I have lumbered myself with creating a simple site for a family photographic archive. I was considering being lazy and uploading them, complete in their ready sorted folders, into my Flickr account, but I gather that Flickr is just too buggy to be reliable in the long term.
So back to the drawing board… I can warehouse them on my server; the question is whether there is a stack which will automate (to some degree) both the albums and the image size. At the moment they amount to around 1mb per image, so it would be ideal to be able to offer a thumbnail, an intermediate and a full sized image. It would also be ideal to be able to restrict downloads on the full sized images.
Is there a stack which would achieve this reasonably painlessly?
Do everything you can to NOT use a 3rd party such as Flickr. Services like that make their money from advertising and if people are viewing THIER(1) content outside of their site then they get no income.
We’ve all seen services change, die, suddenly become $$$ with little or no warning and the content (map, gallery, feed) being displayed on a site suddenly isn’t there any more.
Do everything you can to host your own content.
(1) By uploading your content to the likes of Flickr, Facebook, Twitter etc you’ve actually given it to them, it’s now theirs NOT yours.