On-line printing photos should not be this hard!

Are there are any other ways to store, manage, share and print our photos without being locked in to a single or subset of 'approved' suppliers?

OUR STORY

( for those that are bored with their life and want to be bored by ours )

My wife wanted to send a lot of photos to a company of her choice to be printed into a book. This time we chose BIG W Photos.

Should be easy.

PHOTO 'STORAGE'

Our digital photos are as well ordered as a junk shop: everything is in one place but no one knows exactly where.

To avoid having photos and duplicated photos spread across 20,000 devices in our family I have been trying to get all photos de-duplicated and uploaded to a cloud - I choose Picasa but it could have been any service.

UPLOADING

Getting photos there was not easy. Our cr48 ChromeBook would not work either by plugging in our camera or its SD card. So I switched to a laptop running Ubuntu. This worked but it was tedious.

SENDING TO BOOK PRINTER

Our chosen printing service is not on PicasaWeb's list so we now needed to download all photos to be printed and then upload them to our printer.

You can not do this from PicasaWeb unless you have a Picasa application installed. Google stopped supporting Picasa for Linux some time ago. I think this is good as we should be using web apps to become more device independent.

RE-DOWNLOADING

I discovered that I can download a zip file of all photos in an album from Google+.

Why can't I do this from PicasaWeb?

First we had to move or copy selected photos from one album to a new album because you can not download selected photos using Google+ - just an album.

UPLOADING

Now we have our selected photos in a directory on a laptop (again!), we could now upload them to our book printer.

None of this makes sense. This is daft!

TO FIX THIS WE NEED CLOUD PRINTING

If our printer was truly a cloud printer then we should be able to one-time-share or one-week-share our photos with them. They could then download what we selected and shared, print them and post a book to us.

This would be a bit closer to 'cloud' printing.

Mac to Linux: Ubuntu is better than good enough.

When I purchased my first Mac in 2005, my intention was to get some good hardware, avoid any Microsoft tax and run Linux.

The closest I came was Ubuntu 9.04 in 2009, but I was tied to iTunes for my Ipod Touch and a little stuck with iPhoto.

I tried again in 2010 but I could not get Ubuntu 10.04 working well enough.

More recently I purchased a Nexus One Android phone and gave away the iPod. To do this I had to divorce iTunes. This turned out to be easy. I hardly needed any apps or games and I never purchased any music. So all I had to do was copy music files from the iTunes directory into the Nexus One.

A good friend (who is really my beta tester for... well... everything) got Ubuntu 10.10 working nicely on his Mac and I quickly tagged along. I have not run OSX for 2 weeks now and I don't miss it.

Ubuntu is better than good enough.

Here is his How-To.

I am now moving my iPhoto pictures to Picasa and onto the web using 20GB of Google storage for $5/year. Then I'll clean up my files on OSX and do something else with the partition. I still have another small OSX partition to allow me to upgrade any Apple firmware and to check hardware such as the battery. It also means I have OSX should I need it.

I wonder if OSX will run under VirtualBox?