Online Photo Albums

[wasyoungonce]

Just a quickie...what to people use for online albums...that is to show off your astrophotos?

Flicker; Picasa? any others? Pros...Cons?:help:

I'm thinking of an on line album with Picasa but it is limited to 1Gb. I don't want to use my internet providers free web page service..I may not be with them too much longer.

Thanks

[Bassnut]

Google sites (was google pages) is pretty cool and free. Dead easy to use, through a browser (mine is google pages). Many here use pbase to good effect, at a small cost.

[wasyoungonce]

I looked at what people were/are using but it appears spread around.

Pbase appears very good but at a cost ...no free lunch!

Kinda looking for advantages/disadvantages of each free services before I commit.

For example, flickr didn't' really tell me the storage size available on their service but picasa (google) was 1Gb, limited to 500 pics (can be upgraded with payments).

edit:

Just had a look at google sites...appears much better thanks Fred.

[Bassnut]

Well, google sites gives 10gb for free, with pics in any res. That way you can build an actuall site, not just pages of images. I have found the app insanely easy to use (I know nothing about website building). The only down side I found was, it got buried once, just once when I got an APOD and it crashed (exceeded bandwidth with over 5K downloads in one hr). Other than that, its fast and free similar and way easier than building your own .com site.

[ozstockman]

Will anybody who has its own website and their hosting supports ASP.NET be interested in integrating their picassa albums in their website?

Google provides API for Picassa which means you can use it to add all your pictures to your own website. In that way you'll still use picassa to upload and keep your photos but at the same time you can have them displayed on your website as they were there.

The same can be done even if your hosting supports only PHP but I can do only ASP.NET.

[wasyoungonce]

Thanks Mike...I'll enquire with our ISP on ASP.NET.

In the mean time I'm using a Picasa...temporarily. I need to resize the pics to jpg's for Picasa to minimise space & upload time...only on 512K DSL (thanks to Telstra & RIMs).

I'm only just beginning with a DSLR so the early pics are ...at best ...forgettable!

[Octane]

For astrophotography (well, as far as I'm concerned, any photography) it would be advisable to stay away from Flickr. I just don't understand how anybody can view any type of photography on a stark bright white background. It is painful to look through Flickr albums. You can say goodbye to viewing any fine detail in your image, thanks to the disgusting brightness of the background. This might not be a problem for people who use 17" (and smaller) monitors with low resolutions. But, I can tell you, at 24" (1920x1200), it hurts.

You need something with either a black background or a neutral (50%) grey.

With that in mind, I chose pbase for my interim hosting until I get my business site up and running. pbase allows you to use varying CSS templates. I use a stock one with a neutral background.

Another two excellent sites are SmugMug and Zenfolio. They provide a whole heap of services, too. I didn't need them; I really like the simplicity of pbase.

Regards,
Humayun

[wasyoungonce]

Now there's something I didn't think about.

Thanks

Humayun

[acropolite]

The Picasa client automatically resizes for upload, no need to do that.

[ozstockman]

Ok, it seems there is no point to create a web photo browser for picasa web albums, as there is already a free one for your flickr account. It can be set to any background. Below is a link for downloading SlideShow photo browser
http://www.codeplex.com/SlideShow

It doesn't require anything to be installed on your web server. You will need to upload two js files and create two(one) xml file from templates shown in quick start guide. It should work in any browser. I created a test gallery on my website (http://astro.lysov.net/gallery.htm) in 10 mins and it's very simple and looks ok.

You don't have to have flickr account and keep your photo albums there as it also can load photos from your web server. It's hard to say which way it's better and it' really up to you. I've discoverred the following pros and cons for each of these two methods:

Flickr account:
Pro:
you don't need to add a new photo to data file each time you upload it to your flickr albums. You actually need only one config file where you specify your flickr account name and that's it. It starts working straight away.
Cons:
-it seems that this photo browser ignores a flickr picture description. You can still add a description to a picture title but there is no text formatting and the title and description will look the same and go into one line.
-there is an extra trip to flickr.com to load your photos from them. Your visitors won't see that trip but it takes a bit longer.

Loading from your webserver:
Pros:
- it's faster as this photo browser doesn't make an extra trip. it loads all pictures from your webserver.
- You can add descriptions to your photos and they will be shown with different text file below a picture title.
Con:
-You need to maintain your data file. It means that each time you upload new photos to your webserver you have to add new pictures' data(name, description) to data file(data.xml) and update it on your webserver.. It's easy to add this data and you can use Notepad but still it may be some extra work for you that you don't want to do.


If you choose to use flickr account and need some help with configuration.xml let me know. I have a template to use. Setting it to get pictures stored on your webserver is disrobed in quick guide and should be easy to follow.

cheers,

Mike

[wasyoungonce]

That's a nice explanation Mike.:thumbsup:

I'm looking at the slide show quick start guide now.

[ozstockman]

have to mention one big issue with both methods and software itself. I couldn't find any way to provide a link to any particular picture/album in your slideshow photo browser. You can give a link to the whole gallery only.

[RobF]

I've been happy with Picasa web pages to get something up and running and the simplicity of it, but would prefer the layout options people seem to have with Google pages.

It doesn't look like you can create new Google pages any more though - forced to use Google Sites, which I found fiddley (if not impossible) to just throw up a header, some pics on black background and some info on each one. Anyone else had success with the newer Google Sites?