Painting the Web

Image Storage

One thing that hasn't changed much in all these years of technological advancement is that serving images takes space on the disk and bandwidth. If anything, with the new space-guzzling cameras and multi-gigabyte storage cards, sometimes it takes a lot of space and considerable bandwidth.

You have a couple of different options for storing and serving up images. One is to store and serve them from your own server, either one you own, wholly, or one that you share with other people. The prices for these sites have gone down considerably, and you can pick up a couple of gigs of disk space and 30-50 GB of bandwidth for fifteen bucks a month, U.S.

Even with this generous allocation, though, you may find yourself pushing the envelope on space, bandwidth, or both. There are other alternatives to hosting images yourself, though most of these alternatives have constraints on usage attached.

Hosting on a Social Network Photo Site

Social networks are the big thing nowadays. These are sites where you use whatever service is provided, such as managing your photos for public access, but you also have access to several community features. The focus of these sites is not just to store photos, but to draw people into communities of like-minded folks.

One of the more popular sites is Yahoo!'s Flickr, found at http://flickr.com and shown in Figure 2-17. There are two different accounts, paid and free, and how many photos you can upload and whether you see ads or not depends on whether you've ...