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

[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.