Our photo gallery, powered by the free open source software Gallery, has served us well. I spent quite a bit of time tweaking it to get it just the way I wanted. I’ve been pretty happy with it, but it still lacked a couple of things that I wanted. First, the slideshow options it provided were not up to par with current technology and second there wasn’t a good solution to include videos. And when it came to videos, I really wanted an option where I could post the video to Google Video or YouTube so that it wasn’t using up the space on my website.

I had thought that it would be a fun project to create those features and provide back to the community, but somewhere along the way my ample free time has disappeared. Shortly after I set my photo gallery, Google started their Picasa Web Albums which I recommend to people who didn’t have their own website. So I’ve taken a little bit of my own advice and I switched our photo gallery over to a Picasa Web Album. Their user interface is really slick and intuitive. You can even use the arrow keys to navigate through the pictures. They also have a really nice slideshow. And you can post videos in your albums just like pictures. The videos even play seamlessly in the slideshows too. They offer 1 GB of storage for free so I can put up a lot of photos and even have higher quality than what I had on our site. I put up all of the photos from our old album and it is only using 15% of the available space.

There are some trade-offs. For example I can’t customize the way the pages look. Luckily I like their simplistic pages but I can’t put a link to get you back to our site. I also lost control over the settings of things like the RSS feed. The benefits of switching are worth it though and one thing that finally pushed me over the edge was that Google released a data API (or a way for people to write code to access the things in the albums). That means that I’ve still got access to the pictures and could write code to do things with it that I wanted such as displaying a random photo on my other web pages. (Luckily someone else has already done that too.) Finally, they will continue to add features and as they do I don’t have to update anything to get them. For example, they recently added the ability to "Map" your photos by dragging them onto a map. So now you can really see where we were when we took our pictures on vacation.

So feel free to go check out our new album and latest pictures and videos. Just click on the "Photos" link at the top of the page and you should be redirected to it automatically.