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.