Picasa alternative or DIY solution to share photos & videos?

September 14, 2016 7:05 AM

I used to use Picasa to share family photos and videos. Then I switched to Dropbox. But now Dropbox doesn't have comments on photos anymore, so I'm looking for a better slideshow/gallery solution for the grandparents.

What I liked about Picasa and what I'm looking for now:

- easy to use slideshow or gallery,
- no need to register/log in to view (e.g. no Flickr, no FB),
- gallery protected with a password/link,
- storage and display of unlimited-size photos and videos (I'm ok with overall limits, I just don't want individual files to have size limits),
- captions (or comments) that are visible to the visitors (not just to the author of the photo),
- easy archiving of albums (e.g. download of a zip file containing html and images/videos).

I have basic webmaster skills and can set up a self-hosted solution if necessary, but I don't want to basically develop it from scratch.

Also, I don't want to manually create HTML pages for 300+ images and videos per year that I'm usually sharing, so some automation is necessary.

I'm willing to pay if the solution ticks all the boxes above.

And I'd really rather stay outside of Google universe.

Considering all of this, what would you suggest? Most websites I've looked at so far only allow photos or have ridiculously low size limits for videos.

posted by gakiko to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

- no need to register/log in to view (e.g. no Flickr, no FB),
- gallery protected with a password/link,

Can you explain these two a bit more? It sounds like you want to limit the people who can see the gallery but not have them log in, only use a password. Is that right?
posted by soelo at 7:24 AM on September 14, 2016

I think SmugMug covers all of these, but I don't use the commenting or password features, so I can't be 100% sure.
posted by primethyme at 7:43 AM on September 14, 2016

Best answer: Flickr does not require that you be logged in to view public photos. If you've restricted access to photos to friends/family (or just yourself, which is also possible), you can send "guest passes" to people who are not logged in so they can view them.

Flickr also lets you bulk-download all your photos.

If you want to do the self-hosted thing, Menalto Gallery was the standard, but went into hibernation a couple years ago. Koken looks pretty cool.
posted by adamrice at 8:14 AM on September 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

I believe Flickr requires you to upgrade if you want to bulk upload images. Also, it is owned by Yahoo, which is being purchased by Verizon, so there is no guarantee it will be around in three months.
posted by mecran01 at 12:48 PM on September 14, 2016

You can Bulk Upload Flickr photos using the website with no upgrade. It requires an upgrade to automatically upload photos from your PC, but bulk manual upload is still an option. Also, automatic uploading still works on their iOS app with no upgrade (probably Android, too).

IFTTT will be able to take those Dropbox pictures and add them to a lot of other places. What you would need to do is have a specific folder for just the ones you want published and only add 15 files at a time. Places you can send them include Tumblr, Blogger and Wordpress. If you can get a site on one of those services to behave the way you want, publishing might be easy. It could include comments/captions depending on how you set up the recipe.
posted by soelo at 1:12 PM on September 14, 2016

Response by poster: Wow, it seems that Flickr has all the features I thought it didn't have! Videos, guest pass/link, no login for viewing, 1TB of storage... Although, yes, I fear that its downfall is imminent, considering how's Yahoo been doing lately...
posted by gakiko at 2:12 AM on September 15, 2016