Photosharing Site Dilemma: Picasa Web vs Flickr vs Gallery2

Note: A couple of years ago I wrote this post, but never got around to publishing it on time. I guess it’s better late than never.

Over the years I’ve amassed a lot of digital photos, and I’ve resisted putting them online for various reasons. Since facebook came out and sharing photos online became very popular I have seen the usefulness of it. Until now I’d put a zip file of the latest event on the site and send a link to my friends, and they would do a similar thing. I’m very protective of my photos and don’t want them to be in the hands of facebook – especially since there are reports and discussions about privacy there. With recent introduction of face recognition technology in Picasa, Flickr, and even iPhoto, sifting through tons of photos is now much much easier.

In deciding to put my photos online, I’m going to evaluate three options: Picasa Web, Flickr and the open source photo sharing tool Gallery2.

I’m going to compare the tools above in a few categories that I think will be the most useful for me:

• Client-side software: what you end up spending most of your time in. Editing the photos and preparing them for upload. Most offer direct upload capabilities.
• Access control on the web site: How fine-grained the control of the albums are. Who you can share with and if they can leave comments, etc.
• Integration with wordpress: Considering that I use wordpress, ability to embed photos from the service directly is also important.
• Cost: finally, the cost of the photo storage.

Picasa Web

Google’s photo sharing service has been around for a while and as they bring more and more products online, they continue to integrate it. Buzz, Profiles, and now Google+ all work very well with Picasa.

The Picasa desktop software on the Mac is a very capable app that easily indexes images and can import directly from cameras. In addition, the tool allows for easy uploads to your online account with a few steps to set it up.

Control of who can see them is pretty fine-grained. You can control from groups of people, to individuals, to people who have the link. In this category, Picasa covers what my typical uses for a photo sharing site are.

There quite a few plugins that allow for embedding of photos, or creating a photo gallery from your Picasa account. My favourite is this one.

When it comes to cost, Google offers a shared space upgrade and as of this writing 20GB costs $5.00/year. That means you get 20GB between Gmail, Picasa Web, and Docs. What’s not clear is how this works with the included free space that you get with Gmail, Docs, etc.

Flickr

Flickr has been the leader in online photos for a long time, and it’s still one of the best out there. Because of that many platforms have included support as part of Operating System. On the Mac, that comes in the form of iPhoto. You can directly upload to your Flickr account from iPhoto, and photo editing can be done in iPhoto, or Aperture, or any other app.

Flickr offers an interesting model for controlling access to your photos. People can be divided into 4 categories of: friends, family, contacts, and public. This means if you want to share photos between people that don’t fit into those categories you’ll have to send them private links.

Another strong point of Flickr is the variety of plugins available for WordPress integration. This makes photos show up on the site very beautifully and follow the theme and styling very closely.

Flickr offers a Pro account which included unlimited storage for $24.95/year and statistics for your photos. The added bonus of stats is a very good feature and can be useful at times.

Gallery

A while back I used to run a copy of Gallery2 on the site, and was hosting my own photos there. Gallery is a piece of open source software that allows you to run a very full-featured picture gallery on your site. It requires PHP, MySQL, and a webserver.

Access to the various galleries can be highly controlled. Users can be created on the site, or galleries can be left open to the public. The only issue with Gallery is that fact that you’ll have to manage yet another site, and things can get tricky if you want to customize the theme.

There are a number of plugins available for wordpress, but what I found is that they don’t perform as nicely as I’d like and responsiveness is an issue.

Finally, there are many plugins for various applications that can upload to Gallery including an iPhoto plugin. The official application is called Gallery Remote.

The Verdict

A sign that apple blew it by not supporting flash

Is when a non-techie person sees the new, fancy ipad and immediately realizes that web browsing on it is crippled because you can’t go to all sites on the net. For a company who focuses on the user experience, I think they missed the mark there. Not having Flash on a phone may not be a big deal but for tablet devices it really means they are not replacements for laptops (or other forms of computers).

Music Copyrights on YouTube

A while ago I made a couple of slideshows along with music using the excellent site animoto, and made the videos available to family and friends. I decided to move these videos to YouTube using their export option, and got a little surprise from YouTube. They had analyzed the audio tracks in my videos using their content id system and found two of them to have copyrighted tracks.

So what did it mean? The first copyright notice kindly informed me that

Your video, FRIENDS , may include content that is owned or administered by these entities:

• Entity: Sony Music Entertainment Content Type: Sound Recording

As a result, your video is blocked in these locations:

• Germany

What should I do?

No action is required on your part. Your video is still available everywhere not listed above. In some cases ads may appear next to your video.

No big deal so far, except for the ads that they’d be putting on my personal videos.

The next video had a more serious issue; the audio was blocked on it. Thanks to the folks at WMG, I was unable to share a personal video with family and friends.

About a month and a half later, now the copyright notice says:

No action is required on your part. Your video is still available worldwide. In some cases ads may appear next to your video.

What is wrong with this picture? Copyright has gone so far that I cannot make “mixtapes” for my family anymore. They reach in and block the audio (or the entire video). And in the case of the second video, they suddenly change their minds and allow the audio. So what are my options here as a consumer, someone who has bought these tracks and then decided to use it for personal purposes? I am left with YouTube that automatically decides what I’m doing is copyright infringement without considering the context. There’s no recourse for me. Even their dispute page strongly discourages users from disputing by saying

There are very few valid reasons for disputing a claim. Please review the information below, because submitting an invalid dispute could result in penalties against your account.

It looks like the ideals of internet and business realities are butting heads. YouTube wants to be the medium where people share videos – some commercial, some very private – yet they haven’t been able to find a balance in enforcing the current copyright laws. Of course, the real reason behind this silliness is current copyright laws but legislation is always very slow to catch up to technology. In the meantime I’ll have to look elsewhere for sharing my videos with family and friends.

Office Communicator and Linux

As with most things in tech, large companies catch on to the power of instant messaging late. Where I work is no exception. They rolled out Microsoft Office Communicator a couple of months ago (as a side note, that is a horrible landing page) and made much of the new and improved power of communication between employees. It’s a great thing that I can finally communicate using instant messaging, but the proprietary software threw a monkey in my desktop setup. After some research I found out how to get my desktop to connect to the Office Communicator server: Pidgin and SIPE.

First, I needed to install Pidgin

sudo apt-get install pidgin


Then, I installed the TLS plugin for Pidgin

sudo apt-get install pidgin-encryption


Now, the important piece of the puzzle was SIPE, which is needed to connect to proprietary server. I initially tried the usual

sudo apt-get install pidgin-sipe

But the version of SIPE available for jaunty was version 1.2-1 and it didn’t work. So, I went with the old school way of compiling my own binary. I got the code from here and followed the simple instructions on the same site. They are as follows:

tar -zxvf pidgin-sipe-1.7.0.tar.gz
cd pidgin-sipe-1.7.0
./configure --prefix=/usr/
make
sudo make install


Once installed, I started up Pidgin and after entering the necessary info connected successfully. You can see the detailed info of what I entered in the pictures below.

Testing. Testing. Captain can you hear me?

Here’s what wave looks like when you first enter.

There’s not much you can do with it at the moment, but I guess you could leave your comments below (if you have a wave account).

[wave id=”googlewave.com!w+i_FejqpYA” bgcolor=”white” color=”black” font=”Helvetica”]