Shaun R. Haber

In my previous post Site Addition Part 1: Archives Page, I discussed the addition of the Archives page using the Extended Live Archives plugin. I have also recently added a Photos page. This page acts as an index to my various photo sets/albums hosted on this server (with Gallery) and also on Flickr.

One issue with Flickr is that it doesn’t support subsets. For instance, I can’t create a parent set (basically a folder) called ‘2005′ that contains a bunch of other sets. If you go to my flickr sets page, you’ll see a flattened list of all my sets (not in hierarchical order).

One nice thing about Gallery is that it supports nested photo albums. For instance, my Europe 2004 album is basically a ‘parent album’ that contains 6 child albums, one for each city we visited (London twice).

Hopefully Flickr will add functionality for subsets soon. I am tracking their development (subscribed to their dev blog via rss) to stay up-to-date on all new added features.

I am still debating how many past photos I want to upload into Flickr (they date back to mid-2005 as of this writing; my Gallery photos date back to 2004). I purchased the pro account so I could have all the cool functionality: unlimited sets as opposed to only 3, 2gb of throughput each month opposed to 20mb, etc.

I am also debating whether I want to continue using Gallery to store my latest photos. I will probably use both apps in parallel. Flickr will be my ‘production’ and ’social’ area. Basically, photos I really like and want to share with others will go into Flickr.

I may want to use Gallery as a place to archive raw photos. Perhaps I may store all of them there as a backup. With Gallery, I have complete control over the server and the photos. (However, I feel fairly confident that Flickr will be safe for the next few years, especially since they are backed by Yahoo!).

Despite being conflicted by multiple web gallery apps, I am much closer to achieving organizational zen with my photos using iPhoto. I plan to write a future post about a few of my orginzational techniques. (Hint: Smart albums!… Hint 2: Tagging photos del.icio.us-style using the comments field because the iPhoto keywords are lame).

Also coming soon: a Music Page.