Photo sharing, storing, archiving (cont’d)

As a follow up to Photo sharing, storing, archiving (part 1), I think I’ve found my solution.

Originally, I went with Pixamo after I read a comment I saw while I was searching for a good online photo service. I spent the better part of two days diligently uploading to Pixamo, categorizing and tagging my entire photo collection. The thing I like about pixamo is that for each photo, the categorization technique is separated into:

• People (or subject of the photo)
• Location (or where the photo was taken)
• keywords

From a photographer’s perspective, this is really rather handy, and allows some fancy searching methods. This is a step above the “make your own category” category method used by, say… Flickr.

Flickr has a nice tagging methodology, but its somewhat lacking in that I have to sorta invent what I want to categorize my photos into. In other words, a “location” tag doesn’t really act like a location — its just a tag that lives along side other tags of names, events, and one-word descriptions. Sure, in Flickr, you can “geo-tag” an arbitrary number of photos, placing them on a map… but you can’t really do that with people/names, I’ve found. However, in Pixamo, I have locations that act as locations that are linked to other locations. For example, photos taken at “Disneyland” are linked to “Anaheim” and “California” and get those broader locations by default if I enter a photo as having a location of “Disneyland”. Then, I can later browse Pixamo for all photos in “California”, “Anaheim”, or just ones taken at “Disneyland”.

Another thing I didn’t like so much about Flickr was that there are limits on the file size upload.

So, anyway… after uploading every digital photo I have to Pixamo, and then looking around Flickr, I discovered I actually have a “pro” account on Flickr that came with my AT&T/SBC DSL service. Cool. So, then I spent the rest of my time uploading my photos to Flickr as well, which actually I should’ve done first because Pixamo is able to import photos from things like Flickr. Whodathunkit!

Pixamo
pros:

• Easy, practical categorization
• Searching by practically anything
• No limit on upload, from what I could tell
• Able to handle video as well
• Import from other sites like Flickr (the list is pretty long)

cons:

• Not apparent how to print photos, or order prints
• Not as well partnered with online printing as something like Flickr
• Limited to total size of photo gallery (free account, I think, is 5GB)

Flickr
pros:

• No visible limit on storage space; limit is on bandwidth uploaded and only on “free” accounts
• Easy printing and other wacky cool things you can do with photos on things like t-shirts and keychains

cons:

• No practical way for an amateur photographer to sensibly organize photos, without using keywords as a panacea.
• Upload file size seems to be capped at 10MB, which might be a real problem with newer 10+ megapixel cameras.
• No batch file upload utility (at least not for Linux) — best I could find was written by a 3rd party on sourceforge.net

Both have a pretty sensible interface, even though I don’t totally agree with either they still work relatively well. Most other features compare one for one — both have a date-search interface that you can locate photos by the date they were taken (as long as the image has EXIF data to categorize from), both have the original images available to upload (even though Flickr forces you to limit the file size to 10MB, so you’ll have to scale down the photo), and both have a “community sharing” function to share photos with other people with seemingly good privacy controls.

What I think I’ll be doing now is uploading new photos directly to Flickr so that they’ll be available to other things I might use like Pixamo, and QO-OP, etc.

For pure archival of files, I’ve found Humyo (www.humyo.com).  You can have a free account with 25GB of storage for photos, music, and videos plus an additional 5GB for non-media types of files (like documents).  Very nifty, and its brand new, so there might be a few glitches here and there while they evolve the service.