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trazom
26th of March 2010 (Fri), 03:53
Hi - not sure this is the right place but will try anyway. I am looking for a place to host/backup my familys photos. The price is not the main issue (I am willing to cough up in order not to worry about our precious memories), however, security, maintenance etc. should require as little effort from my side as possible. I have tested a lot of sites by now and found that zenfolio and smugmug are getting closest to my needs, however, they fail on some (or I have not been able to set that up), so I was hoping that someone might enlighten me or point me in another direction.

So my main demands are:

a) Unlimited storage of photos and videos, no resizing of images

b) The ability to allow for quests to view all albums by using only one generic password (I was not able to do this in Zenfolio, but in SmugMug I could do this via the Site-wide viewing password option)

c) The ability of unlimited folder/category structure (SmugMug only allows me a main category and then one sub-category, Zenfolio allows for unlimited)

d) The ability for quests to upload photos but not delete (SmugMug allows for email upload and with the assistant password feature I'm considering the jump to SmugMugPro just for this, I was not able to find any option in Zenfolio to allow others to upload images)

e) The ability to download/backup groups/all files easily - not just one-clicking away (preferably maintaining the folder structure)

So hopefully some of you regular users of Zenfolio and SmugMug can correct me on some of the above points (I hope :D ) or point me to another hosting option. Among numerous other option such as flickr, 23 etc. I was also looking at myfamily.com which seems to work with the general concept I'm looking for. However, I had problems with batch downloads, and customization in general.

Thank you very much for any help/input you can provide!

jacuff
26th of March 2010 (Fri), 07:03
Why not self host and use Gallery (http://gallery.menalto.com/)? (There are other alternatives to Gallery, but it's the one I've used in the past.) Gallery itself will do b through e, while several hosts have an "unlimited" storage option taking care of your a) requirement. Though it should be noted that there is really no such thing as unlimited storage.