Flickr Pro or Gallery 2? Help me decide

And once again I get into the great dilema of deciding what do I use to run my photo album. The last time I was in a similar dilema was when I had to choose between Gallery2 or Coppermine.

I’ve always been toying with the idea of integrating the photo gallery within this blog itself. Everybody remembers this URL and it makes sense.

I can do this with both Gallery2 and Flickr, however with the current installation of G2 on a seperate domain is not possible.

This means hosting Gallery2 on this blog, which is something I am not very keen of doing just yet.

I had been looking at some of the features that Flickr has to offer and concluded that the free account will definitely not serve my purpose. However, the Pro seems promising.

So here is my comparison of the two:

Price:

Gallery2 is open source and hence free for use.
Flickr Pro works out to be for $24.95/yr or 47.99 for two years, which is about two bucks a month. Affordable!

Maintenance:

With Gallery2, I have to always keep track of updates, especially security releases. Also the bundle is really heavy and occupies a great deal of space on my account. The trouble is making full installations and upgrades which has been getting to me!

Flickr will be maintenance free for me. It is owned by Yahoo! which IMO is a good thing.
I also don’t have to bother about hosting the photos as well as downtime (this of course isn’t so much of an issue).

Integration:

Integration of Gallery2 in my blog would be via the WPG2 Plugin. I do believe it integrates even across subdomains or different domains, but I am not sure. Have you got this to work?

Integration of Flickr would be via FAlbum.
One plus point of this is I already have a release for FAlbum with Connections Reloaded and this will just give me an opportunity to properly test it myself.

Features:

Gallery2 has an amazing list of features. This was the main reason why I went in for it in the the first place.

Flickr too comes with a good deal of features. Having the pro account also gives me unlimited storage and unlimited sets, unmetered (they say unlimited, but I prefer the term unmetered) bandwidth.

I do have a good deal of storage for Gallery2 as I have my own hosting. And I have a decent amount of bandwidth which I don’t consume anyway. As for photosets, Gallery2 gives me unlimited on that front, so basically the Flickr Pro is just one up on Flickr Free.
Also, ~~I don’t know if Flickr supports sub-photosets~~ Flickr doesn’t support sub-photosets.
Gallery2 definitely lets me have subalbums.

Uploading:

This is one place that Gallery2 beats Flickr hands down. This was also one of the reasons I chose G2 over Coppermine.
Besides the web upload you can also upload zip files and unzip them automatically. The best is using the Gallery Remote which I have been using to date.

Flickr comes with its own collection of Uploading Tools. Their Uploadr looks neat, but it doesn’t seem as many features as Gallery Remote. However, jUploadr seems to makeup for it.

One thing working for Flickr is the huge collection of third party apps and services available.

As of now, I am pretty much divided on choosing which to go in for. Switching over means a great deal of work to be done in uploading all my pictures.
However, continuing with G2 also means that if later I decide to switch that would again be a great deal of work.

Switching over also means I will have one domain free for use, which could or maynot be a great thing

Are you using either of these? Would be great if you could help me decide.

And any kind soul like to gift me a Flickr Pro account?

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Post Details

Post Date :: Tuesday, Oct 3rd, 2006 at 9:56 pm
Category :: Articles and Computers & Technology
Tags :: album, Articles, Flickr, gallery, gallery2, photos
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Tikurion says:
October 3rd, 2006 at 11:13 pm

I’m fighting with galleries myself at the moment. I agree, that Gallery 2 is really heavy - one might even say bloated… I always liked Coppermine and integrated it back those days when I was using Serendipity, which worked pretty well (reffering to Coppermine and it’s integration).

I actually never used Flickr, but now might give it a glance. I usually prefer open source and the freedom delivered with it (I’m using Linux [Debian Etch Beta3]), but right now neither G2, nor G1, nor Coppermine seem to work, due to problems with ImageMagick at my host(s), so Flickr might be an alternative…

So… Basically this wasn’t really helpful yet XD. My suggestion: Think about what you really need. Are the features of G2 really necessary? Are you willing to pay for Flickr? How bad is this domain dingbat? So, instead of giving answers I pose questions… Evil me. Hope it helped a bit ^_^.

