As part of all the aforementioned effort to make my online life more simple, I’ve also experimented in getting a gallery to be static content as well.

Invariably, my frustrations with picture galleries online are varied, and completely dependent on the service in question. So, lets look at some possibilities, and I’ll share my thoughts on them. In general, I’m going to be describing the parameters around FREE offerings. I’m *already* paying to host my content on my own server. I want BETTER options.

Flickr – 300MB uploads and 2 videos. My personal picture are less than that, or near on that, but the baby pictures? 2G and climbing constantly. Good community, good technology, nice interface in general, somewhat on the decline in recent months due to other offerings and competition.

Picasa – thank you Google. 1G free, relatively cheap upgrade up from there. Client side app (if you want) for helping manage photos and tagging. Not to the extent of what things like Lightroom (or others) offer, but not bad either. Biggest gripe? NO HIERARCHY of images. Its one flat layer of image folders (albums) and thats all you get. Not acceptable. Get with the program. I might consider revisiting this later if they get that fixed.

Photobucket – unlimited uploads! wow, ok, that is a new change, but a good one. Download bandwidth is limited for free accounts. That makes sense, and is a reasonable business model. Interface is … ugh. bulky and not *quite* intuitive, but I could get stuff done. Hierarchical albums yay!

Finally, I went poking around for something that could take a directory tree full of images, and gallerize them. There’s a whole mess of stuff out there, but the shining example of what is possible is jAlbum. Nice job, guys. Truly excellent. Free version is *almost* a full featured version of the program, with some small exceptions and an infrequent (but annoying) popup on the webpage that you are using an unlicensed version. Doesn’t have a “builtin” panorama viewer, but I can’t find one anywhere that isn’t java-based. Anyway, you can find the results here

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