From PicaSto

HTML Image Galleries

The most common way to publish images on the internet is to create an image gallery in HTML and upload it together with the images on a web server. Publishing such image galleries has no other requirements besides a web hosting account, which are available easily, as is software for creating these galleries from either a plain folder of images or a self-administered image library like in iPhoto or Picasa.

However, to keep up with image galleries from multiple publishers, the user has to regularly check many websites, which is tedious as well as a waste of bandwidth. Moreover, HTML galleries force the visitor to use the HTML page as user interface, which is something HTML is not very well suited for. Because of the variety of gallery styles, parsing the page and extracting the metadata manually for presenting it with a custom user interface isn't feasible either.

Centralized Photo Sharing Sites

Lately, centralized photo sharing sites like Flickr™ have experienced a bit of a rush in the wake of the general hype of "tagging" or "folksonomies" as well as content syndication via RSS. Flickr™ offers a Web API for non-commercial use by outside developers via XML-RPC, SOAP or REST, which can be used to fetch metadata about photos and photosets for use for example in an external photo viewer like Organizr. Users can specify privacy settings for their photos, allowing only certain users to look at them.

Nevertheless, if a user has an own web server available, the physical proximity to the server can accelerate and simplify image uploading, and therefore represent an advantage over a public server which is possibly quite distant. In addition, not everybody may entrust their images to a single authority which could alter its terms of use or terminate a user's account at any time, thereby in the worst case rendering all uploaded photos inaccessible [1].