Category Archives: Gallery Updates

Gallery Updates

Still searching for an online storage service

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It’s been weeks since I started to look for an online storage service. I’ve looked in the past but I haven’t put much time and dedication as I have lately. I already have a RAID1+0 set up, an internal drive to handle daily backups, and a Terastation NAS box – why do I need storage online? Two reasons: 1. just in case and 2. accessibility.

I have photos that are over 10 years old. This is when digital cameras we’re hitting the consumer market. Over 90% percent of the photos I’ve taken since using a digital camera are in digital format. I don’t have them printed. These are very important to me, which is why I spend more money getting a RAID1+0 array set up on my PC, use a NAS box, and back up daily.

Having these files online, I can access them anywhere with internet connection. I’d like to be able to share files with friends and family without having to worry about file attachment size limitation with emails. Being that it’s online, files can be accessed any time. Plus, if for any reason all of my hardware at home failed, I would always have a back up of the file elsewhere.

This site along with others have been hosted with Hostmonster.com for several years. They offered unlimited storage and bandwidth. Unfortunately, all the files have to be associated with the websites somehow. I recently moved back to Godaddy for hosting. Not for the storage reason but I didn’t need the extra bells and whistles and to save a few bucks.

I still have a Flickr Pro account. It’s great. For $25 annually, I can upload an unlimited amount of photos and short videos. The problem is I don’t like the interface and I don’t like them renaming my files. Right now I’m only interested in backing up photos so this will work, as long as I ignore the 2 things I hate about the service. But what if I want to upload other files? I can’t with Flickr. So the search continues.

Amazon has been offering a full year of free AWS service (http://aws.amazon.com/free/). They give you a certain amount of resources free every month. Once you go over, they will charge you. It’s a monthly service so prices differ month to month. I have signed up and am already over the free limitations of my account. Not by much. So far after 2 weeks of uploading, I own about $1.45. Doesn’t sound much. Most of that is storage cost and bandwidth. The storage cost is competitive and reasonable, considering it’s backed up with 4 datacenters. But my usage grows and so will the monthly cost. Soon, I’ll be charged the same as if I were to get a service that supports unlimited space and bandwidth. The problem with those services is it’s for back ups only. I’d like to be able to do more than just back ups. I haven’t given up with Amazon but I’ll be watching my usage and see if it’s worth keeping.

Then I tried Godaddy’s online file folder service (http://www.godaddy.com/email/online-file-storage.aspx?ci=9022). I purchased the 100GB for $30 annually. I was able to use a 31% off coupon which brought it down to $20 for a year. Not bad for 100GB and Godaddy usually has coupons flying around. The web interface is just bloated (just like the rest of the website). I used an FTP client and the upload speed was horrible. I tried the desktop software and it was the same thing. My work has a very fast internet connection… (Speedtest.net).

speedtest

To upload a 89MB file took nearly 10 minutes! With the speed I posted above, it should be a lot less than that. I was getting between 35kbps to 140kbps. That’s close to what I get at home. No reason for it to be that slow at work. I’ve uploaded files onto my webserver with Godaddy and get very fast speeds, over 1MBps. Not sure what’s going on but I will be cancelling this service shortly.

I was considering Rackspace’s cloud storage service. Their price is the same as Amazon’s S3 ($0.15 per GB) but they do not charge for bandwidth or request fees. But they do charge $4 per month regardless of whether you use it or not. Though it comes with 10GB of storage space.

I’m going to try Flickr again since for now I only have to back up photos. Hopefully I’ll find a software that is easier to use and useful. Can’t beat their price and this is service as an offsite back up anyway. I recently switched to Adobe Lightroom 3. I will see if I can create some batch jobs that can send files to Flickr and Facebook. Problem solved, if I could.

Our Flickr gallery

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I finally got our Flickr account set up. At first I was having trouble with how to configure it. We both have Yahoo! accounts but if one of us will have the Flickr account, it would mean one of use would have to keep logging in and out of our accounts while browsing between Flickr and Yahoo! mail. I ended up using my account on Flickr since I will be doing most of the uploading.

Anyways, so far the experience has been great. I’ve barely started uploading our pics. So far I’ve uploaded over 2,200 pics today. My work has T3 connection so uploading is fast.

Go ahead and check out our new gallery at Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/w1n78/sets. Remember not all our pics have been uploaded, so keep checking back.

