fellow you want to share the picture with). All pictures are encrypted and when sharing, your fellows receive an e-mail with a key providing them access to the files. Therefore, no need to leave the computer on, no bandwidth limitation. The pictures can be viewed through streamed slideshows, interactively using the KoffeePhoto client, or through an associated Web Space. The KoffeePhoto network can also be used as a backup as the system maintains a minimum amount of copies on the network (erase the pictures from your computer, restart the software and all pictures get downloaded again). Obviously, allocating some amount of disk space is part of the game. More, the software is Java based for Windows/Mac OS X/Linux cross platform usability. I don’t want my post to be too long. Obviously giving a try is the best way to make one’s opinion. Last but not the least, the software is completely free. Carl