Ajay says:
October 3rd, 2006 at 11:32 pm

Thanks for the reply Tikurion.

Actually talking about problems, with exec() disabled, G2 gives a problem because Imagemagick doesn’t function. Facing that here as well.

Actually, for me it currently bows down to easy upload, integration and mainly maintenance.

The domain isn’t much of an issue.

josue salazar says:
October 4th, 2006 at 5:37 am

Flickr is the winner no questions asked

flickr.com/photos/josue

they dont offer unlimited bandwidth, you can upload only 1GB of photos a month even with a pro account.

Ajay says:
October 4th, 2006 at 10:09 am

I believe that their idea is that 2Gb upload and unlimited amount of visits, basically that bandwidth.

Does Hotlinking work on Flickr?

josue salazar says:
October 4th, 2006 at 12:10 pm

you can hotlink, but its not encouraged

get a free account and test it out, the community is awesome

Ajay says:
October 4th, 2006 at 12:27 pm

Already have a free account. Actually the only hotlink will be the integrated gallery on this blog.

However, I’m kinda disappointed because they don’t support sub sets.

TechZ says:
October 4th, 2006 at 11:17 pm

I’m a happy G2 user so far. I’ve not used Flickr, so cannot really comment on that.

Ajay says:
October 4th, 2006 at 11:32 pm

I too am leaning towards G2 now. It’s only the maintenance that I will have to see…

Flickr doesn’t have subalbums and that is something I want!

varun says:
October 5th, 2006 at 12:13 pm

Get flickr !!

G2 is so bloated .. I hate it personally..

Coppermine lacks many features.

bharat says:
October 5th, 2006 at 1:56 pm

Gallery 2.2, which is about a month out, has a great new feature called “Downloadable Plugins”. It’s a wholly web-based feature that lets you browse from a list of plugins (modules and themes), choose the ones that you want and install them. This lets you install the smallest possible Gallery2 footprint (I install only the core and a single theme on my own site) and then get everything else as you use it. The best part about it is that with just a few clicks you can upgrade all of your modules at once and stay up to date.

Ajay says:
October 5th, 2006 at 8:41 pm

Hi Bharat,

I see the site still listing G2 as 2.1.2

Is 2.2 a beta and where do I get it from?

Or did you mean month away?

bharat says:
October 6th, 2006 at 5:39 am

Sorry, yes I meant that it is not generally available yet. We will be putting out a release candidate of 2.2 in about 2 weeks, and expect to have general availability in about a month. The code is stable, well tested and in use on many production sites, so if you’re willing to play with unreleased software you can download it from one of our nightly mirrors: http://www.rabinovich.org/G2/

Ajay says:
October 6th, 2006 at 8:20 am

Thanks for the link Bharat.

I’m going to wait this out for the RC. Then again may just jump in with the nightly if I get too curious

Mike says:
February 18th, 2008 at 2:20 am

Well for the past 4 years I have stuck with Gallery, then Gallery2, and have really enjoyed it. Gallery Remote makes it really easy to upload to your album. But, I am concerned about backups, and the loss of my 128 odd albums or 3500 photos. It would be devastating if I lost it.

So I recently purchased a Flickr Pro account and I am now in the process of Exporting my Gallery2 to Flickr. It’s a real pain in the ****! - Only 1 album at a time can be exported. It’s painfully slow and when I am done I will either be gray and old or dead!

There must be a better option to gallery2Flikr plugin, but I have not found it yet.

As for the two applications. I prefer Gallery2 for now, as I have a Wordpress web site and make use of the WPG2 plugin, which works really well. Although I have not been able to get 2 thumbnails to sit next to each other in the sidebar, so I am hoping Flickr will be able to resolve this problem.

There are plenty of advantages of both, and for me it will be the fact that my photo albums are backed up and I am hoping as well that Yahoo’s servers are faster than my current cheap domain host.

Arnav says:
May 31st, 2008 at 6:59 pm

HI.
Gallery2 is wayyy better than Flickr. You can customise the HELL out of it and if you have a blog it integrates beautifully (although you have to change the css in your blog templates sometimes). I am a non-programmer and my programming knowledge is *very* limited. However the pain i took was worth it. Chek out the photo gallery on my blog! If there is a better seamless integration, lemme know..!!