Catshanghai

You can now see pictures of Jenny’s new collection on her website (www.jnfashionstudio.com), but this was only possible after we moved her pictures from Flickr to Picasa.

Flickr is an Internet photo sharing site that has been broken in China since the beginning of June. The site works, but you can’t see any images unless you install the Access Flickr plugin. Jenny’s site used to make use of the Flickr API to show galleries of her collections. Her site was effectively vandalised when Flickr stopped working in China. She couldn’t expect her local customers to install obscure Firefox plugins to be able to view photographs of her designs. I don’t suppose that the Chinese government was targeting Jenny, but it left us with an irritating headache of how to make her website accessible to customers.

I looked at a number of alternative photosharing sites including Photobucket and Zooomr. Today’s Shanghaiist had a blog post about a number of Chinese equivalents, but I learnt about those after we opted for Picasa. We chose Picasa, because it is owned by Google and offers 1GB of free storage before they start to charge. I am a Dreamhost customer and considered making greater use of their bundled open source galleries webapp. It works fine, but there is no embedded slideshows or wordpress integration plugins that work right out of the box.

Even though we chose Picasa, I still prefer Flickr’s powerful web based interface and it offers more features such as forwarding images to blogs and great cellphone support, but all modern Internet photosharing services have the same basic features to create albums, tag images and embed flash slideshows on your site. All signed up Google users automatically get a Picasa account. We still plan to cancel our pro Flickr accounts and hope they give us back some money.

I could have uploaded Jenny’s pictures straight from my computer to Picasa, but I am still improving my organisation skills so I lost track of the photos that needed to be in Jenny’s galleries. This meant I had to download the Flickr images and reupload them. Picasa has various editing and uploading tools for Windows, Mac and Linux. I like F-Spot Manager for Ubuntu Linux that makes it very easy to upload images to any web photo service.

Maybe Picasa will be blocked someday if someone publishes scandalous pictures of rioting in the countryside. Until that happens, Jenny’s website is working again.