home now

[cellio]

I got home around 9:30 this morning, a mere (!) 22 hours after our first plane left Eilat. Oof. Good trip and I'll write some wrap-up stuff later (and about our last day), but in the meantime, some requests:

1. Please tell me about things you think I should know from the last two weeks.

2. What's your favorite photo-hosting site? I want to post some pictures to my LJ but point to bigger buckets of them (for those who care). I care about individual-photo URLs (for said posts), being able to add captions, and retaining ownership; if people can leave comments (per photo or per gallery) that's cool, but not essential.

Comments

[starmessenger.livejournal.com]

Welcome home!

About your photo hosting question: I see a chorus of shouts for Flickr here and want to offer an alternative in Google's Picasaweb. Flickr is good -- especially if you want to participate in a large community of photographers -- but Picasa has some advantages that might make it more suited to sharing with smaller groups. Here's a pro/con roundup of the two services:

- I've found Flickr to be quite slow in loading accounts with lots of photos and poking around on my friends' pages. Picasaweb loads much faster.

- Flickr's free account lets you organize your photos into a maximum of three separate "sets" that roughly correspond to albums, and it limits the number of photos you can put into each set. If you want more control over sets, you have to upgrade to a paid account. Picasaweb's free account has no such restrictions -- you can group your photos into as many albums as you want, with as many photos per album as you want.

- Flickr's interface is busy, and has gotten busier since Yahoo bought the service; Picasaweb's interface is very sleek.

- Both have good (and very similar) standalone uploading tools that let you choose, add, and manage multiple files at once. Regardless of which service you pick, you'll want to download the standalone tools. (I think Picasaweb uploads faster, but I've no metrics to prove this).

- Picasaweb's tools for organizing and managing files, deleting them, switching them among albums, etc., are a little more intuitive and powerful than Flickr's. Flickr's captioning mechanism is better, but the captions themselves are smaller and a little more crowded on the page. Picasaweb makes much better use of white-space around the photos.

- Flickr's greatest advantage is its huge photo-sharing community. Both sites let users with accounts make comments on your individual photos, but your friends are more likely to already have Flickr accounts.

I have accounts on both services -- feel free to check them out and compare for yourself:

Picasaweb: http://picasaweb.google.com/suzannek

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/suzannek/

Cheers!