Today I decided I was going to use one of the mainstream photo-sharing websites, expecting the service to be better than the plugins that I use with WordPress on this website (those being fMoblog and NextGEN Gallery).
My issue wasn’t that either plugin is necessarily bad. fMoblog has been great for what I wanted – a simple way to sort pictures I take from my phone, that I can email via my phone to my website, and organize them in a descending order, so the newest pictures always show up first. The only feature lacking here is that I want to show the latest pictures in my sidebar as a widget… sort of like how you used to be able to show a 3×3 or 4×4 or whatever size it was square of images from old textamerica.com (now defunct… I guess $100/year subscriptions wasn’t such a great idea, huh?) accounts on your webpage.
NextGEN gallery is something I got because I wanted to make my Moblog part of my Gallery. It let me make my 3 galleries of pictures of me, my stuff, and my pets, and then the 4th one I was able to link to my Moblog directly, so aside from the “Picture Count” being “1″ rather than updating to the total number (as of writing this, 123) pictures in my Moblog, I got to categorize it all under the button you see on the menu “Image Gallery / Moblog.”
What I was hoping to do was use one of the major sites so that I could save on some space and bandwidth, and I figured they would maybe have some better moblogging capabilities. I knew WordPress has plugins for a few and figured I could integrate them into the site decently well.
Of course, the two most popular are Flickr and Picasa. I won’t bother hotlinking them because I’m really disappointed in both.
First I went to Flickr because I just knew of that one better. It seemed pretty good to be honest. I got to work using the uploader program to upload all the pictures I downloaded from my website. I made an album (or “set” on Flickr), moved the pictures in there, typed in a description for each, voila, so far so good.
Oh, wait… then I went to make the 4th set, “moblog,” and find that I am limited to 3 sets being a free user. I could pay $25/year to upgrade and have unlimited though!
Sorry, I pay to host my website already. I’m not paying for off-site image hosting when its going to be work to integrate it into my blog.
If it had better integration into WordPress, and if I had $25 to burn, I’d consider it. I kept trying to configure Flickr but it kept wanting to post on my main page every time I uploaded a new picture. I know there are plugins but I didn’t even bother given the price, although it seems like Flickr is much more robust than the next contender.
Then I try Picasa. Great, a Google product. As much as I worry sometimes about them taking over the Earth, in general Google makes great products (or did until Chrome was released). I figured with all the geniuses working there, they would have to work pretty hard to fuck it up.
I had to fool around with the settings in the Picasa application for my computer because it automatically wanted to take over just about everything (and did so). It searched and found way too many images, and it was tedious to actually turn off scanning of all the places I DIDN’T want it to scan rather than did. After that I realized I could not figure out how to caption my images (if you can at all, I still don’t know, I just found the way to do it on the website).
So, I uploaded every gallery, put them all into the correct albums, and re-captioned about 150 images. I then downloaded a few plugins until I found Shashin which, for a plugin, I found to be pretty damn nice. My only complaint is that I had to open the picture in Highslide, which annoyingly overlays controls that take up the top 1/3rd of my pictures for navigating forward, backward, or closing the picture when it pops up on your screen after clicking. I could have dealt with that.
Picasa would be great just for albums, but I want to use it as a Moblog solution too, and this is where the problem lies. Like I said, I have 123 pictures. First of all, I cannot sort them to descend by date, which means you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page every time to see the newest pictures. This is really, really stupid when you have over 100 pictures. REALLY STUPID. I’m also well aware that I could manually sort the album every time I add a photo, but that defeats the purpose, now doesn’t it?
I also can’t sub-categorize them by month like it automatically does with fMoblog, so they are all just there in 1 big gallery, and I’m not going to make a million albums such as “Moblog April 2008″ to sort them by month. After that, I can send the picture by email and use the subject line to sort to the correct category, but to caption I think I actually have to login and edit the picture via the website, whereas I currently just send to a specific email address, type the caption in the subject, attach the picture, and it is perfectly organized, captioned, and on my site within 5 minutes at the most (which is the interval of the plugin checking the email address I send the pictures to).
I’m really surprised it is this hard to find a solution. Maybe Flickr would have done everything I wanted it to do, but so far with the exception of having to deal with my gallery stating my Moblog has only 1 picture in it, as well as not being able to do a moblog-only “latest pictures” sidebar widget, it works just as I want it to. Picasa clearly is just unfinished, or maybe it is as an image gallery but certainly not as a full-featured social networking image sharing site.
If you managed to read this far, and know of a way I can get a 3×3 sidebar of the latest pictures from my Moblog on my sidebar as a widget, I’d love to know, but I have yet to find anything that will take fMoblog and give you options on a sidebar widget.
Either way, I think Yahoo fails for yet again trying to nickle and dime people when there are a ton of other photo-sharing services (the rest don’t seem to have great WordPress plugin support), and Google just fails in that Picasa does not have all the features it should.
-Falaris
