Not anything I ever heard of, at least.

Can someone please let me know if this is indeed true?

I mostly use SmugMug too, nowadays.

Larry,

Thanks for the input. I definitely agree that most photo web sites have navigational problems.

But none work anything like what they should. Picasa2 DESKTOP application works fine for huge albums with it’s scrollable Folder view combined with a scrollable thumbnail view so yo can quickly located with sliders any photo in the album and if not you can search for it.

Photo sites like Phanfare try to give users a 3 level organization scheme–timelines/albums/sections. And this is generally enough with some inventiveness. However, there scheme falls flat with drop down lists that are cumbersome and slow. Your forced to scroll also thru the timeline to get to the next 5 years. So if you have pictures dating back a hundred years good luck. It just doesn’t work.

In contrast, Picasa2 desktop organizer is ideal in this regard as the user can select a ‘tree’ view or a ‘flat’ view. ALL WEB sites for sharing photos should incorporate this. Otherwise users will have a hard time finding the photos they want as the Gallery grows in size from thousands to hundreds of thousands of photos and it will in 20 years of uploading (or 20 years of backloading from decades of old photos such as family tree photos).

Then too ALL of the sites try to keep users from having much control by generally refusing to allow members to embed their own paid for photo sharing site in their own web site where they may try to take advantage of a database to mimic Picasa2 and create a much more visually appealing and USEFUL interface in which to display & search possibly tens of thousands to even millions of uploaded pictures.

Basically, every single photo sharing website depends on users being dunces who will only upload a few hundred or a thousand pictures and then get frustrated and quit because they can’t organize as effectively as they can using desktop organizing software such as Adobe Elmements, ACDSee, Picasa2, etc, etc.

It’s far more effective just to invite your friends over and view your albums on picasa2 on a 52″ LCD and forget the online sharing which it’s basically worthless except for small galleries (a gallery by definition is a container for multiple albums but some sites think a gallery is an album. Not true).

I do use Picasa for my photo management, but with 50k photos, nothing is going to be easy – I am looking for another solution now.

my 2 centavos – happy click’n

-Chris

Absolutely, it’s a good tool, and also mentioned in the post.

(PS. I think your link text got stripped since there weren’t any text or closing of the actual link, i.e. a element)

Go to the Settings page>Add a google username and you can use that for your galleries. Your gmail account name with then remain your secret.

For me, that’s reason enough not to use it right now.

A web interface hosted on one’s own web site does indeed sound interesting!

I think the combination of photo management software and the webinterface will do it for new people in this market. People who allready have a Flickr account will stay with Flickr/Yahoo.

What i’m looking for is a webinterface like Google/Flickr but then hosted on my own webspace. So I’m in control of what happens to my photos.

Ah, it’s a very valid question, but it’s too long to discuss here. But mainly, my gut instinct (which can be totally wrong ) makes me trust Google more than Yahoo!.

As far as I know, neither of them offer it, but I’d like to be proved wrong here.

Maaike,

Yes, I agree. I think it will take a lot for people to switch from any account they already have. Regarding Google and trust: I know a lot of people mistrust them, but between Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Google, I personally think the safest bet is Google.

michael,

I’m glad that you brought that up! That is indeed very annoying and that’s definitely something that they need to change so someone’s alias and e-mail address isn’t the same.

Douglas,

Well, I like the little things with Picasa described in the post. The Uploadr problems with Flickr I refer to is on Intel Macs, to be more clear; not sure how it works on older Macs or a PC.

Gustaf,

It is quite neat and clean actually. I’ve also tried the iPhoto plugin as well, and it worked great! And, to point out, as opposed to Flickr, the Picasa iPhoto plugin is free!

I’ve been looking for a good replacement service but haven’t found anything that i like yet. I did think that 23hq was ok, but they do not support one-size-thumbnails, which makes the albums quite .. well, it looks asymmetrical.. and the interface is quite ugly.

Picasa looks really clean and neat.. i’m gonna give it a shot.

Then I’ll have to get a new email address, and what a pain that is.

Come to my blog to see a quick survey of other photo sharing sites: http://allthingskyra.blogspot.com