Anyone use Flickr?
Hey all. So, I've been using Gallery now for a couple of years. And with the new version 2, it has improved greatly. But I am starting to chafe at how much I need to get in and under the hood to make it what I want. So. I am considering, just a bit, paying for a Flickr Pro account.
Has anyone used one? Is it the end-all, be-all of web gallery keeping? It's just $25 a year, which I can swing if I just take lunch for a week. And it does albums, and shared albums, and posts to the blog, and you can print from it, and it has privacy settings... all the things I like about Gallery.
Plus it has the cool Flickr-y things, like the slideshows (Gallery's slideshows are... well, they hardly qualify), tagging, picture marking, etc.
So. Anyone?
Danny.
I use both. I've just started using Flickr as a host for my blog's images (http://flickr.com/photos/heet_myser/), and it works great for that (Gallery2, as you've probably noticed by now, stores images differently than version 1 did, making it not so friendly for hosting images in multiple sizes).
I've found a theme for Gallery2 that I really (http://nicheplayer.net/gallery2/main.php) like and that has some cool features. The slide show isn't even too objectionable.
That said, I like having both. I got in on Flickr when they were giving away pro accounts in exchange for recommendations, so it hasn't cost me a dime. I'm happy to answer any more detailed questions you have....
I'm really pulling away from some of the complexity in my life. I think I would ditch my Gallery install in favor of a Flickr Pro accout, if it worked out for me.
One thing I've never gotten comfortable with in Flickr is the user interface. It has never made sense to me, it has never been easy to navigate. I can't imagine it would be easy for my family members to navigate.
I'm going to go read some of their own promotional stuff, see if they can convince me. I'll be in touch if I have any questions, map. Thanks.
"I’m really pulling away from some of the complexity in my life."
Oh dear. This doesn't bode well for your home entertainment system. ;-)
Ha! Yeah, I guess it does. Though I'll keep my TiVo. There are a lot of roll-your-own DVRs coming out, some already out there, that I just can't be bothered with. Yes, I dislike TiVo's Mac-come-lately attitude, but the thing works for what I want it for, and I don't have the time to tinker turning a Linux box into a home entertainment PC.
As for the extended computing plan, well, right now it is pretty simple. Had I the money to fulfill the plan... well money can make complexity go away, too. Sigh.
Like map, I use both as well. I haven't even upgraded Gallery to v2 yet, but its basic operation is perfectly fine for my needs. v2 should be all the more better if i ever get around to upgrading.
My Gallery installation is my primary home of my sets of photos. I use my Flickr account primarily as my moblog location. I only paid for the pro account because I occasionally put some things in there that I don't want deleted someday later when I reach the storage limit.
I feel like I wouldn't mind using Flickr instead of Gallery except for two things. First, you might notice I don't have many sets in my Flickr account. While I'm cool with a central library of my entire collection in something like iTunes where I can still sort by name, album, artist, etc. and make playlists that are subsets of the library, I'm still having difficulty having all my photos dumped in one library with playlistesque sets.
Second, I operate my Gallery installation on a server at home. Sure, my upstream bandwidth to host the albums to the world is just typical broadband upstream, but the albums are primarily for my own benefit and usually from home. So, for both browsing existing images and uploading new ones, I get full LAN bandwidth for my original images that weigh in around 1.5mb each--and it's not unheard of for me to put 100-200 images into an album. I'd not be too fond of the time needed to send 150-300 megabytes up to a remote server.