08 December 2008

No longer a Pro or Searching for a Gallery

For a few months I enjoyed a "Pro" flickr account from a donation (thanks Gianluca), it was useful to host some photos from FUDCon, a time when I got accustomed with the website and started to use it more and more. But like any good thing in life, it ended recently. The price is affordable, so I could renew it, but with the recent news I don't even thing about that: there is no way in hell I will give money to a company that wants to sell to Microsoft or to a company which is a target for acquisition by Microsoft. That just won't happen.

So here I am, looking for a gallery software to run on my own domain, on my own website (with supposedly "unlimited" storage and "unlimited" bandwidth), unhappy with everything I tried so far, from Gallery2 which I find to complex to Zenphoto which I find to basic, asking for input and advice.

I won't move my photos to my Picasaweb account, I find its interface terrible and the limitation of an unpaid account are even more restrictive and I won't go to any obscure flickr clone, I have waiting for upload thousands of photos.

Analyzing myself, I think I understand my rejection for any gallery I saw: it looks like everything is "album" based, as opposed to flickr's "photostream" approach, where you have a river of photos with the ability to include it in as many sets as you like them and have the navigation based on sets and tags. And I like on flickr the ability to license the images as you like (for now I have everything as CC-BY-SA, but I see me making some stuff proprietary and some PD, depending on the content and its use).

So this is what I want: a clean interface, RSS feeds for everything, licensing, comments and a photostream approach. Ideas?

10 comments:

  1. Hey Nicu,

    May I suggest smugmug.com? I have an account that I pay $30/year for and think you may enjoy it.

    The features there are endless, and they have a pretty nice reprint rate (in the US anyway). Lot's of galleries, many ways to add pics, etc.

    Cheers,

    Clint

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  2. This weekend I coincidentally came across something that was self-hosted and looked fairly similar to Flickr. I didn't try it though, so I don't know whether it's any good. It's called Atomique: http://www.atomique.org/

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  3. Smugmug used to run CentOS and is running OpenSolaris now. A bit different from Flickr but seems tolerable.

    I'm moving if the deal ever goes through.

    Flickr is nice and easy to use but I like the "display on black" features.

    I don't like the way Smugmug does groups (like putting a set/album in a group can result in the template of your set/album changing and allowing someone to put ads on your pages... this is bad!)

    Smugmug also has a migration plugin for Flickr that seemed to work pretty good when I was just trying things out last year.

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  4. Nicu, if you find the answer, let me know because I want the same exact thing :(

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  5. The advantage of using Gallery2 over something more exotic is that it can be synced to by desktop software. For example, in digiKam, I have the following options for web galleries: Flickr, Picasaweb, Gallery (both 1 and 2 are supported) or static HTML. I haven't tried F-Spot, but it claims to support Flickr, 23, Picasaweb, SmugMug (central services), Gallery, O.r.i.g.i.n.a.l. (software you can self-host) and static HTML.

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  6. I think it's possible to make something like that with Drupal, but it's probably going to take some time and work.

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  7. Started to look at the various suggestion, the first was SmugSmug. The verdict about 10 minutes of looking at it? I don't like it:
    - no ability to add Creative Commons license to images (not good to type manually in the description field);
    - the code to embed the images in other websites is provided as Flash (and impossible to read on my FF+Fedora);
    - the uploader is awkward: from the Windows category select a Java applet;
    - old style, based on albums/galleries not photostream;
    - I also do not like they don't have "free" accounts for light users, only a 14 days trial (that is what I used).

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  8. I have some experience with Gallery2, I am not happy with it but it is is the only choice remaining, my preferred upload way would be to copy with scp on the server and then batch-import into gallery.

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  9. Atomique is scary, the install instructions say "Atomique is still in its very early stages. It is advised to be cautious and not use the software in a working environment" and the front page "I didn’t really find the time so far to continue my work on Atomique and I probably won’t be able to in the near future"

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  10. i think if you have drupal plus its image* modules installed, you can have flickr like galleries... and the use of tags/taxonomy will allow tag/keyword-based "album". and since every image is a node, you will get RSS published too.

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