Of Flickr and Photo Sites, School Me

EvilBadman

Primary Questions and Requests are BOLDED

I'm helping my girlfriend's father find a reliable website to host photos to easily show to his children (the ones that are grown and moved out). I quickly recommended Flickr, due to their presentation and ease of navigation. Upon further inspection, I've noticed free accounts have a cap, 100MB of bandwidth space monthly. I need a way to explain this limitation in plain English to him.

Also, are there any other sites of this nature that are not just the photobucket style of store and link? (Or does Photobucket do an admirable job in the slideshow department?)

Pheezer

If these are 72 DPI 640x480 or so JPEGs, 100MB is a LOT of space.

EggyToast

Explain to him that Flickr's free account is great unless he plans to upload 100 photos a day and send the link to everyone.

Stuff like Flickr is better than the average "free photo hosting" site mostly because it's set up to be an online gallery or "photo book," rather than just a place to host pictures that you link from other sites.

What kind of photos though? 1mb photos w/ no resizing from a digital camera? Big scans? Can he resize stuff? etc. Plus, Flickr automatically resizes stuff and the resize is relatively small. Plus, he'd likely be able to use the site for a while, even if he did end up maxing out, without even worrying about the limit.

Fristle

Considering he's probably the type to take JPGs at "default" quality (whatever the point-and-shoot takes) and go with default resizing options, he'll probably get plenty of mileage out of a free Flickr account. The uploader will tell him how much of his monthly allowance he's used. It should be pretty straightforward.

Google runs a photo hosting service with a decent UI, Picasa Web Albums. The limit for free accounts is 1 Gig.

Blake T

It's maths.

100 megs is 1000 (shutup) kb

A photo can be 500kb

If he uploads one photo of 500kb 200 people can look at this photo before his limit is reached.

You will probably need to teach him how to resize photos as it's fairly easy to make decent size ones of about 120 or so.

Szechuanosaurus

DrDizaster wrote: »

If these are 72 DPI 640x480 or so JPEGs, 100MB is a LOT of space.

It's bandwidth, not space. Or it might be space. OP said bandwidth space, which doesn't actually mean anything.

But still, unless he uploads the next big internet meme to his account, 100Mb of bandwidth per month shouldn't be something of particular concern. To the point where i wouldn't even bother mentioning it to him, let alone trying to explain it to him.

EDIT: Just went to check the details at Flickr and the 100Mb bandwidth limit is actually a limit on how much you can upload per month, so it's not even a limit on how many people view his images per month. It's also not a storage limitation though, it's just that if he has more the 100Mb to upload he will need to spread the uploading over a couple of months. Still not something worth worrying him about, especially as it's particularly complicated and the end result is 'This really probably isn't going to be a problem for you'.

EggyToast

Flickr's only limitation on photos is on max album size. As most people who use it end up pushing very old things off, it's generally not a problem.

Echo

Blaket wrote: »

If he uploads one photo of 500kb 200 people can look at this photo before his limit is reached.

Wrong. It's bandwidth for uploading. So he can upload 200 photos. There's no viewing restrictions.

GrimReaper

I prefer picasaweb, I can use my existing google account with it.. rather than having to create one with yahoo (blergh).

For example check out my holiday photos.

It has a 1GB limit.

phamtq

Just tell him:

"Use this. Keep it to X amount of photos per day."

When it gets too big, get the pro account for a year. Tell him you'll pay for it (only $25).

Nova_C

I use Flickr pretty frequently (As do my friends, several of which are professional photographers) and it's pretty handy. I'm tempted to go to the pro account just because of the album limitation (I got hit with it a couple days ago - only three albums on a free account ), but for an easy way to host photos online, it's fantastic.

I've also uploaded 71 high quality 1024x768 photos this month and have gone through about 30% of my upload bandwidth, so 100MB is a lot as long as he resizes them beforehand (At full resolution the jpg's my camera creates are 3MB :P).