Pictures

Services

I'm starting to think that Facebook is a bad place to put photos. as I wonder through my friend's pages and look at their galleries, I notice something that has a strange feel. I'm only seeing my friend's pictures. On other sites I find pictures from all kinds of people from all kinds of places all interlinked. With Facebook, I really only go to my friend's pages. It seems like a garden with very high walls.

Picasa gives you 1 gigabyte of space for free. You pay $5 a year for 20G and $20 for 80G and so on.  When I look at my server I use about 1G of space for my entire picture site. These are all the pictures I've felt the need to publish, the small versions, in the last seven or so years. I plan on checking out some other places like Flicker and others this weekend if I get around to it.

$5 a year is not bad for that kind of bandwidth and storage. I bet the barely covers the cost of keeping the power on light of  the servers.

Software

Photoshop is the Xerox of photo editors. It is the go to term for the idea of modifying photos. it is something like $600. I'm looking for a free editor that lets me put them up on my server, my display service and Facebook. it takes more than one tool to get this done.

For editing, many programs exist on linux, but onley one name is on top. GIMP is the PhotoShop of the linux universe at the moment. It is pretty full featured. Ubuntu does not include it on the raw install CD any more, but you simply install it after the fact. It is no PhotoShop, but it is on the same plane.It is also complex and has a high learning curve, even if you know PhotoShop.

GIMP is for high density editing. The real thing. What if you only want to rotate and color correct and crop and sharpen .. That kind of crap that 90% of photo editing is all about? Well, there are a thousand programs that do that. I use one. It is called F-Spot.

F-Spot has its problems. You have to import pictures before you can mess with them. That is highly annoying. You must then export them to get any use out of them. You can't just bring up a folder and modify the pictures in place. highly annoying. It does pretty much everything but make a web page for you and cut out faces of people you don't like. it will also export straight to Picasa and others. That is nice. It is quick to run through a list of pictures and edit all of them. It handles tags and captions. yadda yadda.

I tried using the Picasa software, but it sucks for Linux. It crashed and only kind of worked. The F-Spot software does similar stuff including upload to and make new folders under Picasa. There are a couple things that might be missing, but the Picasa software on Linux was jut not useful for me.