Picasa Web Albums (more talk about web photo sharing)

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.

In usability there's no comparison. Gallery stinks and has always stunk IMO. The slideshow in Picassa caches ahead which is nice. If you manually skip to next the image (and perhaps a few after it) will be able to pop up instantly. There are other pieces of software on the net that provide even nicer slideshows with better looking interface elements, but this is certainly functional.

I'm afraid Flickr is still my beast of choice for online image hosting at this point. I like the idea of sending pictures directly from Picasa, however.

I continue to maintain a Gallery installation, as well, for more personal stuff.

For what it's worth, Gallery2 is light years above Gallery 1.x. The "one page per picture" thing is solved in a couple of the Gallery2 themes, including the one I use on my Gallery site. Browse one of my albums and you'll see you can do slideshows, use arrow keys to switch images, etc. just like Picasaweb, and it also pulls down the images in the background (though not as fast as Google in my case because of my inferior web hosting.) And, not that it's all that useful,but Gallery2 integrates with Google Maps.

That said, I'd probably be more interested in Picasaweb if I were a Windows user and used Picasa as my photo management app. If they ever come out with an OS X version (I guess the Linux version is in beta, so it can't be that far off) I'll look deeper into Picasaweb. But I would at least give Gallery2 a chance.

I just installed Gallery 2 on my site yesterday and I'm still playing around with it (which theme are you using, Tony?). I'm in agreement that it's far better than Gallery 1. One thing I'd add to Tony's post is that Gallery 2 also lets you upload images from Picasa.

The major downside I see to Picasaweb is a lack of integration with your site. You're always going to be stuck with Google-white.

Hi,

It looks like Tony is using a customized hybrid theme. I am also working with Gallery2 and have very good experience on my website.

Cool is also, if you use Joomla for CMS, then you can use the "Gallery 2 Bridge" for SSO and seamless Gallery2 integration.

You can see an example on my homepage http://www.crazymelki.com

Quote:
But I would at least give Gallery2 a chance.

I tried to migrate to g2 today. My webhost shut me down because converting 7,000 images was eating their resources. So, if I'm going to really try g2, I will have to perform the migration on a machine at home and then upload it back to the web. This isn't out of the question, but it's not as easy as it could have been.