Web Applications

Network World's Web Applications Newsletter, 10/24/07

Web photo albums and lists

By Mark Gibbs

My son and his friends on the football team complained to me that there were no photos of their games so I offered to do the honors. I had photographed the last couple of years of my son’s youth football league games for the team so I was excited to be back on the sidelines (there’s a completely different buzz when you’re with the team and it’s High School football).

So recently I shot my first Cougars game (Go Cougars! They won 21 to 7!) and now the question was how to publish the pictures. My previous favorite photo album was the free JAlbum, which I wrote about in Gearhead last year.

Here’s a good example of a JAlbum created gallery by Henrik Lehnerer, who just happens to live a few miles from me (us Ventura county inhabitants have to stick together).

(BTW, Henrik either lose the sounds or give me an off button, the ambient background music, as pretty as it is, was really at odds with the groove I had going: “Nav Binder and Patrick Dream present Bombay One”)

An interesting development is that JAlbum is now offering both free and fee-based album hosting. I think that JAlbum’s free hosting service with 30MB of storage and 2GB of bandwidth per month is very enticing for family stuff, but if you are going upscale (like a few hundred parents browsing your pictures) then you’ll need more.

JAlbum’s next hosting level provides 1GB of storage and 10GB of bandwidth per month for €20 per year while the top level offers 10GB storage and 100GB bandwidth per month for €100 per year. Not bad pricing, but the explosion of free photo hosting sites makes the JAlbum service less appealing to the great digitally unwashed.

If you have your own Web site and you are serious about photography then you might want to consider investing in another product I covered in Gearhead, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. This is still one of the finest pieces of software engineering I’ve come across for a long time.

What Lightroom provides is a Web album building feature not unlike JAlbum’s although, it has a lot more polish (which you’d expect from a $299 application).

Building Web albums with Lightroom is incredibly easy and because it is integrated with Lightroom’s overall workflow model it works extremely well for serious photographers. Here’s a Lightroom-generated gallery I created recently.

Finally, how to get the word out that there are gallery updates. Notifylist.com is a very recently launched free service that allows you to create an e-mail list as public (listed in their directory) or private, manage the membership, allow people to ad and remove themselves, and send a message to your list.

Sending messages has to be done through the service’s Web interface. I’d like to see list owners be able to send to their lists by submitting a message by e-mail as well as an API and maybe integration with the likes of Outlook.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist and now blogger: Check out Gibbsblog.

Gibbs not only pens (well, keyboards) this newsletter he also writes the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns in Network World. We’ll spare you the rest of the bio but if you want to know more, go here

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