Online photo album sharing site that doesn't suck out loud?

Orogogus

I have a bunch of choir photos arranged in albums. I don't really care about tagging or geolocations or likes. It would be kind of nice if I could set the album cover, but at this point that's negotiable. I just want people to be able to see a properly ordered list of albums (ordered by name, if nothing else), and then look at the photos. I don't want them to need any kind of account. It doesn't seem hard, but I'm getting incredibly frustrated with Google Photos and Facebook.

Problem with Google Photos:
- Can't share multiple albums at all. Picasa could, but they've sunk that ship.

Problem with Facebook:
- Album order doesn't stick. I can move them around, but the next time I load up the photos page they've wandered off to wherever. The albums also don't fit on one page and I can't move them between pages.

Searching for help just turns up year old threads, often locked, of people with the same problems and no solutions. I'm looking into Photobucket and Instagram and whatnot, but suggestions would be appreciated.

Commander Zoom

Photobucket's already on your list; I also use Imgur, but I have niggles with both (that I won't go into, as they may not apply to your situation).

Iruka

I havent used it in ages, but flickr should be able to do this. I'm not sure how robust its permissions are, so if they also need to be private albums, the users may need accounts.

If it doesn't need to be free, you may just want to set up a little squarespace site, but that'll be more manual work.

djmitchella

Flickr'll do this -- https://www.flickr.com/photos/gilad_rom/albums, for instance, is the albums y by that person (who isn't me, my flickr is mostly kid photos), and it's easy enough to organise photos into albums. (and you can select the cover image from the images in an album, it's just hidden in the 'organize' ui). Order is newest to oldest by default, but you can reorder them if you like.

Orogogus

Hm. Flickr looks right, but that "Never miss a post..." popup nagging people to sign into Yahoo is a big annoyance. And after searching briefly for fixes to that issue, it looks like Yahoo's chosen that hill to die on. Sigh.

Instagram is apparently not what I'm looking for, at all.

Photobucket's interface is more cluttered than what I was hoping for, but it looks like the frontrunner so far. I didn't know anyone besides Google was devoted to this "to view images full screen you have to run a slideshow" ethic, but here it is. Still, better than Google, Facebook, Flickr or Instagram.

Daenris

Orogogus wrote: »

Problem with Google Photos:
- Can't share multiple albums at all. Picasa could, but they've sunk that ship.

Have you looked at "collections" in Google photos? I haven't tried it but my understanding is that if you make a collection public and share albums with it publicly then you'll be able to provide a single link to the collection where someone could view all those albums.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/photos/XT28vPPaql4/AfEpszDaDQAJ

EclecticGroove

I use shutterfly from ages ago, but only for a very small number of photos. I can't really speak to how robust it is, but I've never paid for anything to use it.... it does toss up tons of "buy your photos in an album!" advertisements all the time however.

Orogogus

Daenris wrote: »

Orogogus wrote: »

Problem with Google Photos:
- Can't share multiple albums at all. Picasa could, but they've sunk that ship.

Have you looked at "collections" in Google photos? I haven't tried it but my understanding is that if you make a collection public and share albums with it publicly then you'll be able to provide a single link to the collection where someone could view all those albums.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/photos/XT28vPPaql4/AfEpszDaDQAJ

I'm probably going to go with this because it saves me the trouble of re-uploading all my images, but it kind of still sucks.

- For some reason collections aren't part of Google Photos, they're part of Google Plus, which is terrible at everything it tries to do. I'd be the bigger man and ignore that, but this collection feature is also terrible.

- Collections can pull images but not albums out of Google Photos because I don't even know why

- You can't reorder albums, they're locked in by the date the album was made, which you can't edit

- When adding multiple images to a "post", you can't shift click to quickly select a range, you have to check each image individually because the stupid hill Google's chosen to die on is a unified interface for PCs and tablets/phones, which they do by crippling the PC interface down to the touchscreen level

- If, while adding 200 images to a post, you accidentally click outside the selection window, it shuts the window and immediately forgets everything you had selected

- Once the album is saved, you can't change the image order or set the album cover, or change or set the geotag

Making an online image gallery is hard, I'm starting to get that. At this point I'd settle for an app that will beat these social media designers within an inch of their worthless lives and leave them in the Arctic tundra in the middle of wolf season.

EDIT: Thanks for all the suggestions, though, they're much appreciated.

Daenris

Orogogus wrote: »

- Collections can pull images but not albums out of Google Photos because I don't even know why

- You can't reorder albums, they're locked in by the date the album was made, which you can't edit

- Once the album is saved, you can't change the image order or set the album cover, or change or set the geotag

Not sure on the rest, but you can share albums to a collection (sort of). Not sure if there's another way to do it, but if you go to the album and get a shareable link, then add that link to your collection it will include a link to the album with the cover picture, so at least you can keep a bunch of shared albums accessible from a central location. And if you share them in that way, they seem to be ordered in the collection by the date you added the link, so you can manually order them based on the order you share the link.

Also, you can change the cover image of an album on google photos. In the album, you choose the more options three dot button, and there's an option for "Set Album Cover" which will allow you to change it. This doesn't seem to update within the collection (at least not in the couple minutes that I gave it in testing) but if you get a shareable link from your album after changing the cover picture and then reshare to your collection it will be the updated cover image. You can also reorder images in the album by selecting Edit Album from the more options button and then drag the pictures around.

Orogogus

Ah, it didn't occur to me to try putting in albums as links. It seems like it suffers some of the same limitations once it's linked in the collection, but at least Photos' upload interface is a lot better than Plus', and being able to reorder the albums is good, too. Thanks!