Finally got a day to myself and hence the point of this post. Ideally, by now, you should be able to see a million photographs on my photo album. However, a total lack of social life explains the un-updated album!

Since then, I have been slogging like crazy at work with minimal amount of fun. In the last 6 weeks I have:

1. Worked almost every weekend and almost every day till at least 11pm
2. Watched Robin Hood
3. Went to Piccadilly Circus area and had amazing pizza at an Italian restaurant
4. Shifted residence, well, almost

And, that’s about it.

There is one bit of good news though, my original assignment which was to be for 6 weeks  has now been extended till the end of October. So, am hoping that across the next few months, I’ll be able to visit the many places in London.

As a result, I’ll be completing my shifting tomorrow morning to a new place. I love the view from there. Will put up some photographs soon!

Update: Just uploaded some more photos in the London album on Flickr.

I’ve been using Flickr Photo Album on this blog for a long long time now, maybe well over a few years. However, in a bid to reduce memory usage at this blog and to also utilise my unused domain AjayDSouza.info, I decided to move the location for my photos.

In fact, until August last year, AjayDSouza.info served as a secondary location for displaying my photos. It was powered by a script that fetched my albums from Flickr. However, I wasn’t too pleased by the script and so didn’t bother to promote the site.

I decided to hunt for a new script today and came across Glickr. Glickr is an extremely easy to use, smal, but very powerful script for displaying photos from Flickr.

AjayDSouza.info will now serve as the primary location for display of my photos. With a little .htaccess magic, I have redirected all existing links on this blog to the site. Please let me know if you notice any malfunctions / broken links.

I plan on working on the stylesheet and theme but that will be at a far later date. Until enjoy my photos.

Several months back I popped a question to my readers… Flickr Pro or Gallery 2?. I got a good response with people pointing me to both sides.

For me the question remained unanswered until now.

Bye Bye Gallery 2

A month ago, I knocked off my photo album which was powered by Gallery 2. Gallery 2 is an amazing software, but I didn’t have the time to actually maintain yet another site. I wanted to have a solution where I let someone else do the dirty work of running the gallery.

Yahoo! Photos?

Since knocking it off I’ve considered two options, the first was Yahoo! Photos. I love the interface of the new Photos beta. I’ve got my Dad to host his pictures out there. The in-browser tool works perfectly in Firefox, IE and Flock.

Picasaweb?

About a week back I started using Picasaweb after the storage for free users was increased to 1GB.

Picasaweb is good. The software is well featured, however I faced a big problem uploading photos. It could very well be my connection, since I haven’t seen reports of it elsewhere.

No it’s Flickr Pro

The turning point to Flickr came yesterday when Flickr introduced Collections.

Honestly, the only reason I was reluctant to use Flickr was the inability to create sub-albums. Yes I know in Web 2.0, we use tags, but I like things of Web 1.0 like sub-folders and sub-albums!

Now, you can put several sets into a single collection upto five levels deep (I need to figure out the sub-levels).

I picked up a two year Flickr Pro account yesterday and have immediately started the tedious work of uploading my photos. Until I figure out how to embed the collections and photos successfully on this blog, you can access the photos at http://photos.ajaydsouza.info/.

WordPress Plugins

I’ve got my eyes on two plugins, viz. FAlbum and Photos-Flickr. I had an unsuccessful attempt at using FAlbum on this blog yesterday. I kept getting an frob error.

I like Photos Flickr from what I see so far, however, it doesn’t have the ability to display sets and collections yet. It is based on phpFlickr and I’m currently studying the code to see if I can extend the plugin. My limited PHP skills have been an hindrance so far.

What happens to ajaydsouza.info?

I was hosting my old album at ajaydsouza.info. I plan on building a site on that domain dedicated to me! (I’m a narcissist).
Jokes apart, it will be a one stop site where you can browse to the millions of profiles I have all over. Am also planning on making it a place to “frame” all my work so far.

Let’s see how that turns out… until then it is pointing to my new Flickr Pro page.

Btw, if you are on Flickr add Ajay D’Souza or Ajay DSouza or ajaydsouza to your friends list.

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?

Have been meaning to this in quite a while. Had considered shifting over to Flickr to maintain my photo album, but the free service is very limited for me. Additionally I did not want to go in for a paid service because anyway I am spending a lot on hosting of my own.

Hence, I decided to try evaluate the option of using Gallery 2 as the software to power my photo album. I have been using Coppermine for quite a while now mainly because of its bulk import feature.
I had evaluated Gallery but found it rather lacking.

Was stunned that Gallery2 gave me a lot more than I wanted. Especially useful was the Gallery Remote which I have been using to upload all my photos. I have realized however that I need to use the online interface as the remote is still lacking many features.

Anyway, so you can now see AjayDSouza.info in a brand new avataar.
I’m still planning on working on the template to get it done to my liking. However, this will take a while as the software is still new to me.

So do visit my photo gallery. Feedback is welcome. Registrations are not required to view the pictures.

After a lot of deliberation, I finally decided to stick with my current photo album.

However, had changed the URL of the gallery however to AjayDSouza.info and also changed the theme.

And finally after many many months of no updates and after having lost a good amount of pictures during a recent hard-disk crash, I updated the gallery with snaps of the recent choir picnic.

Was extremely thrilled to use my new digital camera, and you can see I was really very click-happy

Have taken and uploaded a lot of pictures. Though my camera easily supports a resolution of 2272×1704, I have resized all the pics to 640×480 so that they can be easily displayed on the monitor. Also needed to do so due to space constraints (unfortunately both space and bandwidth aren’t free )

Hope you like the photos.