I know it takes more memory, server space, etc., but it would be great for for us to be able to share pics of our families, significant others, etc. Perhaps we set up a way to make donations through the website to Hardy to get it set up if that's what it takes to get it up and going...

..but photo galleries really kind of take on a life of their own. They require lots of disk space to do properly, and hold the potential to eat up all your bandwidth quota. In other words, not only do they start out expensive, but they can get *more* expensive.

What I think would be a better alternative would be to rely on everyone's own online photo galleries. Lots of people have Flickr accounts (what, you don't? They're free, why don't you?). Google also has a free image hosting service.

We can put a special link in everyone's profile. We can probably also collect all that info into a single page on the site, to make it easier to find all the pictures.

Those sites are really set up to do picture hosting well. And, it will be so much easier to ensure that new pictures are posted regularly (posting to Flickr and Google is easy, whatever we come up with here won't be nearly as nice or convenient). They also have *deep* pockets. :-)

So, what do you say, sound like a plan?

I don't mind hosting the photos on web server and maybe even work on a "drop-box" so others can upload to the server, I can put in a simple HTML page (i.e. my formatting) and share with the rest of us. Hope to get more ideas and comments, then build. Thanks again....Jamie

The hosting plan I have is pretty generous, but, yes, it does have a usage cap. My experience in the past, with hosts that offer unlimited plans, is that their uptime has always been questionable, or they belly-up and disappear. Not fun at all (I run daily backups now, so I'm covered, but that was a real pain). The long and short of it is, I'm happy to pay a fair rate for what I'm getting, but that means I need to be careful with what I do with the server.

I also share this account with my brother (just a personal site) and my sister (her photography site will move over as soon as I can finish up the new one). I'm expecting Stacie's images to use up quite a bit of the available space and bandwidth...

So, anyway, more detail than you probably wanted, but there it is. For me, adding a gallery to this site will make running everything else on the server too complex, and will be hard for me to sort out how to parcel out the costs of upgrading service.

I think the alternative detailed here will work well for us.

OK, not really.
 
Hardy, I agree, this should "serve" our needs for now. :P