No surprise here… .Mac has gotten pretty stale in the Web 2.0 era, and for the last several months I’ve been telling anyone who’d listen that Apple would end up offering some sort of Flickr+YouTube mashup. And now they have. The only thing I’m still waiting on are those Safari social features.
The .Mac Web Gallery is different from a YouTube and Flickr in that it doesn’t support tags and searches, which I favor. Tagging photos in Flickr became some weird obsessive hassle. And when I did bother to get around doing it, it easily allows folks to swipe my pics (with or without my permission). The other problem that I’ve had with Flickr, is that while it’s powerful for those wanting to dig in, the average Joe (or my mom) may not have such an easy time with the paradigm and lingo. So I’m all in favor of Apple’s simple presentation: I have a gallery of albums. Pick one. Surprisingly, Apple does display the extended photo details and provides individual album RSS feeds. The seamless and efficient integration with iPhoto is impressive and pretty much what you’d expect from Apple. But, while I do appreciate the relatively spartan web interface for visitors, I’d like a little more control on the back-end… and I assume we’ll see that at some point, along with even more storage.
So, while the $99 .Mac annual subscription fee seems excessive (only 10GB?) and you also need the $79 iLife ’08 to populate your albums, I did pay up. In the name of science. So go check out my Web Gallery and first Album to get a sense of how it looks and operates. And while it’s true I’m no Thomas Hawk (and I still only use cameras that fit in my pocket), these pics are dreary because it was mostly rainy and overcast.
i’ll have ilife ’08 on friday. i still can’t justify paying $99 for .mac…i pay less a year to host my whole domain with 10 times the storage through godaddy. i must say though, your web gallery seems much snappier then a lot of other .mac sites i have visited
Yeah, the $99 stings, especially since I won’t make use of most of the other .mac services. But I just had to try it. The way the Albums live updates/syncs with iPhoto is impressive – very well done. I do wonder if they’ve tried to get too clever with some of these “Web 2.0 effects” which slows performance. I honestly don’t need photo reflections.
The browsing is distracting under firefox in Linux — the images flash when you change from image to image. I don’t see this with picasa web albums. (plus they are cheaper to boot)
That’s partially what I meant by more control. I’d like to specify Mosaic as the only layout. I think it looks better. However, I still have my Picasaweb albums too and I do like the way they preload images behind the scenes so the transitions are smooth. (For a similar effect on .mac, try the Carousel view.) I still haven’t found the perfect online solution (not even the roll-your-own stuff), but for set up and maintenance Apple’s is the most efficient.
As one of the old iTools users (.mac when it was free), and then a .mac user for two or three years after (I really didn’t want to lose my @mac.com address), I have to say that I’m still underwhelmed with where Apple has gone with this service.
I agree, Dave: The interface looks slick. But how do I post a picture to my blog? How do I order prints of the photos if I’m just a user? And, yes, from a networking standpoint, a lack of tags is a massive downside.
I have to admit: Flickr still rules the roost on this one for me – Apple is not going to convince me to re-up with the interface changes and a paltry 10GB of space. I love Apple, and I enjoy some of the iLife apps, but .mac still just fails to impress (for me).
Geoffrey, there is an option I can toggle that allows download of ~I believe~ larger pics. And in Firefox, if I right click on an image and select “Copy Image Location” I’m given a URL straight to the file, though it’s larger than I would use in a blog. Flickr is nice in providing so many different resolutions. Ordering prints is a good question – I’d rather make my mom do the work. Yes, 10GB is stingy. (Especially since I’ve got so much unused storage and bandwidth within my ZNF hosting package which I’m also paying for. Not to mention I had a paid Pro Flickr account before I canceled in protest.)
Exactly… I’m specifically thinking of my wife and my mother-in-law. My wife loves Flickr and has really embraced it as a way to share photos with the family, but her mother still doesn’t get the whole idea of digital photography (especially showing them to co-workers). The solution was to show her how to order prints off of Flickr (which satisfied her need for hardcopies).
As for the blogging bit: I have to admit that I’m spoiled by the built-in tools from places like Flickr and YouTube since it means you can compose the post and not mess around with HTML or links (and, yes, I am a geek, but I’m in tech support, so I try to make my personal life as simple as possible so I’m not troubleshooting there, too).
I also agree that $99 is steep for the services I tend to use. In the past, at renewal time, I have saved a good $20 just by ordering it from Amazon.com instead:
http://www.amazon.com/Apple-Mac-4-0-Online-Service/dp/B0007LW230
They’ve really got a good scheme going. It’s hard to pay for one of the two products (iLife 08 and .Mac) without going for the companion product to take advantage of all of the features. Good for Apple’s business though. I’m certainly tempted. The more fancy features of the web gallery are a bit sluggish on older machines, however, such as the carousel view.