Personally I’d rather manage my own photos. I’ve been doing it for some time and have some 30,000 or so files (most are pictures) on the http://schelin.org site. Mainly I’ve just been putting the pictures on my local server and pushing out changes. This lets me have a local copy of the web site in case the server crashes (which it has in the past) and if the server is hacked, I can simply wipe the server and load up new files again.
I’ve been working on several web application projects over the past few years learning CSS, Javascript, PHP, and MySQL. This has given me the experience to finally whip up a better photo management site.
I was using a couple of manually updated text files. The files were parsed and imported into a new database. This database holds the event, picture, and other information so I can better manipulate it.
I’m also moving all the event documentation from the photo site over to this blog. That way I can again, easily manage the content here and still make all the photos available for viewing if that’s what you want to do. I’m also doing more investigation into the word press site configurations in order to better manage that content. One of the problems is I tend to use an 800px wide image but that mucks with the right side menu bar. I don’t want to snag a custom theme in part because of security issues. Having a default theme means when Word Press is updated, so is the theme and I’ve at least reduced the possible security vectors down a few notches.
In general, I’ll be pointing folks to the photo site since that’s where I manage the events themselves. Grouping the days into a single event, etc. Where this blog will hold the event or each individual day’s events.