Disabled gallery2

I have disabled our installation of gallery2, as I hinted to before.  We have changed to use flickr and facebook to share photos with our friends and family.  The main reason that I disabled it was because all of our photos, that we decided to share, were publicly available.  gallery2 does support user authentication, but it is hard to have family create accounts on the site.

Since most people that we are sharing photos with have flickr or facebook accounts, that was a hurdle that we didn't have to go over to allow us to restrict access to our photos.

Abandoning gallery2

I think that soon I will be abandoning our use of gallery2.  A few years ago we started using gallery2 to share our photos with friends and family.  gallery2 allowed us to upload the photos and let our friends comment on them. When I set this up, there weren't many other photo sharing sites.

Now, we upload all of our photos to flickr for backup purposes.  And we select some of those photos to share with friends and family.  In addition we have started to use facebook to share photos.  The one good thing about using flickr and Facebook is that it is easy to set up permissions to allow only the people that you want to see your photos.  The one downside is that there is another company that I would have do deal with for the photos.

I will probably not be uploading anything to our gallery2 installation, but leave what is there now there.  We will probably just be posting things to flickr or Facebook.

Cancelling Plaxo

I have finally decided to cancel my Plaxo account. I was not pushed over the edge when Plaxo was spamming people with invites.  Also, I didn't cancel my account when Plaxo was sending birthday notifications for friends of friends or for business contacts.

The problem that I have been having with Plaxo is how it deals with imported data.  For example, when you associate a flickr account to your Plaxo account, Plaxo creates an album in your Plaxo account.  This album shows your public flickr photo.  I have two problems with Plaxo's integration.

1. Photos do not include links to flickr page for that photo.  I believe that this part of the terms of service of flickr to include that link.


2. Plaxo implements its own comment system for photos.  Personally, I want all comments for photos entered on the flickr page itself.

I like how Facebook integrates with flickr, with the Flickr app.  On Facebook, an is added to your News Feed, but clicking on it will take you to the Facebook pages.

Plaxo does have a good solution for synchronizing contacts.  I have used it to synchronizing contacts between Thunderbird, Outlook and my iPhone.  Since I have switched to Google Mobile Sync, I don't have a need for Plaxo.