Help! Need advice about sharing large photo albums online

Cafe Society
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Mods: I put this OP into CS because it’s photography related, sort of. As always, feel free to move it if you think it’ll receive greater readership elsewhere.

I take a lot of photos when we travel and we create photo albums that friends and family want to see. It is easiest to make the photo albums available online rather than have people over to the house, crowding around the computer to see the slide show. Each photo album typically contain between 200 and 400 photos. I know that seems like a lot, but feedback from viewers has been positive (at least with the ability to fast-forward through the slide show).

I found a solution I like – and it worked great.
However, the company has gone out of business.
So I’m screwed, and I’m looking for another solution.

Let me say what I like about my current (though now non-functioning) solution, in decreasing order of importance.

a) I don’t have to upload the photos to a central server (ala most solutions), because the software is peer-to-peer software routed through a central server to my home computer where the photo albums actually reside.
b) I can attach captions to each photo.
c) Viewers can set the pace of the slide show, or manually advance each picture.
d) I can attach music to the albums.

I tried a few of the central server solutions before I found the peer-to-peer solution. I hated the upload time. It takes forever to upload 400 6-megapixel photos.

Some questions:

  1. Does anyone know of an online central server solution that has figured out a way to mitigate the long upload times for large files?
  2. Does anyone know of one of these solutions that provide the capability to attach music to a slide show?
  3. I know there is software to create slide shows on my home computer (with music even), but is there a safe way to provide access for my friends and family to my home computer? (And I’d want a solution that would allow the viewer to speed up the viewing without speeding up the music too)
  4. I could create a web page at one of the hosting sites to contain slide shows, but wouldn’t I still have the upload problem? (And I’d have to learn HTML I suppose)
  5. As a possible solution to the upload problem, is there a way to make the photos smaller a full album at a time? (In other words, I know I can reduce the size of each picture one at a time, but that would take forever) (And I’m willing to do this because while I want to keep the original digital image full size, the people viewing these online don’t need the same level of quality or size)

Any and all help and advice would be appreciated. Software. Services. Whatever.

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Picasa does a good job of resizing multiple pictures; I always use it before uploading my pictures.

I’m not sure about the other questions, sorry. FWIW, I use SmugMug as a hosting service, and I’ve found them to be pretty good. I can give you a referral code should you so desire, but I’ve heard that the free hosting services like Flickr aren’t too bad either.

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(I’m not sure if the lack of responses to my questions is due to a lack of interest, a lack of options, or simply a lack of being on page one of CS.)

Thanks Dervorin. I’ll take a look at SmugMug, though I’m not too excited to spend $40 a year to share my vacation photos. I have examined their web site and I have to admit is seems feature rich. Do you perhaps have a link to some sample standard photo albums? The ones I checked out via their message board forum all seemed to be customized professional sites.
I have Picasa, but I didn’t know it handled mass re-sizing. I’ll have to take another look.

Has anyone any experience with PhotoBucket? It’s another online hosting service that I’ve heard of.