MobileMe Gallery after iCloud

It seems to have turned Apple’s strat­egy for online photography on its head.

With MobileMe and iPhoto or Aperture, you could quickly and easily publish a gallery of selected images to share with friends, family, colleagues or clients. Not so with iCIoud, or at least not to the same degree.

iPhoto for iOS (a paid app from Apple, not part of the operating system) does have a Journals feature that will upload its results to your iCloud space, but its endlessly scroll­ing pages of images aren’t really comparable to MobileMe galleries.

Beyond that, iCloud’s sole function where your pictures are concerned is to sync them across multiple iOS devices through Photo Stream and to archive them on your Mac, for which you’ll still need iPhoto or Aperture, only one of which can be linked to your iCloud account at any time.

Indeed, there’s not even a web view through which you can view any images cur­rently sitting in your Photo Stream, so your only real choices when it comes to making them public are to set up your own gallery or use a third-party photo sharing service.

Journals

You can create Journals in the iPhoto app on an iPhone or iPad, the latter offering more features for editing and customization. It’s the nearest iCIoud comes to MobileMe’s galleries, but not a close match

iPhoto web pages

You can still use iPhoto to export galleries to your hard drive, and from there upload them to your own web space using a regular FTP app, whether to use as standalone pages or within a site. But with only two styles to choose from, once again the results lack the slick finish of the old MobileMe galleries.

In place of Galleries, try... Flickr

Photo sharing site Flickr doesn’t give you a great deal of control over the look of your gallery, but it does let you organize your photos into sets, organized by subject or whatever other criteria you like. With a free account you get up to 300MB of photo uploads and two videos of up to 90 sec­onds apiece per month, and only your 200 most recent uploads will be displayed in your photo stream. Upgrading to the $24.9 per year Pro account gives you unlimited uploads, bandwidth and storage.

Flickr

iPhoto and Aperture each have direct Flickr upload features, allowing you to link the application to your Flickr account, authorize it online and send images from your library directly to your Flickr Photo Stream. They can be organized into existing albums or used as the basis of a new one.

Flickr goes further than MobileMe gal­leries ever did by positioning your images on a map. This plugs a rather obvious gap in Apple’s former online offering, as both iPhoto and Aperture make it easy to add location data to your images, which MobileMe couldn’t use. Some cameras, and the iPhone and iPad, create this data automatically.

Flickr’s for commercial images

Flickr works with photo agency Getty Images to actively solicit new work for licens­ing through the service. Add your image to the group at flickr.com/groups/callforartists and a member of Getty staff will review its commercial potential. If it considers it to be saleable, you may be asked to join its line-up of photographers. This is unlikely to spell fame and fortune, but may mean you can get a few dollars here and there for licens­ing images to the many designers who trawl. You can also actively solicit the attention of Getty’s edi­tors by adding the Request to License link to your images. Sign up at flickr.com/account/prefs/gettyimages.

Alternatively, try... jAlbum

jAlbum (jalbum.net) is a Java-based gallery tool. Before you let its Java underpinnings put you off, it’s well-designed, good looking a responsive. It’s also free for personal use if you’re happy to include a discreet link back to the jAlbum site (if you’re not, its $17).

Each album is a separate project to which you can give a name and a descrip­tion. You can specify the layout of the index page, which metadata should be included alongside your images and how they should be ordered. You can drag images into your album either from the Finder or from a photo app, like iPhoto or Aperture. Double-clicking an image name lets you add a caption that’s displayed on the photo’s dedicated page.

jAlbum

jAlbum partners with Blurb to print photo books in the same way Apple offers branded book printing in iPhoto and Aperture.

Nine professional gallery designs are provided as standard, but if none of them suit your needs you can download new ones from the jAlbum site free of charge.

Once you’ve finished adding your pic­tures and giving them captions, click ‘Make album’ to create a gallery on your hard disk, ready for uploading by FTP. If you’ve already entered your FTP credentials or signed up for hosting from jAlbum, clicking Upload sends your gallery to the server.

This gallery (above) took around five min­utes to put together. We didn’t need to touch a single line of code, but we could optionally change the font, descriptions and metadata. We could also add user variables to improve search performance.