My "Pro" account of flickr just expired, it was not bough by me but a gift. I used it intensely and liked, now I am back at the basic level and missing a lot of the features. At about 25$ is not a big deal, I could easily renew it but I don’t want that: there are a lot of news everywhere about Yahoo willing to sell to Microsoft and Microsoft willing to buy Yahoo, I don’t endorse such a deal, I don’t want to give any of my money directly or indirectly to Microsoft and I don’t want my photos to end in Microsoft’s yard – I consider Microsoft the worst thing that happened to the computing industry.
Currently I am looking for a self hosted solution (advices appreciated), to run my own gallery, on my own hosting under my own domain, integrated with my other websites. I will keep my flickr account and using it until the deal with MS is closed since I have a lot of friends there and want to stay in touch with them.
What can I say more? Shame on you flickr, shame on you Yahoo: in little more than 3 months I was a "Pro" I brought you a 6 digits number of page views, if you can’t monetize that, maybe you deserve this faith.
Gallery2 is the one that comes up most times when I’ve seen people talk about self-hosting pics… Might be worth a try!
I should have mentioned that, I run a test instance of Gallery2 and another one of Zenphoto, but didn’t liked any of them enough: Gallery2 is too complicated and Zen too basic and both of them use the old album based approach, unlike flickr’s photostream.