Gallery 2 and WPG

Gallery is a free, open source photo sharing web application which is a bit like saying a Ferrari Enzo is just another car. Gallery 2 pretty much lets the user set up a photo gallery from as simple as a couple pages of photos to as complex as dozen of albums and sub-albums, with dynamic keyword-based albums and other features thrown in for fun. It has options for password protected albums, RSS feeds, a commenting system, etc. There’s no feature I can think of that I really wanted that wasn’t already part of the core system or easily added on through a plugin.

Like WordPress, Gallery benefits from an active community of plugin developers who have extended the features of the software. One of the nicer features for WordPress users is the WPG2 plugin which integrates Gallery with WordPress so, for example, my Gallery pages use the same theme as my WordPress blog and appear to be simply pages under WordPress. Additionally, individual images can be easily inserted into WordPress pages or posts using a special WPG tag.

If you’ve got your own server, Gallery is a cheap and highly flexible way to host a medium to large photo site.

500 Billion Digital Photographs in the United States Alone?

ZDNet summarize a Tabblo survey which foundthat 11 percent of U.S. respondents said they had more than 10,000 digital photos. Breaking down all the groups, the survey estimates that Americans have about 500 billion digital photographs stored on their hard drives and memory cards.

That is an enormous estimate which highlights just how much digital cameras have changed photography. Digital photography really started taking off in 2000 (as of 1999 there were only an estimated 8 million digital cameras worldwide compared to 200 million film cameras in the United States alone). If we assume that the bulk of those 500 billion digital photographs were taken from 2000-2007, that would be about 71 billion photos each year. According to this estimate of worldwide information production in 1999 there were 82 billion photographs taken worldwide.

A lot of commentators typically complain that these sort of statistics are indicative of an information glut where far more photographs are being produced than could possibly be viewed (and besides, who really needs more pictures of someone’s cat?) But Flickr’s February cache problems illustrate just how voracious our appetite for photographs are.

According to the Flickr blog, the site regularly serves up hundreds of millions of photographs and, on the busiest days, tops 1 billion photographs per day. Flickr doesn’t say how many different photographs are stored on the service but does mention that it uses “hundreds of terabytes of storage.” That’s a crapload of photographs on just a single website.

Why Delete Bad Photos?

An ABC News story freaks out about people with digital cameras deleting pictures they think are not worth keeping,

The cameras are convenient, stylish, and — this is crucial — virtually every model allows you to delete a picture on the spot if it did not come out the way you wanted.

To historians, that delete function may not be a good thing. It has done more than change photography. It has changed the way we record our lives.

Of the 1,000 or so photos I take every month, I usually delete 2 or 3 — typically taken just to test the white balance or other features, and sometimes I feel guilty and leave those in anyways.

Storing a digital photograph costs almost nothing. I’m using a relatively expensive portable 2.5″ drive to store my photos, so it costs about 1 penny per photo stored. If I were just saving them all to my desktop drive it would be something closer to 1/3rd of a penny per drive.

Flash memory is also cheap (unless you’re using a camera with a proprietary system, like Sony’s Memory Stick). You can pick up a 1 gb SD card for under $300 today (I’ve got a couple) and a 1 gb CF card for significantly less than that.

The rule for digital photographers should be — shoot some photos, shoot some more, then shoot even more as every successive image costs so close to $0 that the additional expense isn’t noticeable.

Especially when you consider how much non-digital photography costs. At my brother’s recent wedding I took about 700 photos with my digital camera and about 200 with a film camera. For what it cost me just to develop the film and get prints, I could have bought another digital camera.

Source:

Don’t Touch That Button. Ned Potter, ABC News, August 11, 2004.