Flickr
I finally broke down and signed up for Flickr.
I used to use Photobucket but it’s kind of a bargain-basement setup; then I went to a Picasa gallery, but they have this weird way of providing the links to your photos and albums, which required several steps of work in order to get an actual HTML or image link, and that annoyed the hell out of me. Google (which owns Picasa) is usually so user-friendly and easy and they madePicasa unnecessarily complicated. I know how the HTML tags are supposed to look and it still took me several tries to figure it out. I don’t understand why they had to make it difficult. I don’t want to keep everything here on my site because what if I change hosting companies–then I’ll have to reload everything. It’s a pain in the ass.
I was conflicted about Flickr because apparently they censor. If you post images they deem “inappropriate” they will just delete your entire account without warning. “Inappropriate” could be pictures of, for instance, art nudes. Or even nudes that are not actually showing anything that you’d not show on the street. As in, everything is covered. But Flickr will just delete you if they don’t “like” it. And this really annoys me and, frankly, scares me. However Flickr has the nicest interface (although even it is unnecessarily complicated and without features in their logical place) and they have the largest number of users and most opportunity to have your work be seen by others. So I signed up. Although I’m still practicing “Web 2.0″ just in case. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, as the saying goes.