Gorillapond Dot Com

I’ve always claimed to like photography. Right after high school I would carry a point-and-shoot camera with me all the time. It felt a little limiting, but it was small and worked well enough. A few months ago, I purchased a Canon Digital Rebel XT but only used it at family events. It’s a bit too big but the great shots are usually worth it.

I’ve caught up with some old friends recently and it’s revived my interest in photography. I just purchased a cheap 50mm lens, but I haven’t used it much yet.

I recently upgraded to iLife ‘08, which has new web gallery feature in iPhoto if you’re a .Mac subscriber. They also recently bumped the storage to 10GB from 1GB. I love the new gallery, works just like Steve Jobs demoed. This makes for an interesting problem.

I have web hosting through 1and1 for my domain where I have a Gallery installation, it probably has more storage than I will probably use (250-300 GB), and I pay for it anyway to run this domain, website, and email services. The negatives are that the upload utilities are generally bad, and it’s a little unfriendly for people. I also have the .Mac Web Gallery service. It’s 10GB which should be good enough to keep the newest things online, but the best parts are that it looks awesome, it’s super easy to use from my Macbook, and I can upload pictures taken on my iPhone in 2 buttons presses, wirelessly. Lastly, I have a Flickr account. I’ve never used it until recently, but I’ve always been impressed by the community and tagging. The utilities for uploading are pretty easy, and it has passable mobile uploading. If I start to use it more, then I’ll probably have to pay for a third service. Hosting is $10/month and .Mac is $100/year. Flickr is $25/year.

I’m leaning toward using all 3 in some capacity. We’ll see how it goes.