tales from a guy who is trying to manage a crapload of photos

March 16, 2008

A little while back I decided to give Picasa a go for organizing my photos on my computer and on this web site.

Reasons why I wanted to do this:

  1. It’s free.
  2. It gave me a way to organize my photos because it was getting out of control.
  3. I could upload files to a public web album and then embed them here on my blog, thus saving bandwidth worries.
  4. I could display full-resolution (i.e. bigger) versions by just a click.

I am now in the process of changing back to the way I did photos before, as in hosting them myself on my own site.

I’m doing this because hosting the photos elsewhere introduced a whole new set of annoyances.

  1. When getting photos from Picasa via the web, the load time is slow and therefore slows down my web site. Not good.
  2. Web albums (whether Picasa or Flickr) is clunky at best. The way in which photos are shared is, to be blunt honest, a pain in the ass. I have to log in, upload, tag, title, blah blah blah. Lots of extra effort just to post a photo; that I don’t need.
  3. (This is the big one) Picasa’s way of doing web albums can easily crash a browser when they get large.

Number 3 is by far the most disappointing. If you have, say, 25 photos in an album, the web page for that album will load just fine. Anything more than that and you’ll get intermittent pausing. Because my computer is powerful enough it’s just a short pause, but for slower computers it could literally crash the browser.

In one album I have over 300 photos. I noticed this load pause (only because it’s so huge) and it’s definitely a problem.

I’m still going to use Picasa locally to manage photos, and maybe I’ll keep a few small albums on the web. But as far as having all the photos hosted there, nope.

The only thing I’m going to miss is the ability to geotag photos easily. It was cool because if people wanted to know where I took a particular photo, there was a map showing just that. However I can just as easily post a link to the location on Google Maps or Microsoft Live Maps, so.. maybe I won’t miss it too much. :-)