recommend photo hosting?

[cos]

Yahoo's mistreatment of flickr has been annoying me at a low level for a while, but I'm still using flickr out of inertia, even though I hate yahoo. I think my inertia just got a kick:

Hey cospics! About your photos...

You've run into one of the limits of a free account. Your free account will only display the most recent 200 photos you've uploaded. All of your photos beyond 200 will remain hidden from view until you either delete newer photos, or upgrade to a Pro account.

None of your photos have been deleted, and if you upgrade, they'll all come back unharmed.

Looking at the "limits of a free account" page, I also see this: "If your free account is inactive for 90 consecutive days, it will be deleted."

In other words, if I wanna stay with flickr, I'd better pay Yahoo. Yuck. So tell me what other photo hosting sites are good, ones I won't feel dirty giving money to. Snapfish? Photobucket? What do you use and what do you think of it?

EDIT - I want:

• Raw linking for hosting photos for posts elsewhere
• Tagging, and easy URLs for tag sets
• Automatically generated resized images & flexible thumnail views
• ... a Facebook app would be nice too

I don't care much about weekly / monthly upload limits: I don't post enough photos for it to matter. A more localized rate-limit could be a problem, because I might upload all my photos in a particular month in one evening.

Comments

[miraclaire.livejournal.com]

I use Picasa and really, really like it.

[beaq.livejournal.com]

Ditto. Then again, it's an all your base kinda thing. I use Google for everything and sometimes I wonder about that.

[cos]

unrelated: I might get to Seattle on my current roadtrip. If you wanna see me email me your contact info?

[beaq.livejournal.com]

http://beaq.livejournal.com/47751.html

Presuming you get LJ emails.

I'll send something later today.

[cos]

I'd never even heard of that, and everyone's recommending it :) I just updated this post to list the things I want in photo hosting, does Picasa do those things?

[rdhdsnippet.livejournal.com]

I've been using Fotki and am very pleased with it so far. Sane TOS, limited storage space free account (but it's totally free), unlimited bandwidth and storage if you pay the reasonable yearly fee as well as some other gizmos I don't use much.

[alandd.livejournal.com]

I have my own site at dreamhost.com and just run gallery there...

If you sign up, please enter that aland@aland.us referred you when you sign up, or click http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?42536 and sign up without entering any promo code or referrer. :-)

I'm pretty happy with them - lots of disk and bandwith, and I got an amazing deal when I signed up - $10/month for their top plan. If you're interested I'll try to let you know the next time I notice them running a promo...

dreamhost

[cos]

I almost got a dreamhost account when I was looking for a hosting account this spring, but there was something about them that made me move on and try someone else. I wish I could remember what it was. I think it was one of these two: Either a) they do not allow your contact email address to have a + in the left hand part, or b) they do not have a tech support phone number.

Re: dreamhost

[alandd.livejournal.com]

Could be either - they let you request a tech support call-back, but I've never actually tried calling them...

Anyway, whereever you put it, I think Gallery is a reasonably good solution.

Re: dreamhost

[kirin]

Dreamhost is run by Mudd alumns, so their tech credentials are quite good, and their prices/terms are very nice. We've been happy with them, but I've never actually attempted to get live tech support.

They've had a few nasty outage incidents in the last couple years, but mostly due to power issues in the LA area.

Re: dreamhost

[feuervogel]

One of the things I like about DH tech support is that you can choose from 5 levels of base knowledge when you ask your question. You can go from "I know nothing at all" to "I code in my sleep" levels, so they can tailor their response appropriately.

But yeah. I've been pretty happy at DH since 2003 I think.

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

yeah, if you want it done right...

sooner or later, half of these companies will get bought or fold, or come up with offensive new policies to cover their legal asses or annoying limitations to try to drive their revenue model. In the past, several such sites have vanished on very short notice. Several seem coupled to flash, which strikes me as a terrible idea if you care about anything besides windows and any timeframe past three or four years.

Me, I want to do it once and have the url's not change during my lifetime (and preferably indefinitely thereafter as well) and be browseable at decent speed on damn near anything including two-year-old PDAs, and not have to worry about bandwidth unless I get slashdotted. To me that says run a popular open source package on a box I have DNS control of and shell access to. I haven't looked closely enough to see if any of the common packages meet your tagging requirement (gallery has tags but its urls seem a little gross. no-where near as bad as many photo sites, though), and of course depending on hosting arrangements might mean having to keep an eye on disk space and have a backup strategy.

Picasa really is the only other alternative

[regorfa.livejournal.com]

I use photobucket quite a bit because it has integrated well with LJ, but when I went on a trip and had over 500 photos, picasa was by far the easiest to upload quickly. Plus it integrates well with my iGoogle account that I already have. But I gotta echo the sentiments above - to a large extent, google owns me. I use iGoogle, google reader, google calendar...it's not good for a diversity of styles.

