Service (Flickr) vs Software (host your own)
Recently I've started taking photos more regularly, as well as uploading them more regularly. Before I commit too many of them to any one spot, I've need to decide where they're going. Do I put them on Flickr (or equivalent?) and pay $25USD a year to separate them from my blog? Do I run my own gallery and be forced to maintain them myself?
A lot of development in the web space these days is leaning towards "services", whether its Software as a Service or Software + Services, whatever, but in general "offering X as a service" is the new black. Or whatever colour is the new awesome. It makes sense too, in general people want things just to work, they don't want to have to learn how to set things up – let alone actually go through the process of setting it up, they don't want to have too many choices on how it looks because they want it to look largely like how all their friends things look.
For the geek or the tinkerer (or even the privacy nut), this doesn't always satisfy an inexplicable need to customise until it fits in perfectly with everything else that I've created.
Services
In the services corner you've got freebies like Live/SkyDrive Photo Albums, Facebook and MySpace; while these services are completely free and for the most part unlimited, there are some downsides - namely all metadata seems to gets stripped, heavier compression is applied, and the original file is lost forever. For me these aren't really an option – I want my photos to retain their original metadata, and their original size – I don't have a (relatively) expensive camera just to have its image quality slaughtered by aggressive JPEG compression.
Then you've got your free-but-are-so-much-better-when-you-pay-for-it-services like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Zooomr, Kodak Gallery, SmugMug, etc. Well, SmugMug doesn't fit into this category, you have to pay a minimum of USD$39.95/year to use their service, but they do allow subscribers to customise the look of the gallery – even using customised domains/sub-domains, have unlimited uploads, and other benefits. Realistically none of these options are free. Oh, sure, there are free levels but their limitations can be painful. For example, Flickr only displays your latest 200 photos and only allows 100MB/month to be uploaded, as well as not allowing the original file to be retrieved; Picasa Web Albums only gives you 1gb total storage unless you pay for more, and so on.
Software
If I'm already paying for web hosting for my blog, why don't I utilize that space? That is one of the biggest arguments in favour of any gallery software. I'm cheap (and I know it), and I can maximise the resources I've already purchased.
The problem with gallery software out there at the moment is that there is somewhat slim pickings in terms of features, or ease of use, or other niggling problems which I really don't understand. For example, Adobe's XMP has been around since 2001, but most gallery software ignores any metadata put into XMP despite Lightroom 2 and Windows Live Photo Gallery both using that as the default for tags. For reference, it took me about 10 minutes to have a working solution in PHP to parse XMP tags using regex – it's not perfect but it does a pretty good job.
The two main contenders in the LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) arena are Gallery2 and ZenPhoto. There are others out there, but these two seemed to be the most well known/liked (there was Coppermine but that generally seemed to be frowned upon). By no means am I trying to attack Gallery2, ZenPhoto, or the others I've not listed; they are usable software packages – just not for my needs/wants.
Gallery2 comes off feeling like a behemoth – it has so many options making it so overly complex that uploading a photo can be a bit of a nightmare. I prefer to organise things by tags rather than by albums, but that isn't an easy thing to do in G2. I've also never seen a G2 skin/theme I've liked. Thankfully, Menalto realise this, and Gallery3 is aimed at reducing complexity.
ZenPhoto is a "relative" newcomer (2005), and feels much lighter weight and seems to have a more attractive default theme than Gallery2. Just like Gallery2 though, everything has to be organised by album, not by tag – and navigating by tags is completely impossible (you can view tags but you can't click on a tag to see other photos with that tag). The latest version (1.2.2) seem to be a little buggy with picking up some of the metadata too, some photos it could extract all of it, others none.
The Ultimate Answer
Is there an "Ultimate Answer"? For me, there doesn't seem to be a magic bullet that offers
- no limitations on filesize/storage
- reads all metadata
- customisability
- tag based browsing/navigation + album/sets if/when (but only if/when I want them)
- free
So what is the answer? Have I missed the one piece of software which already does all of this? Am I going to have to settle or more realistically…have to write my own gallery code?
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