Many free photo sharing sites exist on the internet such as Flickr, Picasa Web Gallery and Photobucket. But if you have your own domain then you would ideally want your photo gallery to be hosted on your own domain. Everybody remembers this URL and it makes sense. We evaluate the various options you have to present your photos on your own domain either for sharing with your friends or for creating a portfolio gallery.
Installing open source photo galleries:
You could use free open source galleries such as Gallery or Coppermine or Zenfolio on your site. But it requires a lot of work such as tweaking the themes and updating the packages in order to prevent hacking. The development of these packages has been very slow and they continue to be bloatwares. Plus they are not as “social” as compared to Flickr & Picasa.
Integrating Flickr, Picasa or Smugmug:
If you want to integrate Flickr on your website, all that Flickr provides is an option to display your Flickr badge on your blog. Neither Flickr & Picasa offer the facility to map your own domain with their service. Neither in the free versions nor in the paid Pro versions. Only Smugmug offers this facility if you subscribe to their Power Account costing $60 per year. But you may not want to pay that sum if you already pay a lot to your web host, or you may just prefer Flickr or Picasa over Smugmug.
Your options include embedding your Flickr or Picasa URL in a frame under your own domain. But it doesn’t look that professional as you still see the Flickr or Picasa interface beneath your domain name.
If you are using a WordPress powered website, then there are many plugins which use the Flickr & Picasa API to integrate your photo albums on your website or blog. For Flickr we recommend the Flickr Photo Album plugin whereas for Picasa we recommend the kPicasa Gallery plugin. If you have uploaded your photos to Facebook then you can use the Fotobook plugin to integrate your Facebook photos on your website. We haven’t forgotten the very popular NextGEN Gallery plugin but this one requires you to upload your photos on your own web host instead of pulling them from third party services.
The pros of using this Flickr/Picasa and WordPress Plugins combo over installing open source photo galleries are manyfold:
- You save precious space & more importantly bandwidth on your webhost
- You do not need to keep updating your gallery installations
- You get to display your photos using the same theme & look as the rest of your website
- You can use the social features of Flickr & Picasa
- You have a backup of your photos on third party servers which may be useful just in case your hard disk crashes. Backups on Yahoo or Google powered services ‘may’ be more dependable than on your own webhost.
The cons of using this route are that Open source galleries such as Coppermine or Gallery provide you much more options to password protect your photos compared to Flickr or Picasa. They also provide you much more advanced options to customise each individual aspect of your photo gallery.
But all things considered, its a better option to choose storing your photos on Flickr or Picasa and displaying them on your website using the several WordPress plugins available.
