Since starting my photography class I have been using a variety of services and systems for sharing, printing and storing my images. Depending upon the classification of images, they end up in different places.
First, my sharing of images. Traditionally I have shared images directly from the blog either using a link from thumbnails to the large images, or even using one of my own cute database driven tools. When sharing larger amounts of images I have been known to share individually with people who are interested, or by posting to my “main” gallery (http://www.disturbingthoughts.net/gallery2). Now I have a separate gallery for my class (http://aux.livecurt.net/ART390/) as well as my Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/kularski/). I have to use Flickr for my online photography class, but I don’t find it that useful for sharing images with people, but then some people are more familiar with it, and its easier for them. Oh, and just to make things even more fun, I have tried Picasa web (http://picasaweb.google.com/kularski). The thing I hate most about having all of these services is not the difficulty of keeping up with where my images are, but how hard it is to get them there. For Picasa Web, I upload with Picasa. For Flickr I upload with Windows Live Photo Gallery. For my two Gallery2 installations I use an extension of Windows Explorer on Windows XP, or in Vista I have to “print” my images to the Gallery2 “publisher”. Why can everyone not just tap into the normal Windows Explorer publish functionality, or better yet, lets get a standard protocol for this crap so that I can use a single open-source application, probably designed by Mozilla (or as an add-on for FireFox). For my printing providers, things are a little less weird… I’ve used Kodak’s own publisher and also a CVS/pharmacy… both of which are essentially the same, except with CVS I can theoretically pick up the prints the same day in the store. I’ve found that the easiest way to work with it the publishers is through Picasa, but I would still like something better than that.
Anyone have any photo sharing, printing or storing tips?