Now I’ve lost Flickr, time for my own online photo hosting me thinks!

Following on from my previous post about how BT Yahoo tried to hold me to ransom so I could use my Flickr account. I have finally decided once and for all to stop using Flickr and move over to my own hosted site. I looked at a few different Photo Sharing sites, all have merits, and downsides. In the end, I read an inspirational story (I would post it here but cannot find anymore), where one person had a bad experience with Flickr, tried 2 others, and then finally went ‘self-hosted’ and they have never looked back.
They have full control over the layout of their site/page/photos, and can even add much more to it than most Photo sites offer in their ‘free’ packages. Furthermore, It’s relatively easy these days to self-host your own photo site.
Today we have Lightroom for instance, which even builds the site for you – yes, it may be a little limited, but these are album sections, and how you build up the ‘overall’ page is down to your creativity – and again, tools like Dreamweaver (just started using again) and iWeb really help.

Earlier this evening, I designed and tested out a Web template in Lightroom, successfully uploaded it, and it’s viewable online right now (visit www.cliffgettings.com and click on the Photography link), although there are only 2 images on there right now, it is just a test and in the coming days and weeks, I will start building up collections in Lightroom. I don’t think I’ll wait to get all my pics organized, I’ll be here til Christmas (damn, that’s less than 2 mths away now), So I will get 1 or 2 collections up maybe per week I reckon – I’ll just have to see about time and patience

And then there’s the site ‘frontpage’ if you like, at the moment there is a black and white page, which directs you to my blog here or to my photography section of the site – although that’s not strictly true, it takes you (right now) to an Album (or Gallery) that is part of my ‘photography section’.. So I need to design not only my ‘frontpage’ but also my Photography ‘frontpage’ too.. I’m playing around in Dreamweaver and iWeb right now.. If I can really learn a bit more of Dreamweaver (nothing fancy, I like to keep things simple), as I used to use Dreamweaver a few years back, I know the power it holds, and I for one find it easier to go back and re-edit my site, even if I lose the hosting files on my local drive (something I personally found iWeb to struggle with).

Anyway, I’ll keep posting here whenever I make any significant changes/improvements/additions on the site, and whenever I upload a ‘gallery’.. Happy Viewing