Photos, photos, everywhere

I’ve got photos all over the web. They’re on my website, on Jack’s website, on Flickr, and on Facebook. I’ve held back against Flickr and Facebook for a long time because of my desire to keep things simple and in one place, but Flickr is just so simple and cool for sharing with a limited audience, geotagging and the like that I had to give it a go. So far Facebook is pretty empty, but its genius is in tagging faces with Facebook IDs, so linking all photos of a person on Facebook to one profile. Jack’s website is made with Apple software, just to see how it works, and my website is Movable Type powered. The Apple software is gorgeous to use and just keeps getting better, but the Movable Type platform is pretty much what I started with and so I shall continue. It feels much better suited to straight forward blogging than iWeb in its current incarnation, although I expect iWeb to grow and grow in future years (but I’ll bet it retains its original simplicity).
Of all the places that I publish photos online to I like my website the best because I tend to put items of personal interest up here and it’s then interesting in later years to peruse the past. My full photo collections on hard disks are large and aren’t annotated with as much text as those on my website. As I built this site myself it will have greater longevity than the latest social networking fad. It is more a of a pain to upload batches of photos though, and what I put on this site is open for all to see, so some self imposed censorship is important. Just like my frontal lobes’ job in real life.
So Apple have released an updated version of their excellent iPhoto software, with a new web gallery component that adds further difficulty to my choice.
“Group participation. Visitors to your Web Gallery can not only view your photos, they can contribute their own (with your permission, of course). So your collection keeps growing, for all visitors to enjoy.”
“Keep yourself in sync. iPhoto synchronizes your .Mac Web Gallery with your iPhoto library. When others add photos to your Web Gallery, their photos appear in your computer. When you add a photo to your published album, it’s uploaded to your Web Gallery. Automatically.”
Brilliant, but naturally it works with the .Mac service, and I assume it is closed off to .Mac only. Take a look at the sample online gallery and you’ll see that it works very much like a slick desktop application. It’s a beautiful way to very easily share photos online, but it has much to compete with. If .Mac was cheaper I’d go for it and link it into my site. Maybe I will anyway. The new version of iLife is very cheap with an educational discount, and I’m not finished looking at all the updates to it and to .Mac yet.
I just wish more of my friends and family used macs and .Mac.