My installation of Menalto Gallery (still using 1.x) is getting a bit hard to manage. The installation at spmicro has become huge (in storage requirements) and sluggish (possibly due to Gallery 1 not using an efficient database). I'm at about 5GB, and 700MB of that is dedicated to thumbnails and downsized images. Backing this up isn't very easy anymore.

Since I've embraced Google as my new internet overlord, I jumped on the Picasa Web Albums beta. If I'm going to give up control of my web photos, I think the only company I would trust to stick around is Google. Plus, the likelihood of them loading my album up with annoying ads is low. Picasa is also pretty handy for organizing my images, so integration with that is a plus.

So, the first major thing I uploaded to Picasa Web Albums was my album for the 2005 European empeg meet. Presently, there are two issues with Picasa Web Albums. The first is that they don't currently accept video. I imagine this will change because when trying to upload video, Picasa says "video is not currently supported." The 2nd issue is that I don't think you can link to photos for use in a forum posting or ebay auctions. Since this is supported by competitors for paid accounts, I hope this will be added at some point. If it's not, it's more of an annoyance than a major problem

Here's the link to my Gallery 1.x album for the meet: Link
Here's the link to the Picasa Web Albums version: Link

Any opinions on the usability of each version? I'm trying to decide if I should subscribe (to get 6GB of storage) and move all my stuff over. My impressions are that you seem to lose nested albums, but the actual photo viewing is much snappier because you're not loading a new web page each time to want to see the next pic. The slideshow is also nicer than Gallery 1.x. RSS is also cool.