Nothing to say

I have photos hosted on no less than 4 sites (possibly more). I’m counting my collective hosted websites as one, so personal and wedding sites combined. I’ve been putting a lot of thought into what to do about this mess I have, and while talking it out with a friend, I crafted my plans.

Flickr
This site is brilliant, because they have a well developed community, great functionality, and quick pageloads. The AJAX photo titling and describing is a cinch to use, and they’ve gone the extra mile adding great features like video hosting and geotagging. Now not only do your stalkers know what you’ve been up to, but they know WHERE. And for that, they have great privacy features. All around perfect, right?

Unfortunately, no. There are significant limitations for unpaid members, and my Pro account expired. So I’m limited to 200 photos and 3 sets, no videos, and .. well those are the only limitations. So the membership is only a couple bucks a month, no big deal, but there are other factors. Part of what makes flickr great is what also makes it obnoxious. The community is great for connecting with friends, but it’s also great for connecting with all the bored losers on the internet who really want to appear popular and clever. So they’re always posting ridiculous, stupid, and insanely annoying comments on photos. I’m not the only one bothered by all the “OMG GREAT PHOTO JOIN MY INVITATION ONLY GROUP AND TAG YOUR PHOTO SUPERSPECIALDELUXEGOLDSTAR!!!!!” Um. Your group is lame. Your gold star graphic is annoying. And your compliment is empty. If I am posting a photo for comment, I want to hear what my friends think, or I want constructive criticism from people who can help me take better photos. If not that, then gimme silence. Please.

Zooomr
Zooomr was the brilliant Flickr copycat that I fell in love with when I found it some years ago.  They had geotagging before Flickr even knew what the word meant.  And…. that was all they had.  They didn’t have speed.  The site was so slow for me that I quickly deemed it unusable and just gave up.  I checked in on it today, reset my password, and logged in.  It’s SUPER FAST now!  It also has a pay system, but the limitations are very different.  You can still upload as much as you want, but there are ads, and you’re limited on what you can browse.  You can’t go find random photos.  You can’t browse unknown photos.  You can just flip through the popular ones.  Weird.  Anyway, it doesn’t matter.  The community is cool, but chock full of people who take really nice photos.  Me, I take crappy photos to help me remember things.  I don’t fit in, and I don’t know anyone there, so the “community” benefit is hardly a bonus at all.

Picasa
Picasa is great and fine.  They have the software and the online hosting.  They work really well together.  I have 2 albums on my picasa account, because flickr was blocked at work.  I just used it for viewing at work.  Now I don’t use it at all, and am quite at peace with that.  One awesome thing I have to give Picasa props for, though, is reading RAW images.  For a quality photo organization program with an integrated database, and RAW capabilities … you’re paying for it.  Except with Picasa.  Awesome.  That said, I use something else.  Next!

Gallery
This is the first photo gallery I used on my site.  It’s literally called Gallery, because they wanted to make themselves difficult to search for online.  That’s the only logical reason they’d choose such an … innovative name, right?  Anyway, it’s slow as molasses.  Apparently, you can customize it and cut out some of the components that slow it down, like Print ordering (as if I’d ever need that), but doing such things is a total hassle.  And then I found….

Zenphoto
This is what I use now, and I love it. There are templates, there is AJAX functionality for editing titles and descriptions, like in Flickr. It totally spanks Gallery in speed and size. It’s a very lean installation. It caches the files so people are loading static HTML files from the server instead of dynamically creating them all the time. You can force an update of cached files if you update anything and the automatic update doesn’t work or happen fact enough (it always works, though, but it’s nice to know you COULD force it if you ever needed to).

I already pay hosting, regardless of how much I use this, and I have space galore on the server, so it’s effectively free. The only real downside is that there isn’t a community or “friend” system. I can’t make a photo friends only. My friends won’t see my photos in their friends updates. But it DOES have an RSS feature, so friends can add me to their google reader, Firefox, or whatever RSS reader they use. Sure, most people don’t use an RSS reader, so that’s kind of irrelevant, but for my geekier friends, it’s a nice feature.

And so it’s decided. I’m not going to migrate all of my other photos and albums to Zenphoto, but I will continue to use it going forward. I’m going to keep my free Flickr account for keeping up with my friends, and will probably occasionally post the odd image there, such as the color swatch I did today.

What do you think? What do you use? If you look at my photos, what are your viewing preferences?