Dear GCC Members,

As club photographer I try to provide the best pictures and albums possible with the equipment and web sites that are available. I know a lot of you enjoy the pictures because you often tell me so, and that makes it worth it for me to do the work involved.

As most of you may know we had to make a transition from the Kodak website to Shutterfly some months ago, when Kodak went under and had to find a buyer for their customers photos. Our old albums now reside on the Shutterfly website.

Suffice it to say that I am not at all pleased with the Shutterfly website. Its software is difficult, clunky and requires extensive tinkering to become even slightly usable. Absolutely not acceptable for the large numbers of photos I typically have to process. Captioning and photo arrangement are a complete nightmare for large numbers of pictures on Shutterfly. Clearly Shutterfly is only intended for a couple of dozen or so pics at a time, about what the average everyday user might need.

I am already familiar with a number of other websites for photo management, but suspect that there are many more I don't know about.

At any rate, if you have a photo website that you like a lot, and think is at least moderately intuitive, capable of handling large lots of images easily, I would like to hear your opinions. Costs and features would be helpful. Even the name only of a site you think is good would be helpful. I will then review them all and try to find the best fit for our clubs images.

Some of the benefits the Kodak site provided which Shutterfly does not:

Extensive historical records, both of publication dates, recipient lists, and dates for both, including the date that the albums were accessed and by whom. This provides the data to justify the time and effort that goes in to the work. In other words: statistics.

Kodak had an ease of arrangement and captioning.

Kodak also did not send continuous commercial spam the way that Shutterfly does. I apologize to you for their spam, I assure you that I am at least as annoyed by it as you are.

Someday I expect that the GCC will have its own server independent of commercial websites on which to keep our photos and videos, in the meantime however, I would appreciate your input if you have any opinions. 

Following winds and clear skies,

Rob Wilt
 
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe