I’ve uploaded all my pics from Australia onto Flickr, although I had fully intended to self-host them here, but have run into a few problems in doing so.
Firstly, my ftp upload was ridiculously slow for some reason, not sure if it is being throttled by my ISP Plus.net, or whether I need to kick my firewall into place, but uploading a zip of the images was taking forever (like, days!). Instead I managed to upload them to Flickr in an evening…
Secondly, I decided to spend a bit more time investigating how I’m going to self-host, I’ve previously used Menalto’s gallery to host my backups, but I’m not a massive fan, so am looking for an alternative in Zenphoto which looks like it should do everything I want it to do.
Thirdly, in order to get all my old photos off Flickr and into Zenphoto I had to get a pro-membership again, so might as well use it. While I do have all the photos scattered around various hard drives, I’d much rather just transfer them across as they are, in their sets and with titles, descriptions and tags, which I can do with a bit of hacking of this depreciated Zenphoto extension.
Why do I want to move away from Flickr? As much as I like the service and it’s simplicity, I want to retain control of as much of my content as possible and I don’t really need to be spending money having my photos elsewhere when I have great unlimited hosting thanks to Dreamhost (coupled with 50gb of space for personal file backups).
There are a few other areas where I’m planning to self-host services I currently use elsewhere. I’m keeping an eye on SparkleShare for their Windows client so I can move away from Dropbox (and I love Dropbox!) and similar services like CX.com which I’ve been giving a go too in the meantime.
I guess mainly I’m a bit stingy, and don’t want to be paying for services I can provide for myself… provided the experience is as good. Hopefully Zenphoto can add a decent uploader soon so I can fully move away from Flickr by the time my pro-membership runs out next year!
