Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

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I just spent a few lovely days in the desert shooting the bloom happening there (Joshua Tree, mostly Cottonwood area). I've dabbled in photography for about 20 years but I'm a no-talent casual at it. The small bag with my kit is altogether worth only a grand...

My biggest frustration at the moment is that there isn't an ideal home for my photos. I tried Smugmug, but found I didn't use it enough to justify the pricing. It targets Real Photographers and takes a little bit of fiddling about to get it set up. Instagram is Insta-no. Picasa is just another stone in Google's Graveyard. I'm >this< close to self-hosting Lychee, but one of the attractions to photography for me is that it's more about getting out and going places and aiming a camera at things, and I don't really want to corrupt that with the same sort of stuff I already do for a day job.

I'm never gonna sell a photo but friends and family like to see some of the things I've seen. Does anyone have a glowing review to offer for some photo hosting and management service?

I know it's not cheap, but I've really come to enjoy Adobe Lightroom, as well as the rest of the creative cloud suite. I also don't care about the social aspect of sharing my photos (comments, likes, favorites, etc...) -- so if you already have a CC subscription, don't care about social, and just want a place to post -- look into Adobe Portfolio.

Edit: I'm not advocating that you go subscribe to adobe just for the hosting! But if you already have the subscription but aren't making use of the hosting, it's definitely worth looking into. It's included in the subscription cost. Consider this my glowing review.

Lightroom is also the best I have found. Just this week I was able to send an album from a trip in 2012 to a friend and share some photos of a trail run last year with some new acquaintances at a conference directly from the iPhone app. You also get a no-code portfolio site included. I now just create best of albums for trips and text links to family, friends and coworkers. I don’t see any point in pursuing strangers approval of my photos and rarely is their ever meaningful and helpful critique on sites like Flickr.

Also, for context, I shoot JPEG only on a Fuji XE4 so don’t use the Lightroom editing tools much.

Lightroom classic is great. Has the newer lightroom even got luminosity/range masks yet?

> My biggest frustration at the moment is that there isn't an ideal home for my photos.

As a hobby photographer, I share my public photos on my own site [1] and syndicate to Pixelfed, Instagram and Glass [2]. Glass really has potential (photographer-oriented, small fee), but it has yet to stand the test of time.

For my private and "share with friends" use case, I'm still looking for a solid solution. Two options I'm considering are my NAS and OneDrive (where I have a 1TB space due to my Office subscription).

[1] https://photos.darekkay.com/

[2] https://glass.photo/

If you have the skills, self-hosting might be the way to go. There are a few options beyond Lychee these days [1].

[1]: https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries.

For me this mostly depends where my friends and family are online which invariably ends up being Facebook. I still use Picasa for local storage and simple edits and Gimp for more complex edits. Google Photos is handy for an automatic cloud backup of android phone pics and I have tried creating sharable albums there but they don't get many eyeballs when I share a link. Youtube channel for grandkid videos. I have a starred folder in Picasa for my best shots and every so often I copy that to a thumb drive to distribute to various family computers and the living room TV for use as a screensaver.

flickr is just perfect. why it's not on your list?

Low confidence in the platform? It's been around a while, but has also changed hands a few times and is owned by Smugmug now anyway, and I've got the impression that it is stagnant.

YMMV but I've been a happy Flickr customer for over a decade. They haven't modernized much so the site looks and feels old, but their pricing is very fair and there are still a lot of folks on it.

I have considered selfhosting myself, but it's a lot of work and features like "auto upload from my phone" and "privacy guard for pictures of my kids, but make login-free links for grandparents" are very nontrivial.

I agree, Flickr has lost its spark. It might be dying, it might not. But whatever it had is gone.

i think it's a wrong impression, try it. it's not super social; for this you can try instagram. but some flickr groups are just amazing. i am learning so much, training my eye...

An inkjet printer is what works for me.

Just like olden time, prints are the end state of my digital picture pipeline.

A side effect is that making pictures is a different experience now. What is interesting on a screen is different from what is interesting as a physical object.

For perspective, I usually print small at 4x6. It is faster, easier, takes less space.

More importantly it is less precious about things.

Good luck.

I'm in the middle of getting my family using Nextcloud and the Memories app for that. No idea how well it will work long term, but it's an idea.

I haven't used it much lately, but I opted for 500px. Similar to flickr

Flickr is still going.

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