Over the last couple of weeks as I’ve been ramping up to do the whole “fancy new camera” thing, I began to realize that my free Flickr account probably isn’t going to cut it as far as volume of images, and flexibility for things like set creation etc.

At first I just assumed that I’d convert my account to a “Pro” account to give me the unlimited bandwidth and the necessary freedom to muck about while taking advantage of the nice pre-built Flickr infrastructure. But as time went on, a few people suggested that a photoblog may be a better way to go. Given the added flexibility of being able to customize the entire site to my liking (not to mention the fact that my photos would be ad-free) is a big plus for me. My biggest concern is the potential time involved in maintaining the separate site.

Darren is using pixelpost for his photoblog iSpie, and it seems to do a nice job, though I haven’t seen the admin interface yet. Other options I’ve been looking at are Atom Photo Blog, similar to pixelpost. It provides a quick clean interface to photos and allows comments etc. Yet another candidate is the Yet Another Photoblog plugin for WordPress. I did take a few moments to try this one out. The integration with WordPress was quick and seamless as we’ve come to expect from the “better” plugins.  It was a bit disappointing on execution though, providing very minimal “photoblogging” functionality.

At the end of the day, I’ll probably end up doing both.  Flickr Pro to store, manage and share all of my photos with the community, and post back the photos to my main blog when a longer commentary is required. Or I’ll do something completely different!