SuperSatellite ||

If you have been following my tweets lately, you might have noticed that I’ve been fighting over which service I would prefer to use: Flickr or Picasa. This has resulted in far more headache than I would have initially thought, and I still don’t feel any closer to coming up with an answer. I thought by sharing my opinions, maybe you could toss some feedback my way that might help the decision making process. You may also ridicule and taunt me, as it pleases you.

I am not a photographer. I enjoy taking pictures, and I believe that I take relatively good ones, given my amateurish state. But I admit that it’s just a small hobby. Until now, I have used a Coppermine powered gallery that I kept on my personal server for managing and sharing my pictures. This works relatively well. To be perfectly honest, the only real reason I even care to switch is because I’d like to connect to more social tools through my photos. My own hidden little gallery site doesn’t do that. I also don’t have a lot of interest in keeping the software maintained, so I end up with older software that is a pain in the butt to update. But, I’m also not looking for 100,000 people to drool over my pictures. Mostly it’ll be stuff from plays I work on, or trips I take, things none of you care about (even though you try to act interested).

And here’s the matchup. Flickr is clearly a more socially driven web site. It’s purpose is more closely linked with my goal, I think. But, they lack a good desktop app for organizing pictures like Picasa does. They have an uploader application, which seems to work well enough, but I’d like my offline archive to basically mirror what I have online (at the moment, my photos folder is a pretty big mess, I admit it). Flickr is also pretty crippled if you don’t spend $24.95 a year on a pro account. Without it, you only get to use three sets (albums), which is, frankly, useless to me. You also only get to upload 100MB of photos a month, which if you are trying to migrate to their service, is also pretty useless. I said I’m not a photographer, but I still have a solid 2GB+ of photo (not that I need to share them all, but if I can, I probably will share most). However, with pro, you get unlimited everything for the most part. Storage, bandwidth, sets, collections, even video (if you care. I don’t).

Picasa has a slightly different purpose. It is geared more towards what Coppermine did for me; simply provide online gallery/album functionality. It’s desktop app is nice for organizing offline, and it integrates right into web albums. You get unlimited albums out of the gates, and a full gig of storage with no upload limits per month. But, extra storage (10GB) starts at $20/yr. Cheaper than Flickr Pro, but Flickr Pro gives you unlimited storage for five bucks more. Alternatively, you can do more for free through Picasa, just at a loss to some of the social networking features Flickr has. If you need more than 10GB, the price starts hurting.

My problem is basically that I can’t easily decide what kind of user I am, or what my goal is. I fall right in the middle of one big gray area, like Nick-at-Nite TVLand poop. Ideally, the systems should just merge into one super warehouse, like my crappy Photoshopped graphic above intimates. $25 a year isn’t much, but a lot of what I’d pay for I could have through Picasa for free. And using Flickr leaves me stuck managing stuff offline through something else. I could use Picasa as a purely offline file manager, but that’s like using it and wasting half the purpose of it. Half a dozen of one, six of another. I sure as hell don’t want to do both, I’d like one solution that answers my needs.

You could solve this problem for me, of course. Just sponsor a Flickr Pro account for me, and that will make up my mind for me. It’s not that I’m cheap, it’s just that I’m cheap.

Update: I almost forgot to mention; Brad Ward has a nice blog writeup on Flickr over at SquaredPeg on Flickr, and using it to manage your photos.  I read it the other day and it was really what got me thinking that Flickr might be the way to go.

Hey look, the theme is done! At least, done enough that I’m ready to start taking feedback. Use the comment form below for that. Even if it’s just to say “neat colors” or “I h8 u kthxdie.” But really, feel free to let me know what does and doesn’t work for you. I’ve tried keeping things simple, but engaging enough to make it worth looking at. I’ll also consider making it into a downloadable theme, if people are interested anyway. But I am very interested in what you think of it. I’m not really a designer at heart, but I do think this is a big improvement over the last layout.  I have one more change slated for the main frontpage, but I’m battling a vicious, nasty little bug, and I’m not gonna hold up the theme because of it, so that part’ll get done when it gets done.

I have not yet upgraded my blog to the famed Wordpress 2.5. No, instead, I am taking the cautious route for a change, which is a little unusual for me since I normally am not afraid of being bleeding edge. The thing is, I am dependent on a couple plugins I’d rather not lose. And having just finished this theme, I want to make sure all the hooks and functions I call aren’t being deprecated. I did help a buddy get going in 2.5 last week though, and it looks okay.  I just wish they’d done more with care towards backwards compatibility.  In the end, once I upgrade, you actually shouldn’t notice. So, you probably don’t really care. Sorry to waste your time on this paragraph. I love you for it though.

On that note, am I the only one that doesn’t like the WordPress site?  It always feels like content is out of date/sync with other parts, and the support areas are painful to navigate and find what you need.  I feel like I get led in circles a lot.  And the forums always come across very hostile, even those users marked as “moderators.”  That might just be me, but it always seems like for every question with a good answer, there is one with a snarky one and one with no anwsers.  But, at least the wiki has good information, which is all I normally need.  But if you want my advice, avoid their forums like the plague, and if you can’t, don’t even dare asking a remotely vague-ish question.

I am continuing to try to stick with an active social web presence. My attempt to live mostly through my NetVibes page didn’t go so great though, but I can say it’s sped things up in a couple places at least. It’s just that there’s too frequently not enough info in the feeds I’m reading, so I find myself visiting the sites about as much as always. I did do a new thing in the sidebar for my blog though, with the integration of Profilactic. Which is nothing like what you might think. It has nothing to do with sex that I have discovered (so far), and trust me, I’m looking. It’s a site designed for lifestreaming. That is, coordinating feeds from all your various social web stomping grounds. You can also use it like I did at the right to make a nice link list that can be styled up so people can see you in other areas. Then it adds pretty icons and all that jazz without you needing to screw with it (well, technically you do have to screw with it if you don’t like their default styling, which I didn’t, but it’s classed well and can be changed with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) easily). At the site, it then creates a mash up of all the sites’ RSS feeds that you can send to people who want to keep with you on various fronts, but at one source. One feed to rule them all, one feed to bind them. Stupid hobbitses.

I just fnished 3 series with two models recently. I am pretty happy overall. I have the best stuff selected out in my DeviantArt Gallery, as usual. Below are links to the full galleries.

Krystel: This was a shoot for her MySpace Music page. Look for them to show up there soon, and go listen to her music. Locations included the Veteran’s Memorial here in Pittsburg, and the Fox Theater.

Ally 1: Also a MySpace photoshoot. This was based on her idea for an eye-focused series of pictures. The little gem thingies were from Claires, if anyone cares. She did her own makeup.

Ally 2: Just a few of my own thinking after the initial session.

Photomanips: There were a few other pictures we took between the two girls that I did some manipulation on, they just got tossed into the general photomanipulation gallery, so you might have to dig to find them.

Anyone interested in doing anything with me is welcome to talk to me about it. It’s just a hobby, so I like just getting to play around with things. I have some other stuff in the works, so look for that to be coming sometime probably in the next few weeks. Constructive criticism is always welcome!