I can't bear the thought of losing my Pete & Pete screencap descriptions

December 24, 2011 6:09 AM

Help me drop Livejournal for good by finding a Scrapbook replacement.

I've been on Livejournal since 2001 and at some point snatched up one of their permanent accounts. It's been a long time coming but with the most recent (horrible) changes to the LJ interface and their (horrible) customer service I'm finally properly jumping ship. The problem is that Livejournal has been an integral part of my online identity for over a decade and there are some things I use it for that seem to not be found replicated anywhere else online.

Of course, the general blogging/journaling/community/fandom thing will all be done over on Dreamwidth. But it's LJ's poor old abandoned image gallery function, Scrapbook, that has me stringing it along. I have almost five thousand images on my scrapbook, all in elaborately organized galleries with customized styles for optimal viewing depending on type of image.

Scrapbook is very oldschool. Apparently the "new LJ" looming beyond the horizon will have a Scrapbook update as well but I don't want one! I'm clearly not a valued customer anymore and I'm quite concerned that if I don't pull all my images off now and put them somewhere else I will lose them. Many of them are only on my Scrapbook or lost on dusty ancient harddrives in a closet at my parents' house.

I'm prepared to pay money for a Scrapbook-like service. This includes:

1. simple uploading
2. a flexible tagging/folder/gallery system
3. public visual thumbnail galleries I can customize in appearance and link to people
4. the ability to put descriptions both on galleries and on individual image pages
5. no automatic resizing of any kind, but simple resizing of the image when viewing it on its own page within a gallery. (with a "click to view fullsize" button somewhere)
6. the ability to hotlink my images anywhere (this is key!)
7. reliable, speedy hosting
8. no fear of files being lost or removed if they're not regularly viewed (this happens on imgur, but not imgur pro as far as I can tell?)
9. preferably as standards-compliant as possible, so no flash dear god, easily navigable by blind people and so-on. simple!

I do NOT need any image editing and would prefer it to not be in my way when simply uploading a file.

I also have no desire to be part of a social network thing, like picasa's integration into the google pantheon of G+ hangers-on or twitter's... whatever twitter has, or anything like that. I just want a place to host my image files where I can see thumbnails and organize them elaborately and link them places on my own time.

I'm also trying to figure out if there's a way to scrape my Scrapbook account and batch download the whole thing, preserving the gallery structure, and then somehow reupload it somewhere else. If there isn't, I'm happy to slog through it manually, but if there's something out there then I would love to know.

I know about imgur pro, is that the best choice for me? I don't know that I like their gallery interface or the fact that the editing stuff is pushed, but I have very little experience with imgur. When I look at other image hosting services they're all aimed at particular markets - I would like to avoid flickr, for example. I have a huge variety of types of images, from gifs to thousands of screencaps to scans of my own private artwork, and none of them all fit well into one sort of flickr-like service. I need something more flexible and less focused.

Is there anything out there that fits my needs?

posted by Mizu to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

You might look at Gimme bar. I just found it this week, but it seems to offer some of what you're looking for
posted by Heart_on_Sleeve at 6:21 AM on December 24, 2011

I'm also trying to figure out if there's a way to scrape my Scrapbook account and batch download the whole thing

There's a Firefox extension coincidentally called Scrapbook that will batch download web pages, preserving their content and structure for offline viewing. It gives you options for downloading any pages linked to from a particular web page (and pages linked from those, etc., etc.)

I'm not familiar with Livejournal to know if it would work in your case though.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 6:33 AM on December 24, 2011

Most domain hosting accounts accounts come with Coppermine, Gallery, or some other photo organizer. Find one that works for you and spend $40 a year on a domain account and you'll have total control. Personally, I use the web album feature of gThumb (Linux photo app) to create the photo gallery on my blog (link in profile).
posted by COD at 6:57 AM on December 24, 2011