RandomThink.net

I have to say, I feel so torn about the best way to go about sharing photos with people. It frustrates me to no end, and I can never decide what to do. I locked up on the issue a couple of years ago, and have been pretty bad about properly sharing things since.

I have an installation of the Gallery2 software on my domain (seen here), which has several older events in it. I also have a Flickr account (seen here), where I’ve shared some more recent stuff. On occasion, I’ve also used the WordPress upload ability to share a couple of photos, and if I dig about in the archives, I can find some moblog-type pictures from 2005 that live only in WordPress somewhere here.

Having my own managed gallery in the Gallery2 system is nice because I have control of the data, but specifically the metadata, such as titles and descriptions. It’s similar to my reasoning behind running WordPress — my data is mine, and I have total control over it. However, Gallery2 has been a much bigger pain in my side to maintain, so, I don’t like that.

Flickr is handy because it’s a much more social thing. I upload, and my friends can easily tell that new pictures are there, even if I don’t blog it. Heck, some of you probably get that daily email saying that I’ve uploaded new images (I get that for all of my Flickr friends). However, the data in their system isn’t mine. I mean, it is mine, but, I don’t have any stewardship over it. In a sense, it is good because it means there’s more reliable backups and such going on, and I am a paying customer, so theoretically it should be fine, but if I ever stop paying, I don’t know what’ll get lost (if anything), and the company could go away without notable warning (highly unlikely, but hey), so, that kind of bothers me.

Until recently, WordPress hasn’t had the best of image management systems. You upload photos, you’re done. However, the latest version has somewhat of a level of support for image galleries. I’ve also figured out that I can set up image galleries within pages, so I can set up pages as galleries and manage it all in WordPress. It’s kind of like the Gallery2 solution, only not in a dedicated photo system. However, it is all my data and I do like that. I can add photo titles and descriptions, so that’s handy.

I’ve set up some testing to contrast Flickr to WordPress.

• Gallery of pictures on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianarn/sets/72157604397118646/
• Gallery of pictures on RandomThink.net: http://www.randomthink.net/photos/lilacs

It’s hard for me to say what I prefer. I really do like that I can easily give the photos a more meaningful URL on the WordPress side, but then Flickr offers much better levels of photo size, allowing for people to view my content in sizes they prefer.

I suppose that ultimately, my content is my content and such metadata doesn’t matter so much, since I still have all of the pictures myself on my local hard drive in a nicely managed iPhoto setup, complete with keywords and such, but I don’t have titles/descriptions in iPhoto because that’s not easily added, so, that kind of stinks.

Perhaps I should be just doing iPhoto exports to iWeb and uploading the resulting galleries that way.

I don’t know why I spend so much time thinking about such things, but, I do.

I’d imagine my next post will be me complaining about my back, which has been hurting pretty bad for about two weeks straight now with no real sign of improvement. Maybe tomorrow.