Fotopic - the alternative

Flickr is free, but with certain limitations. That's what I'm experimenting with :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/40052043@N03/

However, if you pay you get a 'pro' account with more options and greater capacity. I didn't know that a 'pro' account came with BT through. As my ISP is also BT, perhaps I should investigate...

Like many people, I'm waiting to see what Joel Roebottom's new 'Pikfu' site has to offer. If he can do it, the prospect of having everthing currently on Fotopic transferred over lock, stock and barrel is most appealing.

 

Following the last time fotopic vanished, I've been putting my newer pictures on both flickr and picasa as well as fotopic. I've also slowly started copying my oldest digital pictures on to both of them. This is still very much a work in progress but you can see the current sample here;
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/38339202@N00/sets/
Picasa: https://picasaweb.google.com/jon33040

My feeling so far is that Picasa is closer to what fotopic was. It's simple and does most of what's needed. However there's almost no UK railway pictures on it. Flickr is more complex. The photostream is closer to a blog than anything else but sets (see the URL earlier) do fit well with fotopic's collections. There are however many small irritations. Flickr does have a reasonable number of UK railway pictures. Flickr also has something called groups which collect pictures with a common theme. For instance, one of my pictures is included in the Southern Locomotives Ltd group. Another one is included in the gatwick express group.

To summarise the relative strengths of these two from my point of view;
Picasa: simple, close to what fotopic was
Flickr: reasonable number of UK railway pictures already, groups

Both of them have several advantages over fotopic (as well as the obvious reliability). For me, the biggest is that both can take captions from EXIF metadata in your pictures if you add them before uploading. Loss of manually entered captions seems to be many people's loudest complaint about the loss of fotopic. The 64 pictures from this year's PTG tour in Portgual don't have captions on fotopic because I didn't have the time to copy/paste them over from the EXIF. Both also support tags which makes it easier to organise and find pictures of related topics.

Of course this is purely my personal opinion and what matters to me may not matter to you.

 

I've had enough of fotopic crashing so I'm trying ZENFOLIO
I have been toying with the idea for ages! You get a free 2 week triall period first. And I really do like what I see so far! Mind you I've only uploaded the same file sizes I used on fotopic but the reproduction quality is far superior.

Go to http://rickeborall.zenfolio.com/ to have a look. The only problem is I now have the dauntless task of uploading all of my collections. Not got very far yet! Its going to take ages!


All the best...Rick

 

Thxs Rick for the nod on Zenfolio - will give it a two week trial to see if its suitable,

I have been trialing two other products 1) "Moonfruit" on a two week trial also but finding it hard to come to terms with atm. Also seems expensive - somewhat similar to zenfolio

2) A free download called "Coppermine" http://coppermine-gallery.net/ which up upload and use from your own webspace. It seems so far to be the best option giving far better results than fotopic did. This program comes with about 6 themes with more on the internet you can add. You can title pictures and collections as per fotopic but limited in adding text boxes which you could on fotopic. If I go down this route, I will have to buy a domain name and extra space on a server which will work out slightly more expensive than fotopic premier but at least it will be your own stand a lone webby

see - http://www.jamesarobinson.co.uk/dad/cpg15x/

(TIP - the above is achieved by adding folders to "no category" - took a while to sort this out) It seems to have the ability of alot of different people being able to upload their pictures to different folders aswell giving it a "sharing website" used by a few people overseen by admin.

Check out Stuart Browns webby - shows what else can be achieved

John

 

Flickr

I've been experimenting with flickr this afternoon, by moving over the digitally reliveried A1 and A4 Pacifics mentioned elsewhere on this group. Whilst I'm reasonably satisfied, I'm not quite ready to subscribe as Pro User, which will be necessary to make it a sustainable venture. The captioning facilities are good, but re-ordering by manipulating upload dates is messy. Also the overall look is a rather bland. But at least it brings me back into the land of the living.

www.flickr.com/photos/northernblue109

 

Do these alternatives give you the option to password protect a collection as Fotopic does? I am asking because I take photos at my son's football matches and then upload between 2-300 pics from a match so that the other parents can copy them for their own use. I would still prefer them to be in a private rather than public collection.

Neil.

 

ZENFOLIO comes with Private (for your eyes only) and Password protected collections! You can email directly from any gallery, collection or group with all the relevant codes for photos, collections, slideshow etc.
Rick
http://rickeborall.zenfolio.com/

 

Flickr has a 'Friends' or 'Family' option. I haven't tried it yet because all my pictures so far have been for general consumption.

 

Thanks to both Rick and Ron for the prompt replies. I shall have a look later tonight.

Neil.

 

Wish I'd done that!!

I can't help feeling that there are going to be a few more soon!

 

Re: Flickr

Flickr supports multiple different ways of looking at your photos. The "photostream" is indeed the order in which they're uploaded - think of it like a blog. Sets though can be in any order you like and the order can be edited. Go to the "Organise & Create" menu and choose "Your sets and collections". You can then pick a set and re-order by drag and drop.
JP

 

Re: Flickr

That's jolly clever stuff! I won't ask you how you do it though.

But I will ask how you get the watermark, or whatever it's called, on the bottom of the pictures. ie : www.flickr.com/photos...etc.

Fotopic has a simple facility for this but I haven't found anything on Flickr.

 

Re: Flickr

The pictures within the sets can be re-arranged as well.

 

Hi all
Tried some on Flickr but miss the look of Fotopic

http://www.flickr.com/photos/43264661@N03/

 

just got a quote via my son

"costs 60quid a year for server, thats 10gig space, 50 gig bandwidth, and 7quid for domain name." so nearly double fotopic premier account but it is your own site - I reckon thats about 2000 pictures at 500mb but could be wrong

Yes!! you can put blocks & passwords on collections in coppermine

john

John

 

Just thinking if someone goes down the road of having his/her own web site. How easy is it to up load photos and to put in captions? I was under the impression you need to input a series of command words to make some thing appear on the web site.

 

All I can say about coppermine is that its the best uploader ive used - dont need a ftp program such as cute.ftp which I use for fotopic. - Choose the directory/collection you want to put them in - press a button - naviagate to the pictures you want off your computer - choose which ones ( singles or batch) please the button - hey presto its done - really fast aswell.
to had a caption - choose edit picture- fill in the box under the picture with your caption - save & done
easy

 

Re: Flickr

The footer and watermarks are done in Photoshop. I have a template from which I manually drag the layers but it could be done by a macro (actions in Photoshop). The footer in the bottom left hand corner replicates the standard fotopic feature, which Flickr doesn't appear to offer. The difference here is that it is actually on the image, which is something that you probably would not want if selling prints through Flickr.

The small copyright notice is about 40% opacity. This is positioned individually on each image (mostly over the loco wheels) to make it awkward to clone out, whilst not spoiling the image. I'm still experimenting with this, which is something that I've been loath to apply previously. The trade-off is that I'm permitting larger images to be viewed and downloaded.

The more I use Flickr, the more comfortable I am with it and, to some extent, the 'pain' of moving material over has been offset by the opportunity to take a fresh look at it.