What's my best bet for a hosted photoblog?

May 3, 2011 6:50 PM

What's my best bet for a hosted photoblog?

I'm going to open a photoblog, a new thing for me. Most of my prior experience has been with written blogs in a linear timeline style.

My general outline is a blog about local architectural history that is as much browsable and tagged gallery as a daily blog. (What I am doing is reconstituting online a study of the county's historic sites that I helped my dad with 35 years ago.) I would have a posting tempo of up to maybe half a dozen pictures a day, and would like to highlight new content using social media, but not necessarily every single post. I would need to have room for anything from a simple caption to a multi-para house history. Most important, I would need to add lots of fairly free-form tags, denoting the age, style, location, and status of the structure, such that it will be easy to click on a tag and bring up a gallery view. I will have comments, but don't expect the feature to be heavily used -- and would consider a Facebook-login-based system.

I fully expect most of my traffic to come from Google as people look at individual houses (their own?) and get drawn in. There's almost nothing that's date-sensitive about this, but I would like it simple to see that there is new content. I don't have a great need for a canonical url, but I'd prefer something parsable.

Now, I can't host any of this right now, although I might want to move to self-hosting later on. I could upload the photography to Flickr or anywhere else that works well.

At some point, I envision a geocoded interface as well, so there could be a map interface, and tips on how to build that in now would be appreciated.

I like the simplicity of Tumblr, but don't expect it to be as robust as I would need down the road. WordPress and TypePad both have a lot of support and mindshare, but are more targeted at the midrange. I'm less familiar with squarespace and textpattern, but both of them look very attractive and presentation-oriented.

posted by dhartung to computers & internet (4 answers total)

I'm a pretty heavy Textpattern user, and I'm wondering if you've found a hosted Textpattern service, or if that was just a typo...you pretty much have to host it yourself, AFAIK. Also it's extremely flexible for people who don't want to learn PHP, but the tradeoff is a longer learning curve for beginners than, say, Wordpress.

If you want to start out with Flickr (highly recommended) and then possibly move to Textpattern, at that time you'd probably use a plugin like this one.
posted by circular at 10:12 PM on May 3, 2011

What robust features do you need beyond what TypePad does? From what you're describing, it sounds like you want one of the mid-range options, no?

And you know, you probably haven't looked at it in a while, but good ole' Blogger's got a lot of the capabilities you want, and you've already got one kicking around. :)
posted by anildash at 11:05 PM on May 3, 2011

circular, I hadn't entirely rejected self-hosting, just see it as impractical for me right now.

anil, I haven't played with any blog software in a couple of years (never in a photoblog sense), and hoped for an off-the-shelf solution that would minimize experimentation and dead ends, that's all. I have no doubt that with work I could get just about anything to do something close to my ideal, I just want less work! At one time I would have relished the challenge, but these days I'm busy as hell in real life is all.
posted by dhartung at 12:25 PM on May 4, 2011

Use flickr.
Later when you are ready to move to a self-hosted solution you can use something like Wordpress+flickr plugin to display the collection. That way you can get away with a low space/bandwidth hosting package.
posted by WizKid at 1:05 PM on May 4, 2011 [1 favorite]