Photo Gallery disabled

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We are currently using Phanfare as our online photo gallery. They have been great for the 1+ years we’ve been with them. They have unlimited storage, allow full quality photos, we have access to the original files, and video uploads. Recently, they upgraded my account over to their new version 2.0. My biggest complaint is our gallery is only accessible to Phanfare account holders. I wrote them an email about it and was informed that they will implement the ability for non-account holders view access again but in June. So I spent some time today looking at other companies out there that provide similar services.

SmugMug looks great but I felt the price was too high. PicasaWeb would’ve been great but they don’t have an unlimited storage. Snapfish, Shutterfly, etc. looks like a giant advertisement and I didn’t see them storing full quality photos as part of their services.

So far Flickr is leading the pack. For $25 per year I’ll be getting most of what I am now. I will be missing the following things from Phanfare:

  • allows me to upload videos that are longer than 90 seconds
  • an application where I can edit photos and albums and have the changes update on the website
  • templates of albums are more personal

But the advantages for moving to Flickr

  • they seem to be more Mac friendly
  • lower cost
  • more features like adding notes, map the photos, groups, online photo editor
  • more APIs available

Even after the email they sent me I’m still considering the switch since the my advantages outweigh what I’ll miss. But we’ll see if Abby will like the new stuff. Until then, we are disabling our photo gallery until we have decided on what service we will use.

Finished arranging and uploading 2,222 pics from the wedding

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After weeks of arranging and uploading, I’ve finally finished all the pictures taken by our photographer during our wedding last month. Ariel Javelosa was the company who shot our prenup pics and the wedding pics. I was impressed by their professionalism and punctuality. Unfortunately, out of the 4 cameras used at least one had the date/time-stamp mis-configured. This made it hard to arrange the pictures in chronological order. I tried my best to remember the order of events. Here’s what I did using my Mac.

  1. Import all of the pictures off the CDs and create an album in iPhoto.
  2. Select View => Sort Photos => Manually. You can now drag the photos around and arrange them the way you want.
  3. Select all the photos (Apple + A). Select Photos => Batch Change.
  4. Set = Date. Then put the date and time you want the first photo to have. Then I added 10 seconds between each photo so that the order stays the same. Each photo’s time will be different by 10 seconds. I checked the Modify original files and clicked OK.
  5. If the title isn’t displaying, you can display it by selecting View => Titles.
  6. Select all the photos (Apple + A). Select Photos => Batch Change.
  7. Set = Title, to = Date/Time. Select Include Date: and select Short. Select Include Time, 12-hour clock, and select Show Seconds. Click OK.
  8. Make sure everything is still in order. Select View => Sort Photos => By Date. Make sure Ascending is checked.
  9. Create a folder on you Desktop.
  10. Select all of the photos in iPhoto then export. Select File => Export. Select the File Export tab. Select Current under Kind. Select Use title under File Name. Then click on Export.
  11. Navigate to the folder you made on your Desktop.
  12. Once finished open the folder and you will notice that the file names are now the date/time-stamp you changed it to using iPhoto and the order stayed the same (assuming that folder orders the files by filename).

That’s all in iPhoto. You can now use Automator to rename the files to whatever you want. It only takes 2 Actions in Automator.

  1. Get Specified Finder Items. This is where you drag the files over.
  2. Rename Finder Items. The first drop down select Make Sequential. Then new name: DSC_. Place number after name. Start number at 0001. Separated by nothing. Check the Make all numbers with the value of 4.
  3. Run it and you’re done. The files should be renamed something like DSC_0001.jpg and it’s incremented by 1 for every file.

You can name it whatever you want. I then uploaded it onto my Phanfare account and 2 weeks later I’m done. Keep in mind that the Exif data wasn’t changed just the image property. Hope this helps anyone out there. It was an adventure trying to solve this problem – which could have been avoided if the camera date/time-stamp setting was configured properly.

You can see our pics at http://abbyandwin.phanfare.com. There’s 5 albums since I’m only able to have 500 pics each album.

Update: Phanfare has notified me that I can have more than 500 pictures in an album but am limited to 500 pictures in a section within an album. They were kind enough to email me a link on how to rearrange it. So now I have just 1 album broken down into 5 sections. Thanks Phanfare! :)