Sadly, its name was not "Babe"

[drwex]

In other news, what are people using for image sharing these days? The plusterfuck has invaded Picasa and rendered it nearly unusable (I can't just share a photo, I have to "post" and manage sharing on my posts and blah blah whocares and make sure you remember to turn off whatever Google thinks is its clever photo-processing hoo-hah). Imageshack wants paid signs-ups, pfui. Flickr? Pinterest? What's the most usable for quick photo shares?

Comments

[make-your-move.livejournal.com]

I like Flickr. It's worth the 24 bucks a year I pay for the extra storage.

[drwex]

Yeah, I already have dropbox. Doesn't make sense for me to pay twice.

[minkrose]

I was going to recommend Flickr as well -- but I thought you could share photos in dropbox? They have links to share pictures. I use it a lot. I have no idea if you can embed them, though.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

I've been using Photobucket for years. It does what I want it to do without a lot of hassle, and it's free, but I don't know if it'll meet your needs. You can check it out and see what you think.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Flickr: the original and still the best.

[mizarchivist]

+1. I, too, give them money so I do not have to pare down my total number. I don't love the redo they did with the interface lately, but I'll get used to it.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

For things I want to show family and friends I use flickr, even though it's caught the "everything must look like an iOS app" bug lately and has gotten harder to use as a result.

For stuff I'm posting semi-anonymously (reddit, message boards) I use imgur.

[mizarchivist]

Oh, is that why I dislike it and find it incomprehensible? Well, I just got a new apple device, so perhaps flickr will demystify with broader exposure.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Probably not. It's not a great interface paradigm, and while Apple stuff tries (or at least tried) to keep it clean, Flickr kind of missed the point and covered what should have been a sort of basic photo-viewing screen with contextless near-meaningless icons, and areas of the screen with different functions with almost no way to differentiate between them because of low-contrast hairline dividers and things like that. Overall I liked the old white-background version and pretty much tolerate the new black-background version.

[wotw]

This is the second time in a week I've commented to express puzzlement about why you want to outsource something it seems to me you could do more easily and effectively yourself.

Here, for example, are my photos from Baitcon 2012. It took me almost zero time to write a little html code and throw these up on the web. What does Flickr or Picasa or any other web service offer that I don't already have?

[drwex]

It's a fair question. As before, the core question is what is the time, cost, and risk of running my own server. Since I don't currently run a public Web server I'd have to put one up. One of the reasons I no longer run such a server is that some years ago I did have a publicly exposed Apache and that was exploited to turn my Linux box into a spambot. Not only did I have to do the work of cleaning the zombie scripts and de-rooting my Linux (essentially a fresh install) I then had to go and do the work of getting my site de-listed from all the blacklists it had gotten onto because my box was being used to send out tons of spam. The number of hours that took was considerable, and the number of hours it would take for me to keep a public Web server up to date on security patches would be large. My site was also unavailable intermittently due to power outages, and the inability to get a truly static IP (except by paying exorbitant "business rates") caused my site to be unreachable on DNS now and then (*).

All this cost and hassle precedes the cost of actually serving up Web photo albums. There are, I'm sure, packages I could install that would do that, but again that's more of my hours tinkering with it. I list these hours separately because perhaps one doesn't want to do that - just have a public URL for any given photo. That's what some sites do. One of the reasons I switched to Picasa back in the day was that they offered very useful and simple album-level features. The loss of these features is one of the main reasons I'm looking to switch. If I just wanted simple unorganized photo hosting I could do that lots of places.

I haven't used Flickr so I can't speak to that. What Picasa offered was drag-and-drop upload, organization (sequencing) post-upload, a slideshow interface, automatic resizing with previews, the ability to name, date, and sort albums at the album (group of photos) level, and the ability for people to find photos based on tags or keywords through search. You have a page of pictures, which is fine, but if you value any of the features listed here then I think you'd have to write additional code to support them.

(*) All hail DynDNS who are low-cost and fabulous and helped me work through all these issues. If I didn't have their support I'd probably still be in a virtual black hole somewhere.

[wotw]

But I don't host a webserver, and I don't deal with Apache. I pay Bluehost $6 a month to host multiple domains for me. So your various assumptions about cost and hassle are mostly quite far off.

[drwex]

I didn't ask this last time publicly and don't feel obliged to answer, but I'm curious how you value your time. I estimate you probably make north of a quarter-million a year and using the heuristic of thousands/year ~= dollars/hr I'd value your time then at $250/hr. So if we say "almost zero time" is half a day then you've used time valued at $1000. The number of hours of daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance involved is likely also non-zero but regardless, I'd guess that you could get a year's worth of the services we've discussed for under $250.

I therefore have to ask what form of rationality explains the choices you make. I guess there are values placed on accomplishment and self-satisfaction, or other enjoyment you get from doing this?

[wotw]

Long ago, I wrote a script that takes the contents of a directory and produces html code to display the contents of that directory. The Baitcon web page I pointed to resulted from running that script. It took about a minute to produce.

Writing the script took perhaps a few hours, but I've amortized that cost over many dozens of web pages since then.

The alternative was spending several hours figuring out which public service to use (as you are doing now), and then having to deal with the hassle of having the rug pulled out from under me when those services disappeared or substantially changed their features.

So it still seems to me that on balance, my financial costs, my time costs, and my aggravation costs have all been much lower as a result of doing all this myself. And as I watch you deal with the what-do-I-do-now problem, I believe that more strongly than ever.

Another advantage of doing it myself is that I understand my script and therefore understand the code on my web pages, which means that if I want to change their appearance, I can do it easily without having to figure out Picasa's or Flickr's interface (if the changes I want to make are even possible there). So that's another time-and-aggravation saver.

Your mileage of course may vary, as different people have different aggravations they prefer to avoid. But for me, the solution has always seemed clear: Pay Bluehost a small amount to deal with the hosting, and write my own html code, or better yet, write my own scripts that I can use to generate LOTS of html code.

If there are costs you think I'm overlooking, or benefits of the Flickr/Picasa route that you think I'm overlooking, I want to hear about them. I am always happy to hear about ways to make my life even easier.

[drwex]

So you're paying for hosting of domains, and they provide you with a Web server that serves up your HTML pages. So the question then comes down to the tradeoffs of writing one's own code versus using a vendor's code. That's sort of the classic build vs buy decision. So long as you can write the features you want and your desires for them don't change it's likely the case that build makes more sense.

The features I want (image resizing, slideshow capability, the ability to permission and link individual items as well as collections) are things I could do but don't want to be bothered with. I'm pretty sure I could script P'shop to do the sizing and the rest would be a reasonably easy set of PHP coding. Scripting the upload might be a little more annoying, but that could be a manual process.

I make less than you do, but let's ballpark that at $500 of my time to do this work. If I say it's taken me $100 of my time to select a vendor (so far it's been less but eventually) then over some number of years I'd pay out that $400 worth to have someone else provide the code and services I want. I then estimate the probability of the vendor failing or changing its features versus the probability that I'd have to go in and tweak or maintain/expand my own code.

So at some point in the future, it's likely that the "buy" decision turns out to be more expensive, assuming an otherwise-static world. I think I expect things to be more problematic and less static than you find them to be, but I understand your reasoning better now.