: Static pages for large photo album I'm looking for advice on software for managing a largish photo album for a website. 2000+ pictures, one-time drop (probably). I normally use MarginalHack's

@Fox8124981

Jekyll, with a photo gallery plugin like github.com/ggreer/jekyll-gallery-generator Unfortunately, that one doesn't have pagination but you could get round that with subgalleries.

Generate everything locally, then just upload the HTML and images to something like S3 or Cachefly.

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@Shanna517

If you know Python/Perl, why don't you just write a script that generates a paginated gallery? That's pretty easy to do.

Also, it's pretty easy to find out the revenue model of most free web services. The vast majority of them fall into either a freemium model (99% of users pay nothing, subsidized by the 1% that pay for a premium subscription) or are subsidized by advertising, or they may use a combination of both.

Open source companies like Automattica (the makers of Wordpress) also use their free products/services to promote themselves and their platform, and they make money off of enterprise licensing, support and consulting.

And then there are mega corporations like Google where their core business is able to subsidize lots of unrelated products that they provide just to capture mindshare, grow their brand, retain thought leadership, and to have a strategic foothold on new markets.

But, at the end of the day, what does their revenue model matter? All that should matter is their privacy policy, their security policy, and their data migration policy. With companies like Google, you pretty much have nothing to worry about (Google also takes a particularly strong stance on the last point; their position has always been that it's your data, and you should be able to take it with you, so there's no threat of a vendor lock-in).

The point is...

If you're unable to provide a reasonably modern photo gallery/sharing experience, then you're really not doing anyone any favors by hosting their galleries, even for free. Because there are a ton of exceptional dedicated photo gallery hosting services out there that deliver a rich user experience with lots of useful features.

I mean, I could host all of my friends & family's photos if I wanted to, and I can actually do it on a decently robust CMS and code in any features that they might request. But it just makes much more sense to put the photos on Flickr, Picasa, Photosynth, Facebook, etc. It just makes the photos much eaiser to view, manage, use, share for the end users. Not to mention, the CDNs that these professional services use offer much greater availability and performance than anything you'd likely be able to provide.

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@Bryan171

Haven't used it for a while, but I always used to use Gallery:
gallery.menalto.com/

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