I give up

I was trying to upload some new images to my gallery last night.

It didn’t go well.

For years, I’ve believed that self-hosting is the way to go, as opposed to uploading pictures to something like Picasa Web or Flickr.  Back in the day when I maintained my own webserver, I was practically rabid about it.  The long and the short of the argument was that in the end, I owned my pictures.  They were in MY gallery, to do with as I pleased.  You don’t have to go back too far in time to find stories of people losing all of their pictures being hosted on this site or that site or the other because the hosting company changed its policy or just plain screwed up.

Now, however, I don’t run a web server.  This site is hosted on 1 & 1.  Though I think that 1&1 is a GREAT value for service, running a photo gallery on their site is a bit of a pain.  The issue is that I’m running open-source software on a more-or-less grey box.   If something goes wrong with the gallery software, I can only pursue it to a certain point before my privileges run out.  Plus, who has the time to do that?

So this morning I’m making a choice and putting down some money.  And I think I’m going to end up with Flickr Pro.

I’ll keep you posted, especially as I move pictures around.