Online Photo Storage
on 12.27.06, 06:25am in media • comments (12)
As I march on with reorg’ing my home server setup, I’ve been thinking more and more about using an online photo service, such as Flickr, SmugMug, Zenfolio, etc. for both archiving my photos and having slideshows for the family.
I keep going back and forth on this. On one hand, my service provider (Dreamhost) gives me 200gb on online storage, which is more than enough to house the photos that I have (and not to mention, I already pay for that :)). What’s nice about this setup is that I can have the flexibility to go ahead and put together whatever website I want for my family pictures and be able to control the whole thing. For the last year or so, I’ve been building some basic pages Simpleviewer which has been working out really well (I export to iPhoto from Aperture, then use Hagus iPhoto Export to quickly create new libraries). There’s two problems though - First, I need to create lower quality (800×600) photos so folks can view them quickly and there’s no easy way for family members to ’save’ photos since the viewer is in Flash.
So now I’ve been looking more at some of the photo sharing sites. While Flickr seems to be the ‘leader’ in this space, my wife isn’t too fond of their slideshows or their website (they do have a really nice API, so I could put something else together or just use FlickrViewer).
Anyone have any thoughts/comments/experiences with the online photo sites? Thanks!
Dave Kekish (December 27, 2006 @ 7:58 am)
I used to love flickr then, I don’t know, I guess I got fed up with the slow rate of change. Zooomr is very nice (though they don’t have a public api yet, I’ve been waiting), and they give out free accounts to folks who blog.
There is another one, Twango that a lot of people like, but I don’t know anything about them.
gdkzen (December 27, 2006 @ 3:03 pm)
I think of two things as important factors in this decision:
1) How do your photos look when displayed via this service? Do they do a nice job with presentation? Do they give you lots of options for user experience?
2) Does the site offer some sort of access control? You might want to be able to grant access levels to users so that you can control what they see.
All in all, I like a simple PhotoBlog. The ability to mix photos with a text post allows you to be a virtual photojournalist.
for an example, checkout http://gzphoto.blogspot.com
Steve (December 27, 2006 @ 8:25 pm)
Not a fan at all of photoblogs. I have tons of slideshows to share with the family, and never text with it.
Carl (December 27, 2006 @ 11:57 pm)
At KoffeeWare, we thought that the 100 % online storage has its limits. First, it can not be free because of the costs of storage, second, how confident can you be? Therefore, we developed a free online photo sharing software using a peer-to-peer storage model. Pictures are obviously crypted and can only be viewed by people you share the pictures with.
KoffeePhoto is available from http://www.koffeephoto.com.
Timmy (December 28, 2006 @ 7:23 am)
I love P2P, but it too has its limits. For example, I only use laptops, therefore, my photos wouldn’t be available because my machine isn’t on 100% of the time. I do notice that KoffeePhoto says that it stores all the photos on its network (”unlimited storage”). I am not sure if this means it is a bittorrent like thing where my photos might be encrypted on some random computer (I WOULD HATE THAT). But, if it isn’t, then KoffeePhoto has the same issues as any online system. More importantly, more and more of my friends are using Blackberry, Symbian or simply generic phones that use the built in browser to look at photos. There is no way P2P software is going to work on the phones, so I must have an online solution.
I don’t want FLICKR or anything that uses FLASH because of my requirement for them to be displayed anywhere.
gdkzen (December 28, 2006 @ 1:46 pm)
I don’t think storage is such a huge issue in something like this because the photographer’s job is to take his/her photos and seperate the wheat from the chaff. Only a certain percent of photos are going to be worth posting from even the best photographer, so posting all of them will diminish the user experience.
Anybody know of any of these services that provide the photographer with the ability to protect his/her copyright? Some simple web programming can inhibit the average user from downloading your file from the browser, do any of these sites give the photographer this option?
Another thing that would be interesting, is to see the number of hits on particular photos.
Jalil Vaidya (December 28, 2006 @ 2:51 pm)
If you already have a host then simply upload you photos and use image viewing software like Gallery (http://gallery.menalto.com/). Gallery also provides a client that can be used to upload the images to your site. It will also convert your images to different sizes (including 800×600) while uploading. You can also use ImageMagick (http://imagemagick.org/script/index.php) to do it yourself via command line if you wish. Gallery needs ImageMagick (or NetPBM - another image manipulation package) for image conversion. For just re-sizing/converting images I use IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com), which is another nifty utility with a small footprint, in batch mode. I have used all these softwares myself and can highly recommend them.
Timmy (December 30, 2006 @ 9:12 am)
A true profressional photographer will sort and share. However, for a family, I want all my photos to be stored off my home network and on a drive in the sky. I want everything from the great photo to the pictures that I snapped with my phone. I want my high quality videos as well as my junky-shaky videos to be stored in the cloud. In fact, I want all the DVDs that I ripped (the VOB and MPEG-2/4) files to be stored.
Steve (December 30, 2006 @ 3:08 pm)
Exactly. I want my photos in the cloud, no matter what I take them with. I want them backed up, safe, and to be viewed on a variety of clients, which is why flash can be/is a pain.
gdkzen (December 30, 2006 @ 7:32 pm)
If offsite storage is the main interest then there are a world of possibilities. A colleague of mine recently attended a talk at MIT about the methodologies involved in truly maintaining a robust backup system for digital media. There’s been a ton of research done in this area lately - particularly in the estimated longevity of different storage media.
Of course with these services, the rest of the situation is your own concern (presentation, access control, etc). Basically, they just store stuff and guarantee that it won’t disappear anytime soon.
Steve (December 30, 2006 @ 8:12 pm)
Offsite storage is easy. I have 200gb on Dreamhost. I have a NAS where all my photos are. It’s easy to have it rsync to dreamhost for nightly updates..
Carl (February 5, 2007 @ 4:24 am)
A couple of words to answer Timmy’s post about P2P storage:
“I love P2P, but it too has its limits. For example, I only use laptops, therefore, my photos wouldn’t be available because my machine isn’t on 100% of the time. I do notice that KoffeePhoto says that it stores all the photos on its network (”unlimited storage”).” What I mean here is that the albums are encrypted are stored on the KoffeePhoto p2p network, making them available at anytime to anybody granted to access them (people you share the pictures with). You can also publish them on a shared web page.
“More importantly, more and more of my friends are using Blackberry, Symbian or simply generic phones that use the built in browser to look at photos. There is no way P2P software is going to work on the phones, so I must have an online solution.” This is obvious, we therefore are working on a Java mobile phone client for KoffeePhoto to be released soon. A shared Web Space is already available with specific pages for PDA kind of browsers.