I am kind of a photography hobbyist these days and enjoy opportunities when I can pull out my Pentax K100D and shoot things, whether it be family and friends or maybe even a hummingbird hovering over our hibiscus. Back in the day I used to just store all of my photos on my hard drive but over the years I have accumulated several gigabytes worth of photos.
I used to use an open sourced tool called Plogger to archive my photo collection in galleries but eventually grew tired of it’s quirks and bugs, especially the comment spam, so I did a little checking and found Picasa, a free photo hosting service provided by Google. I was already familiar with Picasa because I had used their desktop application back in the day to manage my photos. If you haven’t already, you should download Picasa’s desktop application and have a look at it, it’s pretty advanced and does a nice job allowing you to store and manage a multitude of photos.
Since Google acquired Picasa they have made a lot of advances to this already awesome software, one of which is the ability to automatically upload to the web. I use RSS to syndicate my galleries onto my blog (picasa web scraper) and this has proven to be one of the most effortless things I have ever done, now when I add a gallery to my picasa account, the galleries are automatically displayed on my blog. Oh, and with Picasa, you have the ability to make some galleries public and keep others private with restricted access by only those who I grant access in. This solution has worked out for me big time. I want to one day soon start migrating some of my clients who have large photo galleries into this solution because it could become so effortless for them as well and I could eliminate Plogger altogether from my servers.
Questions or Comments?