What if Flickr fails?

Two weeks ago, Doc Searls, which is a senior editor for Linux Journal and has many other roles, wrote a blog post that anyone who share photos online should read: What if Flickr fails?

The origin of this question is the:

One cause for worry is reports of sudden and unexplained account deletions.

But I doubt it concerns more than a tiny list of users. Okay it’s really not cool for these users, but I don’t think all Flickr user should fear for deletion. What I think is the most important is:

And the greater risk is not of Flickr’s deletion of customers, but of the market’s deletion of Flickr. Because, after all, Flickr is a business and no business lasts forever.

Then Doc Searls explains the Pro Vs Free accounts and how Flickr generate revenue with Free accounts (with advertisement).  Doc concludes with a solution for the future:

First is to pay more for what’s now free stuff. […] Second is to develop self-hosted versions of Flickr, or the equivalent.

I couldn”t agree more. This is exactly what projects like ZenPhoto, Menalto Gallery and of course Piwigo are trying to propose. The major problem with these systems is that they require higher technical skills because you need to get a hosting provider, install your photo gallery software (with concepts like database settings) before you can host your photos.

This is where Piwigo.com comes into action. Just like WordPress.com let you create a WordPress blog without worrying about technical requirements, Piwigo.com let you create a Piwigo photo gallery with just a 4 fields sign-up form to fill. This is what I explained in my comment to Doc Searls blog post.

Fortunately Flickr has a generous API Garden that does allow the copying off of most (or all) data that goes with your photographs. I’m interested in being able to copy all my photos and metadata off into my own self-hosted system.

Well Okay, you can perform request on an API and hope you will be able to fetch all your data, but for sure the gallery features will be lost : at best you only get your data back. With Piwigo.com you can get your data back and the software as well (from Piwigo.org) and then you can run your photo gallery anywhere you want. This is what we call the no vendor lock-in feature. And YES I think this is an important feature. Piwigo.com has many other features, such as the ability to customize your photo gallery theme but also activate or deactivate features, but I admit I’m very proud of this one.

Piwigo.org to run Piwigo on your own website

Piwigo.com to start a Piwigo photo gallery in a few seconds

Piwigo 2.1.6 is out

No vulnerability fixed in this release, only 14 minor bugs and 2 new languages for the north of Europe : Norwegian and Swedish.

The availability of Piwigo 2.1.6 was also the opportunity to send a happy new year 2011 message to the thousands subscribed users of the Piwigo Newsletter.

Read more and download Piwigo 2.1.6

Piwigo 2.2.0RC1 is out, ready to beta test?

The first release candidate for Piwigo 2.2 is out. A release candidate is dedicated to test and user feedback. Don’t install it on your live website. Here is the summary of changes compared to Piwigo 2.1 :

• “categories” renamed into “albums“
• “image / picture / element” renamed into “photo“
• administrator can automatically sort albums and sub-albums in a few clicks
• a protection was added to prevent robots from registering
• ability to remove or resize the high definition version of the photo in the upload form (requires ImageMagick on the server)
• new web API methods for administration purpose (activate a theme, deactivate a plugin, move an album, delete a photo)
• ability to delete photos added with synchronization like other photos, with just a few clicks
• new batch manager 1) filter 2) select 3) apply an action
• week may start on sunday in your calendar
• basic multisite feature, ability to have several galleries with a single Piwigo installed
• the user upload was removed from core and a better one will be added in the Community plugin
• the adviser mode was removed
• automatic rotation of the photo based on EXIF Orientation
• ability to delete a single photo from its administration screen
• ability to clean orphan tags in a single click (automatic detection)
• if the album representative photo has a Family privacy level, then all Friends visitors will have another random representative photo instead

… and also at technical changes:

• if available, automatically use ImageMagick instead of GD for photo resizing
• CSS and Javascript files are combined to reduce the number of HTTP requests
• core themes use CSS sprites for icons to reduce the number of HTTP requests
• performances improved when browsing tags linked to many photos
• the representative photo of each album is cached for each user, this may avoid many database requests if you have a deep album tree

I will open other blog posts to give more details about some specific changes for Piwigo 2.2.

As usual, the more feedback we get, the more bugs we fixed, the more robust Piwigo 2.2.0 will be. Sometimes it’s not so easy to have a testing environment available, so I propose to install a testing environment to anyone who asks : just send me a private message.

Download Piwigo 2.2.0RC1