Fri Jan 28, 2005 9:35 pm 
However I did this primarily for *one* specific feature (2a below) and would have preferred pbase overall if this & some other features were available, which is why I am posting here. (because next year I would like to switch back, photobucket is kind of crummy in some ways)
I am also curious whether anyone else agrees with me (or if I'm just a control freak
). This is a long post, but I wanted to get this off my chest.
1. Modes of use
Basically I have a few ways I'd like to have an online image account:
(a) Galleries here, to share publicly if someone knows my username.
(b) Galleries here, to share publicly, but only if I post a link to them (security through obscurity).
(c) Galleries here, to share privately with selected people (need a password)
(d) Images I would like to store here, so I can link to them as needed on other sites (bulletin boards, etc.).
(e) As an image-hosting site for a set of webpages that I put together exactly the way I want.
I could have used pbase for all of these except, although (b) is not obvious and I didn't discover it until after I signed up for photobucket.
It would also be nice to use pbase:
(f) As a web-hosting site where you could also upload .htm files
they are a small fraction of the bandwidth/space of .jpg & I don't understand why the image-hosting sites don't seem to offer this feature.)
2. Access control / anonymity
However I'm kind of picky about access control & would like --
(a) "Security through obscurity" at the image level:
for people to have to know a certain URL in order to see the image, so that just because I decide to share *one* of my images with the world, it doesn't mean I want to share all of them.
(b) "Security through obscurity" at the gallery level:
if I want to share one gallery on one website's forum, it doesn't mean they can see all my other public galleries without knowing where to look.
(c) Anonymity at the image level:
to share an image on a website, without giving people a way to figure out my account name/number & thereby access other information about me.
(d) Anonymity at the gallery level
to share a gallery on a website, without giving people a way to figure out my account name/number & thereby access other information about me.
This gives me some more control when I use my pictures like in (1b), (1d), and (1e).
With the way pbase is set up now, I get (2b) [if I uncheck the "public gallery" box for a particular gallery... ]
But otherwise, it appears that if someone has a link to any image that is public, they can peruse all of the galleries that are public in your entire account.
For (1a), I don't really care about that; I figure that if I'm making it that public, I don't care who sees those images.
For example:
If I post this link ( http://www.pbase.com/image/37887303 ) into a webpage, the URL itself says nothing about me or anything, it's just an anonymous image ID on the pbase site. (Which goes halfway towards image anonymity (2c).)
However, if you go look at that, all of a sudden you can see all of my account (except for any galleries I have password-protected or non-public).
I signed up for photobucket primarily because it allows this kind of "security by obscurity". I can post an image, e.g. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v235/ ... 000429.jpg , and because I've designated my account "private", that's all you can see unless you know the names of other images in that account.
Photobucket gives me (2a) but not (2b,2c,2d), and they don't allow password protection -- once I've posted a link to an image in a public place, I've lost control of access to that image unless I rename it.
If I post this link ( http://www.pbase.com/jms_nh/misc ), anyone can see my "misc" gallery which is not a "public" gallery. That gets me (2b) -- you have to know the name of the gallery to see it. What I don't like is that "public" doesn't have a consistent meaning between galleries & images: galleries that are not public can still be accessed by anyone as long as they know the gallery name, whereas images that are not public can't be accessed by anyone except the owner. Pbase should really have used the names "public"/"hidden"/"private".
I would like to be able to set things up so that if I post only the image ID link ( http://www.pbase.com/image/37887303 ) rather than the link w/ my account ( http://www.pbase.com/jms_nh/image/37887303 ), then only the image in question would be shown, and all the information about account name, gallery name, etc. would not be listed. This would accomplish (2a) and (2c).
The gallery-level feature (2d) could be accomplished if pbase had a "virtual" numeric ID alias for each galleries. E.g. rather than posting a named gallery link ( http://www.pbase.com/jms_nh/fauna ) I could post ( http://galleries.pbase.com/1020304 ) and it would only show images in that gallery w/o my account name.
I don't think either of these features would be that hard to set up. Again, they are the primary reason I went with photobucket even though I feel pbase is far superior at a technical level.
Am I paranoid or something? No (or why would I be posting a link to my pictures at all?!?!?!), it's just that there are different groups of people who will see my images (relatives, friends, members of a forum on photography, random people who visit my webpage, google-surfers, etc.) and the photos I would share with one group are not usually the photos I would share with another group.
3. Customization
This is less important to me...
I wanted to set up my gallery in certain ways and I gave up. CSS features are great and a big benefit to pbase.
However, when I started getting into captions and making a gallery tree, etc., it was starting to become quite cumbersome, and I realized it would be better for me to make my own webpage to show some of my images (I'm working on a taxonomically-organized website for plants in New England.) and link to the image-hosting site rather than try to construct a gallery directly.
Barring that (which is a lot more work!!!!), it would be nice to have some kind of a "configuration file" for each gallery where you could just upload one file "____.cfg" and it would contain data for all the captions. (Rather than having to set all that up through an "edit gallery" GUI!!!! Painful when you have lots of images.)
Options to take titles and/or captions from the EXIF/IPTC data (perhaps with some special code like %IPTC.Caption%) would be very handy & even easier than that "configuration file"
The other thing worth considering is being able to designate a special gallery called "prototype" or "source" or something, where you put *all* of your photos there. Then if you want to create a gallery with a subset of those pictures, you upload some kind of configuration file which just lists which pictures should show up in the gallery (with the server looking in the prototype gallery to find them).
4. Other features
(a) Testing -- To see what other people see more easily w/o having to log out first
I guess you can use two different browsers, e.g. Firefox to edit the gallery and IE to view it (so that the login cookie is only on Firefox & IE doesn't know you're logged in).
Might be nice to be able to access your images through "notme.pbase.com" and have the server ignore the fact that you're logged in.
(b) Upload / move images via FTP for drag & drop access (photobucket allows this)
(c) Linking to an image by name. In order to link to an image, you have to know the ID number. That's a very manual process & gets in the way if you develop a web page on your local computer & then have to change all the img links when you upload them to pbase. If you have dozens or hundreds of images, this is a pain.
(d) Having a way to download a list of the images in my account which correlates the ID number with the original filename. This would let me help automate my web page creation process.
5. What I like about pbase
I have to add this because there are some things that are really nice about pbase.
(a) The look and feel -- it's a no-nonsense professional look. Not goofy or dumb or fancy. Just very well-done.
(b) The noncommercialism -- yes you have to pay, but it's affordable & there are no ads.
(c) The name -- I ruled out "smugmug" & some other sites because the names are kind of silly. I wouldn't use a hostname like "photos-for-cheapos.com" (silly) or "xvarbiosom1234.com" (too obscure)
(d) The upload-by-zip feature, very easy. (Although I wish you could have a zip file with a file structure that would translate subdirectories in the zip file into galleries.)
(e) CSS support
(f) EXIF support
(g) The whole small-medium-large-original sizes thing.
I might switch to pbase next year (or sooner if there were some really cool features!), we'll see...
