Economy be damned, I’m shopping for a new home. Not a place to live, but a place online to store my photos.
Apple’s MobileMe Gallery is about to join the history books as a free service that didn’t make it to the future.
What can I do with a few thousand photos that I want to share with family and friends? Facebook? Instagram? Flickr? The choices are many and varied. One I came across this week is called InstaWeb. With one exception, this would be a good replacement for my old MobileMe Gallery.
InstaWeb is a free Mac app that takes your photos and creates a web site. That’s all well and good, right?
And that’s where the good ends.
InstaWeb is simple to use. It automatically grabs photos from iPhoto. All it takes is a click to the Make Site button and you get a photo gallery online.
So far, so good. How can a company give you a free app to create a photo gallery online and not make any money?
Uh, they can’t. InstaWeb requires a CoffeeCup S-Drive account. That gets you a website, a place to upload photos, a webpage editor, and a few other tools, including a link to your site.
S-Drive is billed as one-click web hosting. Plans range from Freebie to Webbie to Shopkeeper to Total Pro and up to 20 gigs of storage.
All kinds of attractive little extras are included. There’s a site designer, a shopping cart, statistics, forms, and more. As web site hosting plans go, the monthly rates are competitive with typical website hosts, but not the list of features.
This is more for the point and click and I’m done crowd. But the InstaWeb app is close to what I’m looking for. An easy way to create a photo album or gallery online.
You grab the photos you want to use, pick a website theme, then publish the photos online. That’s about as easy as it can get, considering the price.
But that’s also about all you get (considering the price). The Instant Website includes a home page, a photo gallery, and two more galleries. You can add text and images and select from a number of layouts.
It all looks nice, and the entry price is low, but so is capability. This is no match for a few hundred photos in an online gallery, let alone my orphaned MobileMe Gallery of thousands of photos.
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