I've been seeing so many WordPress blogs with integrated Flickr photo streams showing off their photos and it's really making me want to do something similar with my photos. If I had an easy way to share photos I think I would do a lot more quality photography (just as this blog allows me to easily write and publish anything).
I created a Flickr account awhile back and uploaded some photos to my account to try out the features. Flickr is OK, but I hate the idea of relying on someone else's service. Plus, there's the whole paying-for-extra-storage thing that I really don't want to think about. I'm sure I could modify the script powering my current gallery to make it integrate more nicely with this blog and perhaps even take some design lessons from Flickr.
Check out smugmug.com – I have a pro account which is 140.00 a year. On the pro, you can fully customize your layout – which you would have no problem doing. My account: http://www.dajatuphoto.com (I haven’t done any customizing to it)
I’m just really hell-bent on hosting my own photos. I hate the idea of giving someone else control over all my stuff, especially when I’m going to put all that time into organizing it. And since I already have so much web space available, I feel like I can’t justify paying for a service.
Even if there was a free service, I’d be too paranoid to host important stuff with them (I don’t even use GMail or Yahoo to store all my email; I have all my email stored on my own server!). If anything, I’d figure out how I can use the free service as a bandwidth backup in case one of my photos starts getting a lot of traffic. It’s really just bandwidth that’s the issue anyway. Bandwidth is more costly, and can increase a lot more quickly, than disk space.