Flickr Hit Hard By Yahoo Layoffs .

It’s always difficult to hear about layoffs, especially in times like these.  Flickr has always been a great site to look at, and be involved in. I hope it continues to be so.

Pownce No Longer

I’m saddened by the demise of Pownce – in its current form.  They were acquired by Six Apart earlier this week which means…I don’t know exactly what it means.  I wasn’t  a heavy user of Pownce, but I did use it to communicate with friends. I was able to privately share small files, photos, links, and messages with various friends.  I’m not sure if Pownce will be integrated with one of Six Apart’s services such as Vox or Typepad, but it won’t be the same.

And this brings up a problem that I fear on the Internet – the loss of content you created / posted on the Internet. 

Luckily Pownce provided a way to export your data and time to complete the export.  But other services that have gone the way of the dodo, such as Digital Railroad, didn’t give their users this opportunity.  Imagine losing all the photos you posted online? What if you didn’t have a backup?

I have over 9000 photos posted on flickr, another 24GB of photos posted on Smugmug.  My blog has 473 entries,  and there are only about 100 entries on my tumblr account.  Most of this data – minus the tumblr posts – I have on hand a local backup.  But some data cannot be copied, such as my Facebook and MySpace account.  Plus any comments made on the photos above cannot be backed up – or at least I’m not aware of a way to do it at this point.

My greatest fear is that flickr or Smugmug goes under without notice.  It was a fear I had with Vox which is why I moved my blog back to my personal site.  (If Vox provided a means to export my blog posts it would make me feel more comfortable using it as my primary blog.)  I’m sure this reality is far from possible at this point, but with this economy you never know.  I have always hear that flickr is a losing proposition for Yahoo!  This unconfirmed fact makes me more confident that Smugmug is a stronger choice to share my photo data online.  But I enjoy flickr’s community so much.  

And this is the other aspect that is lost with the demise of Pownce – the community. A solid community is difficult to build – let alone maintain. While Pownce may have not had a choice but to sell itself to Six Apart, it is a shame it wasn’t able to keep the community it had built together.

My First Flickr Video

Easter Photos Available

Photos: SmugMug | Flickr | Zenfolio

Photos from Easter day at Auntie Tina’s home in San Jose are now posted at the above links. Yes, three different ways to view the same photos! I’ll write more about why this is the case later. Until then enjoy the photos!

You might also want to see Jane’s posting of Tiana’s Easter photos as well on Vox.

Any comments welcomed.

Too Many Photo Sites to Choose From

I have been trying to find an online solution to display my photos that isn’t reliant on hosting the software myself. If you go to //http://www.janella.com/photography you will see the photo gallery that is hosted on my site.

The software is provided by //Gallery and is a great piece of open source work. My problem? For one thing, I am getting a little time crunched on doing any patches that is required from time to time. The second thing is I can’t upload the original image (due to lack of disk space). This requires me to spend time resizing images for the web. It becomes a pain in the butt after a while.

Looking for a Solution

There are many photo sites to choose from. Most offer a way to make prints, such as //Ofoto, //Shutterfly, and //Snapfish. These are very good sites, but they lack the customization I’m seeking.

I took at look at four solutions. Here is how I rank them and their pros and cons – IMHO.

1. //Flickr
The lowdown:
A free account gives you 20MB upload limit per month with no limit on storage space, but only 200 most recent photos will appear. Older photos are not deleted they just don’t appear.

For a paid account it’s $24.95 per year. This gives you 2GB bandwidth a month for uploading and all your photos appear. This works out to be about $2.08 for unlimited storage!

My view:
The best of the bunch. You can’t beat the price for a paid service. The community, if you are seeking comments on photos you have taken or want to make comments on what you see, is very active. It can get brutal at times, but overall it’s nice to see people interacting online. I also like the ability to control permissions on a photo level. The current knock against Flickr is the incredibly awkward way it handles organizing of sets. The drag and drop UI for this needs to change and subsets need to be implemented.

2. // Zoto
The lowdown:
New kid on the block getting attention. Free account gives you 2GB of storage with currently no upload limit. Paid accounts are a little pricey at $44.95 per year, so about $4 a month. At this price it only gives you currently 5GB of storage.

My view:
The big positive for this service is the ability to create photo galleries easily. Organization of photos is done by keyword (tags) as Flickr, with the mass tagging of photos a little easier than Flickr. The big knock against this service, besides the price for a paid account, is site outages in the last several weeks. Not sure about leaving my photos there for the long run.

3. //Fotki.com
The lowdown:
Community photo site with easy to use tools for organization. Photos can be organized by albums and subalbums as well as by date. For a paid account at $50 per year you receive unlimited storage, FTP access to upload photos, and customization to suit your needs.

My view:
FTP was a very nice feature to have. I found the password protection scheme awkward though.

4. //Smugmug

My view:
No free accounts here, but free to try for 7 days. All paid accounts (starting at $29.95 to $99.95 a year) offer unlimited space for photos. You can even order prints of photos from your gallery, as well as allowing friends and family do the same.

My view:
Easy to use interface for anyone. The albums I created were very attractive. The big point I didn’t not like was that photo albums that I had password protected or private was searchable through Google for some reason. I’ve read on Smugmug’s message boards that this is a known issue and they are working to remedy this problem. If they solved this issue, this would rank as my #2 out of the four services I’ve looked at.

So for now it seems //Flickr, in my opinion, is the place to be.