Tuesday, September 04, 2012

Photo gallery sharing is dead. Why?

E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e
rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the
bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!
Monty Python, the Dead Parrot Sketch

Photo gallery sharing is an ex-parrot.

SmugMug is still around, but they recently raised their rates and started a wee twitter storm. Google discontinued support for Mac uploads from iPhoto. Flickr is a zombie. Apple killed their photo gallery service. A bunch of printing/sharing services have closed. Apple's Aperture pages have dead links to extinct sharing plug-ins. Old products like Gallery don't have Aperture or iPhoto plug-ins.

Facebook has some photo sharing, but albums are limited to 100 images and there's no full res download. Twitter and Photo Stream and Dropbox are different products.

The interesting question is - what killed photo gallery sharing?

I assume lack of interest. There just weren't that many people interested in sharing photo albums, and perhaps even fewer people interested in browsing them much less downloading their own images. The number of people willing to pay to share photo albums was even smaller. Now add in the considerable complexity of personal photo management ... (my Aperture consolidation project almost finished me)...

Now factor increasing costs, as image size grew faster than storage capacity.

What interest there was ended up being largely served by Facebook.

It's surprising the businesses lasted as long as it did.

I miss amateur web page technologies, and I will miss the online photo gallery.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

People are sharing photos with Facebook, and in their blogs and then pinning with Pintrist. I think blogging may have replaced some of the photo sharing. I hate FB for photographs as the resolution is so poor. Better to link to a SmugMug gallery, which looks great.

steve caturan said...

I've always prefer to share my photos using the open-source Menalto Gallery 2 platform - it's been 8 years or so and still going strong (for me).

I like the idea of having the old way of showing albums, and comments and slideshows - not the latest and greatest fancy features but it works, and that's good enough for me.

and with native support for WebDAV, uploading/downloading has never been easier.

here's my Gallery2 powered site: https://pixi.me/gallery2/