agilliland.com: A new approach to the gallery

December 26, 2004

A new approach to the gallery [ Website News ]

I've been pretty preoccupied over the past week working on coding a simple gallery using the Flickr API.

The idea arose for two reasons ... one, just because i like messing with cool stuff like this. second, because it was quickly becoming apparent to me that hosting your own online photo gallery with full quality hi-res pics just takes up too much disk space.

My hosting company provides a great plan which includes 1.2gb storage for $15/month, but with a standard 2 megapixel camera you are looking at using about 1mb per photo you upload. This means you can hold roughly 1000 photos before you start to run out of space, and thats not much. I don't even take that many pictures, but I have about 700 online now.

The new plan is to pay a little extra for a pro account at Flickr and use Flickr as an image hosting service. Then using the Flickr API i can just query for the album information and display the pics on my own site.

Check it out ... all the actual images are hosted on Flickr. There are still kinks to work out, but so far i like it.

Posted by agilliland at December 26, 2004 12:00 PM

Comments

It's cool but it seems a little spendy considering you have to fool around with it to make it work. You have to know what your doing and places like yahoo are giving away 250MB free for email and google is giving away 1000MB for free for email. I'll keep my eye out for something a little cheeper or more bang for your buck.Peace out.

Posted by: Robert on December 28, 2004 6:22 AM

It does kind of suck to have to spend more money just to host some pictures, I agree, but the reality is that if I didn't use flickr then I would have needed to upgrade my web hosting plan which would have cost me an additional $7/month.

There are some ways of hosting your photos for free, like shutterfly, but you don't have any control over them. They are only displayed on shutterfly and people can't download the originals if they want to.

I dunno, it's a tough situation.

Posted by: Allen on December 28, 2004 10:16 AM