These days most of us own at least one digital camera, whether it is a point and click or a more sophisticated Digital SLR. If you own a digital camera, the next most obvious thing to do after taking wonderful photos is to upload them somewhere. But where? How should you decide? Should you just follow everyone else and create an account with Flickr, Picasa or other less popular photo sharing sites? Some of us will just upload the photos onto Facebook. After all sharing your holiday photos, creative photos, etc. is a social activity we humans do.
There are some of us who may decide that we want to be more geeky and install a copy of an open source photo gallery software on our self-hosted account and have full control of administering and designing the layout. Whether you’re the former or the latter, you will have to make a decision.
So what are the benefits of using Flickr, Picasa and the likes as our photo sharing platform?
The benefits of using Flickr, Facebook and other photo social networking sites are:
1. You don’t have to worry about patching the software when there are new releases.
2. You don’t have to worry about doing a backup in case anything were to go wrong.
3. You don’t have to worry about SEO, i.e. making your photo site friendly to the Google crawler.
4. You instantly announce to your friends that you’ve just uploaded beautiful photos. That is taken care of by the photo sharing software.
5. Essentially you have peace of mind and don’t need to hire a webmaster or an I.T. person to get things started.
But…some times we want to make our photo sharing web site unique. Some times we want to have our own design and theme. Some times we want our own domain name, like www.beautifulphotos.com. Or we want to start our own photo sharing social networking site. So we go and research and see what open source software is available and then we install it on the hosting site that we own.
How do we decide which photo gallery software to use?
Let’s list a few of the photo gallery software that are commonly used.
1. ZenPhoto
2. Gallery
3. Coppermine
4. Pixelpost
5. Piwigo
6. 4images
Now we are spoilt for choice. How should we decide? In Part 2 of this blog post I will talk more about the software that I have listed above and help you decide. I will share with you my personal favourite too.
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a tech junkie and a software developer.
a apple fan and an avid photographer.
a frequent traveller and loves art and graphic novels.
Thank you, I’ve just been looking for info about this topic for ages and yours is the best I have found out till now. But, what about the bottom line? Are you sure about the source?
Oh, a great post! I have no clue how you came up with this report..it’d take me days. Well worth it though, I’d suspect. Have you considered selling ads on your website?