Re: Picasa really is the only other alternative

[coraline]

does picasa allow static image names for raw linking from elsewhere?
and does it have a mac client now? those were my two stumbling blocks when i was considering it before...

Re: Picasa really is the only other alternative

[feuervogel]

The Mac client, such as it is, is an iPhoto plugin, which allows for easy uploading. I don't know if there's a port of the editing version, since I use iPhoto and Photoshop Elements (it was free with my scanner.)

Re: Picasa really is the only other alternative

[coraline]

...but does it have static image locations for embedding images elsewhere?

Re: Picasa really is the only other alternative

[feuervogel]

The webclient does. You have to click a 'share this photo' button hiding on the right and copy-paste an URL. It doesn't allow naming AFAIK, so the static link is a string of identifying numbers.

Re: Picasa really is the only other alternative

[miraclaire.livejournal.com]

It's not just for iPhoto, you can also use it on its own.

Re: Picasa really is the only other alternative

[cos]

Huh, what was the limitation you ran into that prevented raw linking?

Re: Picasa really is the only other alternative

[coraline]

i haven't used picasa because when i considered it, it didn't have mac client. but i had thought i'd remembered someone telling me it was DB-based and so the picture names weren't static.

but it looks like there's a way around that, even if it's more annoying than one would like.

[(Anonymous)]

I use Photobox.co.uk. They great and you get 40 free prints when you sign up! Plus you are able to put all your pictures onto gifts and stuff.. check them out! Hope that helps..

[catness.livejournal.com]

I use fotki, sorta... (which means yes I pay them and like them, but I haven't done much with them because I'm too busy).

[geoffroi.livejournal.com]

webshots is unlimited these days...

[justinjs.livejournal.com]

I believe that those "limits of a free account" bits were there before the Yahoo purchase. At least, I am certain that the most-recent-200-ish photos aspect was always a limitation with the free accounts. That isn't something Yahoo imposed.

What do you hate about Yahoo, by the way?

Snapfish seems pretty good if your end goal is letting people see photos that they likely will buy physical prints of -- but it's very much not set up to be a good general-purpose photo sharing site.

[cos]

That may be true, but when I first signed up I probably thought if I liked it I'd eventually pay for it. I've been putting that off because Yahoo bought them, but now I've got the kick to stop putting it off and I'd rather move.

No time now to go into a survey of all the things I hate about Yahoo :) I do, however, intend to remain Yahoo-account-free, and they're slowly making it less doable to remain a flickr user while doing that (just this weekend, for example, I found that you can no longer access flickr mobile with a flickr login, you need a yahoo login).

[struct.livejournal.com]

IINM, SmugMug meets most if not all of your requirements, and has a nice interface to boot.

[regorfa.livejournal.com]

Oo, forgot about smugmug.

[skreeky]

I use SmugMug, and I even pay for a pretty high level account. Thus, I don't know what a basic account costs. I have never had any sort of problem whatsoever with them in something like 3-4 years now. My friends don't have to get accounts to view anything. THERE ARE NO ADS. There's a wide variety of settings to let people download or not, whether it's indexed or not, whether people can order prints or not, etc.

I vaguely imagine they probably cost a bit more than average, and I so don't care, because I have NEVER had ANY sort of problem with them.

[cos]

I just went over to try them, today, and encountered a problem before I even managed to sign up :(

[cos]

Alas, SmugMug totally strikes out for me, because when I try to sign up it says: "The email address you entered doesn't appear to be a valid address. Please try again." It's one of those sites that uses an email "validator" with its own ideas about what makes an email address "valid". Lame and stupid. Oh well.

[cheshyre]

No suggestions, just a request that you post an update once you decide, because I may be looking as well...

[gconnor.livejournal.com]

I'm biased because I work for them, but give Shutterfly a try. It's free and unlimited.

good luck!

[cos]

Free is less important than the other stuff. I need automatic resizing to multiple sizes, tagging & tag sharing, easy to remember links to tag sets, and easy raw linking to include my photos in posts & pages elsewhere on the web. Is Shutterfly a good site for that kind of use?

[gconnor.livejournal.com]

I admit I don't use the site much myself. My guess is it probably doesn't have all those features. Their focus is more on prints, photobooks, calendars, etc. Gallery might be a better fit in that case if you have a place to host it. (I can probably install one under www.polyamory.org/$name if you want to test out gallery+dreamhost)

[cos]

From the Shutterfly terms of use: "Linking directly to images on Shutterfly’s servers from external sites is expressly prohibited."

... which is the main reason I want photo hosting: to link directly to images, from other sites (such as, for example, LiveJournal posts). So Shutterfly is expressly not for me.