And the winner is...

Diddlbiker jumped head-over-heels into the whole bloggin thing. Years and years ago, when I was a speaker at the Nationale Office Dag conference in Holland, organizer Henk Wildschut emphasized about our presentations: pictures! pictures! People love pictures!
Clearly, I like pictures, too. So my blog needed to show pictures. That means that you'll need a picture hosting service. Now, I could say, "long story short, picpile, but I'm not doing that - that's what's blogging all about, right?
In did some quick research on hosting pictures and came quickly to the conclusion that there are actually three different categories of picture hosting services:

• Free, no deeplinking (example: Walgreens. Very limited, and usually the only way you can show people your pictures is by some kind of email invitation. Not good. I still have an account, though, because there's a Walgreens around the corner and the whole point of their photo service is the fact that you can print the pictures.


• Free, deep-linking allowed. This, of course, is what picpile is all about. A 100% free service (not like the pay-sites crippled unless you upgrade) with reasonable accesibility and excellent deep-linking options. The price, as I have learned: not super reliable. I'm okay with downtime, I'm not okay with three days of downtime - and then not being able to upload pictures for another two days. Another problem is that I was never able to figure out how to give somebody a link to a gallery. "Fred, I have pictures of your son's birthday party, you can check them out here" never worked. Well, I have the Walgreens site for that (and you can print them from there as well), but it's inconvenient.


• Pay sites. The downside is clearly paying money, but on the other hand, it means that the provider has more financial space, is reliable, and you don't get commercials mixed in with your pictures when people view them (picpile has the nasty habit of throwing in commercials of pretty randy date matching sites). Paysites also have a very rich feature set. But, you will have to pay some money (usually around $25 per year, although I saw a British site that charged GBP 45 per year...) and I AM Dutch, so I'd rather not spend it if possible.
  

So, for a while I was happy with picpile, but then the service became less reliable, and the fact that you couldn't move the pictures around to different albums after posting was another hassle. There are other free services, but TANSTAAFL, and they're usually limited in the amount of storage space and/or bandwidth - something you'll run out of eventually. So I've decided to invest some money in a subscription service. Originally I wanted to get a Pbase account, but in the end I deciced to go for Flickr. Just like Pbase, Flickr has the ability to show Exif data. And although Pbase still has an appeal to me because it is clearly more oriented towards serious photographers, two things made me decide to go for Flickr: the community idea - everybody who's looking at my pictures can comment them, and the vendor. Flickr is backed by Yahoo. Yahoo is really, really big, but lost the search engine war with Google. So they're going into the niche market of communities, where they're really big in. And Flickr is one of their flagship products. That means, in my opinion, that Flickr's feature set, already rich, will just grow more and more in the future. And it's a great place to put your pictures, of course.