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On Digital Photo Storage and Sharing

Some people are content to choose one way to do a thing. I’m not like that. I am constantly re-evaluating the way I do things, trying to find the most efficient methods. Perhaps it’s a mental disorder. Maybe I should get help. I don’t find that it has much impact on my life, but it does generate a lot of thinking cycles in my head that might otherwise be used on more useful or profound thoughts.

Anyway, one of the things I constantly re-evaluate is the way that I store, catalog, and share my digital photos. Lately, I’ve been thinking about my next advances in this area, and after a little bit of research, I’m made some interesting discoveries. Since my camera is not exactly pocket-sized, I don’t take it with me everywhere I go, and thus I don’t take photos every day. But between evenings, weekends, and vacations, I manage to do a fair amount of photography. I have over 17,000 digital photos stored on our Mac, dating back to the time I bought my first digital camera in the latter half of 2001. They are all stored in Apple’s iPhoto software. I’ve recently reorganized my iPhoto library, thanks to a tip from Win. I now have a separate iPhoto library folder for each year of photos. This speeds up iPhoto dramatically, as it doesn’t have to load data on all 17,000+ photos each time it starts up - just the data for that year. It’s particularly helpful since my Mac is over six years old, has a slow processor, and not a ton of memory.

After I get things offloaded from the camera and on to iPhoto, I put them online. For the past several years, I’ve been using the standalone Gallery software. This PHP- and MySQL-based photo gallery is one of the best web-based tools out there for managing your own online photo gallery. It has recently undergone a major overhaul with the release of Gallery 2, and I have since upgraded our own photo gallery to use this new version. Gallery has many powerful features, particularly for allowing you to customize the look and feel of your photo gallery. You can change everything from the color of the background to the layout of the photos on the page. Our gallery doesn’t really have a lot of customization, but it’s nice to know that those features are there.

For a while, running your own gallery or borrowing someone else’s gallery was the only way to set up an online photo gallery. A few years ago, however, a service called flickr was introduced. This slick web application allowed you to upload photos to a third-party website, manage and organize the photos, and share them with others. It also had a feature called ‘tagging’ which allows you to assign descriptive keywords to each photo, in order to have them automatically grouped with other photos sharing those same keywords. flickr has since taken off in popularity, and it now seems to be the most popular place for storing and sharing photos on the Internet.

I have always found flickr to be a cool and interesting tool, but in the past I have been divided in my opinions of it. On one hand, I already have a photo gallery set up on my own web space, with thousands of photos carefully organized into albums. I’m already paying for the web space, so I might as well use it. And Gallery is a sophisticated, powerful tool, with the ability to tightly manage every aspect of your photo website. I also was never thrilled with the idea of flickr’s closed community - generally, the people using flickr mostly look at and comment on photos of other flickr users, and rarely venture outside to view photos in other gallery systems. This is similar to my thoughts on systems such as the Xanga and LiveJournal blogging services. The people on those services tend to read and comment mostly on blogs of other people in the same service, because it is easy for them to do so. It creates a closed community.

These days, however, the issue of flickr being a closed community is moot. It is now the de facto place to share your photos online. It’s now a Yahoo!-owned company, so they have solid backing and plenty of resources. There is a great community surrounding flickr, with lots of special interest groups. They have excellent, easy-to-use features for organizing, archiving, and managing your photos. And their pricing is great - $24.95 for an entire year of service with unlimited storage, or just about $2 per month.

So just how popular is flickr, and who uses it? Well, I turned to my own blogroll for answers.

There are 31 people on my blogroll who have photo galleries. Of those, 18 are using flickr. That’s 58%, or roughly three out of five. I’d say that makes it pretty popular! I can see the flickr promotion now: THREE OUT OF FIVE USERS ON PETER’S BLOGROLL PREFER FLICKR. WHY DON’T YOU? Eight people, or 26%, use Gallery. Not too shabby. Three people have their own homebrewed solutions of sorts, and two people are using commercial services like Shutterfly or Webshots, services that are mostly geared towards people who want to get prints of their digital photos, and have online albums as a side-effect.

Something else to consider is what type of people have online photo galleries. 23 of 31 people on my blogroll who have online photo galleries are what I would call ‘tech savvy’ (74%). That is, they know enough about web technology that they could probably set up their own web-based gallery if they wanted to. Out of the 23 tech savvy people, 15 are using flickr (65%)! That surprised me initially - I figured that tech savvy people would want to set up their own photo galleries and have complete control over the way things worked. But nowadays it looks like techies want to spend less time setting up the galleries, and more time coding or doing other things. ( In fact, since flickr has an open API, the techies can write their own tools to take advantage of the existing flickr framework. For example, check out the excellent FlickrExport and 1001 tools for the Mac. ) I have to say that I’m starting to agree with this sentiment. While it can be fun to set up your own gallery if you have the time, more often than not, I just want it to work. And I don’t want to be in charge of upgrading the software when new features are released or new security holes are found.

There are still a few techie users who are using Gallery. One such notable person is Matt “PhotoMatt” Mullenweg of WordPress fame. He’s got a heavily customized Gallery installation that works really well for his situation.

Another interesting statistic is that out of the eight people on my blogroll who are using Gallery, six are using it either because I directly recommended that they use it, or were referred to it by someone else I recommended it to. In fact, three of those six people had their Gallery installation set up personally by me, and two of them are hosted on my own web space! I originally recommended Gallery to people because it was (relatively) easy to use, and I knew how to set it up, so it was a natural choice. These days, however, I would probably recommend that most people go with [flickr].

Gallery is currently still the place where I go to store all of my digital photos online. But flickr is starting to become the place where I put my “better” stuff. The stuff I want to have critiqued by the larger photographic community, the stuff that I think is particularly interesting. It is also a place to find new and interesting photos, learn new photographic techniques, and get ideas. Finally, it is also a community in which I can meet other photographers and other people with similar photographic interests.

Finally, I’m curious what the readers of this blog think. Would you be more likely to view and comment on our photos if I put them into flickr? Or do you like them in Gallery as they are now? What are your thoughts on flickr versus Gallery? Who knows, some day we may switch everything over to flickr.

To compare flickr and Gallery, you can check out our gallery, and my flickr page.

By Peter | 12.03.2005 | 01:15 PM | Permalink | Categories: Techie | 4 Comments