First off, I don’t think anybody in my family reads my blog.  That’s why I can get away with this post.  :)

I’m having a bear of a time sharing photos with my family.  They’re still on the train of emailing photos to everyone.  Yes, I have explained to them how that just doesn’t work when you have 50 5mb photos.  Yes, they have sent 50 different emails with one photo each attached.  :facepalm:

I use Flickr, and it works great for my purposes.  It creates awesome photo galleries, I have unlimited storage with my Pro account, I can order prints via SnapFish and have them ready for pickup at my local walgreens or mailed to me… the options are endless.  However, some of those things only I can do.  Others cannot order photos (yet), nor can anyone download a full set without using some 3rd party hackery tool.  Not good.

Thinking back to my “hosting my own website” idea, I wonder if there’s some 3rd party WordPress plugin that will allow you to embed Flickr into your site and also possibly download entire sets?  This would probably be at the expense of my bandwidth, but that’s something I’m willing to deal with to make this an easier process.

I could possibly do the same for YouTube, as I know you can download the MP4 using a javascript hack.  This is something I need to look into, but my quick search results for the past hour or so haven’t really turned up anything.  The YouTube part would be easy enough… the Flickr part is stumping me.  I’ll keep looking and hopefully figure it out soon.  This idea is acceptable though, as all the hackery will be done by me and will seem to “just work” for everyone else.

Something else I want to consider is privacy.  The majority of my photos, I don’t mind being viewable by the world.  That’s the point of Flickr.  However, there are some that I would rather keep private to my family and friends.  I do know there are permission levels you can set in Flickr, but the problem is none of my family or friends are actually members of Flickr.  I don’t want to force them to register for a Yahoo or affiliated account just to get their photos.  Goes against the whole “it should just work” idea.  Again, this might be a good argument for hosting my own website.  In theory, I should be able to lock down privacy settings on certain sets but still make them viewable and hopefully downloadable via my website.  It’s basically just security by obscurity, but my website will be less likely to be viewed by some random passerby than my page on Flickr would.  I could probably even have a password on the sets.  Something to look into.

It actually looks like SmugMug would satisfy some of my requirements, but at the cost of $60 a year.  I still wouldn’t be able to download entire albums I don’t think.

I realize bandwidth is expensive, but come on… we’re in the 21st century.

So, what’s stopping me from starting up my own site?  I can’t find a domain name I like.  Yes, I’ve said that before.  It’s just something I’m really picky about.