Photo Albums exploration

I'm experimenting with a new photo galleries feature, and I'd love everyone's input on how you'd like them to work.

The general idea is that you'd be able to create albums and upload some photos to share with readers of our site.  You could link to them in forum posts, for example, or people could just browse through galleries that are publicly visible. 

I'd like to take an Agile/iterative approach to building the feature, so please help me understand what's critical to you vs. nice to have.  I can likely get the initial feature set up and running pretty quickly and then continue adding features to it as time goes on.

Also, if you know of any sites that have particularly great photo galleries for users, please let me know and I'll go check them out.

Thanks in advance!

No opinions on this?  How about you Keppinger theremin builders coming from the Yahoo group?

A full screen slideshow option would be nice. :-)

it would be nice to be able to upload videos, but i know that is a question of server space...

I'd like to post some photos, but I haven't, because even photos will take more server space than text, and I have no idea how much server headroom you have....Please give us some guidelines as to what kind and how much content we could post...

@gordonc - Thanks.  Definitely on the list :)

@amethyste - Agreed, but yes... YouTube or other services might be a better place to store videos.  They take server space and data bandwidth, both of which get expensive quickly.

@mollydad - Thanks.  That's one thing I'm trying to see how much space other similar community sites give people to get an idea of how much we'll need.  My host is fairly reasonable with 500MB costing only an extra $5/month.  It's likely we'll try one limit and then play with it as we see how much people use the feature.

Some other questions:

- should all albums & photos be public, or should we limit some just to registered members?

- should we implement some kind of "Friend" or "buddy" feature so you can share photos only to people who are your "buddies"?

- should we store full-size images, or chop them down to what can fit on a screen like Facebook does? 

Thanks all!!

I think a way to make some photos public, and some for buddy/friend only. Crop only if headroom/band width becomes a problem.

 In His Service --- Dana

Probably stating the obvious here...

A permanent gallery of historically and universally significant theremins. (Although, coalport's already got that pretty much nailed.)

A "hall of fame" of significant and select member supplied photos?

A small, permanent storage for individual members, can be set public or private.

An area for short term posting of photos for clarification of ideas and postings.

(If it were to turn into a depository for photo's of kitties, puppies, vacations, etc., I would be very disappointed.)

Could you set it up so that we would just post img tags from sites like apjotobucket and the like? Thatmight save on server space.

You can actually do that now by clicking the little image icon in the toolbar below to insert images in forum posts.  Or would you like to be able to link to other hosted photos from a photo gallery?