I’m in a quandry, and I’d love some advice concerning photo hosting. Right now I’m using a Flickr Pro account ($25/yr) to host our photos, but I’m not crazy about it to be honest. It plays OK with Wordpress, but I hate the album plugin I’m using and have no time to sett up another plugin. Their web interface is a little slow when editing, uploads from a Mac are a pain, but overall nothing is a complete dealbreaker.
Things I need from a photo-hosting site:
- EASY to upload from anywhere. We’ll be doing more long-term traveling sometime in the next few years, and I need to be able to easily upload photos to the blog, as well as any newspapers or magazines I’m writing for at the time.
- Simple interface, preferably Mac-native
- Ability to blog directly from the application
- Social-media friendly
- Plays well with Wordpress sites
- Cheap is always good
Now for the quandry part.
I use Google applications for 95% of everything I do. All my email, writing, calendar, analytics, and whatnot are Google-powered, and I’d like to go ahead and use their Picasa Photo service to integrate everything. I have one of their free accounts and love their PC desktop interface and uploading features. If they had a native Mac application, I’d ditch IPhoto in a heartbeat and switch to Picasa.
Any words of wisdom? I’d love to hear any real-world experiences.
Hi, I found your blog because my friends and I are going on a river trip from Minneapolis to Mobile in a couple weeks (not in a canoe, though). Anyway, sorry to say, I can’t think of anything that has all the features you would like. There is something called FlickrExport that is for iPhoto (I haven’t tried it). And maybe there’s a good flickr plugin for Wordpress, but I haven’t found one. Sounds like everything would be great if Picasa was out for Mac (if someone made a Wordpress plugin for it or something)…honestly, I am pretty basic with my photos: I keep them in folders on my hard drive and then I keep them in folders in a php gallery on a server. Sometimes I upload a few photos to flickr. Nothing is synced or anything. But I thought I’d at least say hello, and thanks for the blog.
Erin,
Thanks for the comment. There’s been some noise about Google porting Picasa over to Macs for the last year. I think it’ll eventually happen, but we’ll see…
Eventually I’ll be using this more of a photo dump for all my photos when travelling, while keeping a backup at home. Memory has gotten so cheap these days that a couple of SD cards could last a couple of months for us. Backups are always a good thing to have though.
Tell your friends I said good luck. Sounds like a great trip!
-JP
Hey John, Check out simpleviewer! It’s a slick photo viewer that ports your photos in from Flickr by tag or set. See it in action here:
http://greatoutdoorprovision.com/clothing-equipage/outerwear/arcteryx/
you can make your own by clicking on the link in the bottom right corner.
- lin