Discussion: Photo gallery online

I just bought a new camera, and I'm now starting to take o-photos. I would like to upload the photos online. Any tip-off for good free(?) gallery-website that I should use?!
I'm a lot for quality...so full quality upload and nice organized layout would be perfect.

Two of the major galleries are Flickr (Yahoo) and Picasa (Google), but I´m sure there are lots of others out there.

One example of a high quality gallery at Flickr is actually Peatmonster (a.k.a. Mike Waddington, Hammer on AP).

Flickr has an orienteering group as well. I think the site is pretty user-friendly.

Here is the orienteering pool on flickr: it is rather small but has some nice photos.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/orienteering/

If you look around, you can easily find Daniel Hubmann's photos too :)


The only problem is that you will soon hit the limits of the free account on flickr: only your 200 most recent photos show up, you have a 100Mo monthly limit and your photos can only be accessed in med-size (although your original high quality photos still reside on the server in case you upgrade). I found the Pro upgrade worth the cost, as flickr has a very friendly community and offers one of the best HMI experience I ever seen in picture management.

So Picasa could be a good choice in your case, more traditional and "album" oriented.

I've been using fotki for about 2.5 years, and have been very happy with it. It's another album oriented album which is also free. Like flikr it stores the photos at whatever resolution you upload them, but your visitors see the photos at reduced resolution. If you are willing to pay, it has the advantage of being able to personalize the appearance of the albums more (e.g. adding your own html framework).

One advantage of flikr is that it can be linked with several other websites such as facebook.

Something else you may want to consider is security, privacy and copyright. Of course the most secure thing to do is NOT upload your photos. You may not care about this, in which case it's not a consideration. I ended up going with Picasa because (unless I missed something), Flickr only implements security on photos for users who are logged into Flickr. So if I wanted to put a photo on Attackpoint, I had to make it a public photo that anyone could see. Within Flickr, you can designate other Flickr users to be friends, family members, etc. and thus limit the photos they can see based on who they are. But it didn't appear that you could link one of those "limited access" photos to your log for your AP friends to see.

Picasa has something less fancy that works for my needs - the concept of unlisted albums. If I give someone the link to a photo in an unlisted album, they can see it whether or not they have a Picasa account, but someone who is just browsing or searching in Picasa will not see the unlisted album. I'm sure that some truly dedicated techie could find my pics, but it's not as if I'm uploading photos of my credit card!

Photobucket is another nice one! i haven't used it in a while as most of the photos i feel like posting online are ones that I post on facebook. Oh and for my liverpool trip we were posting on a wikispace but that got annoying as you have to upload one at a time. But yeah i liked photobucket when i used it.

I went thru this progression a year or so ago. Flickr looked good but very restrictive in quantity. Picasa wouldn't allow sorting by date... only event (I wanted to use it on my PC also). Others that appearing promising, had limits on resolution. In the end, I coughed up some cash and got my own domain name and hosted it on a cheap service. With discounts, this was about $150 for 2 years. When that expires, it'll cost about $100 a year to maintain.

This may not apply to you, but I look on this as a family photo-site. I hope to pass it on to someone else in a few years. For that to work well, the domain name is important. When you're paying, you can have any photo, any size, any number and almost unlimited downloads available. Even host your own flash movies.

There's hardly any place left anymore that is both free and unlimited. Yahoo Photos was excellent before they redesigned it and then closed it completely. When they closed I transferred my gallery and the club photo gallery to Photobucket, but I find the layout there to be somewhat awkward. I did end up paying for the upgrade for more space. I also have purchased my own domain name and webspace for my photography site, though I've been rather lax in getting it designed and uploaded :-) Still, you get what you pay for and often doing it on your own is best.

I've tried several, including Flickr, and I think Picasa is the best.

You can sort by date in Picasa, BTW. Maybe that's a new feature.

Picasa offers 1 GB of storage for free, more for a fee (10 GB for $20 for example).

I really like Picasa's super-easy link feature, with various size options. It also lets you download the original high-res versions (if that's what you originally uploaded).

Thanks to all for the information and your opinions! I'll go for the Picasa then!