Photo Galleries – Picasa, Flickr, Facebook… yet a lot of vacuum

There are lot of Photo Gallery services available but all of them have something missing – a big feature or important frills . Already coming from a Yahoo Photos heartbreak, I decided to do some research on features provided by these galleries. Here are the ones missing from biggies’ plates:

1. Original Resolution/Size not retained (unless you are a premium member). Picasa does but limited space.
2. Unlimited space. (Resolution & size of photos already increasing rapidly)
3. Auto-sharing notification on Facebook or other social networks.
4. Privacy concerns.
5. And most importantly, would Facebook or Picasa would still exist 10 years from now, and for free?

 

For these reasons, hosting my photos to these services did not make much sense and I decided to host my own gallery on my own hosting space. However, the job is not done yet. Finding the right software (a PHP script) with my kind of features is still far-fetched.  The two software that I could zero-in to, Gallery and Zenphoto provides only basic to intermediate level features. Not that I am a tough customer, but the social-media evolved much faster than these scripts.

Below is the minimal set of features I am looking for in a Gallery Software:

1. Stores Original Size
2. Converts to Thumbnails for listings
3. Login with Facebook/Yahoo/Google/OpenId
4. Good integration with Facebook for Comments, Likes
5. Secure Access (on individual albums as well as Photos) – Moderated Signup
6. Multi-upload tool
7. Supports all popular formats
8. Supports Video uploads as well
9. Photo Timeline kind of view
10. Easy backup for non-techies
11. Tags
12. Automatically posts to my Facebook wall with Thumbnail Sized image only

 

If you find a tool with above features, let me know in comments section. Or, if you do want the same tool, do drop a comment – I might decide to write one if none exists already.