Zing.Com is officially dead. I've been looking around for different places to store/display the (vast gigabytes of) photos that I take. There are so many places out there, but only a few are worth it. I signed up for a premium account over at ClubPhoto but there seems to be some bad restrictions over there (30 permanant albums, each restricted to 60 pictures only), so since I usually take 100+ photos per outting, that is a lot of work to split them up into 60 photo chunks. Bleh. So, since I paid for premium service and it won't work for my regular photo-taking, I think I'll just use ClubPhoto to host my SolaraGuy pictures.
I then tried out Sony's ImageStation and that was a test in frustration since it uses Zing.com technologies, which aren't bad, but lately Zing.Com technologies (especially the upload spooler) aren't being tested and seems to crash a lot. Plus with thousands of Zing.com people running around trying to find a new hosting place, ImageStation is being innudated. To make things worse ImageStation is partnered with Zing.com so they are actually just using Zing.com's network and that network has been SLOW for a while now. I liked the familiarity of ImageStation (since it looks and feels just like Zing.com), but there are a lot of kinks they need to work out before it's ready -- plus, I have this sense of uncertainty about ImageStation because of Zing's shutdown, will that possibly affect ImageStation?
I also tried Ofoto, who's now part of the Kodak family, but they don't let people look at the full resolution picture that I posted. Instead people see a tiny little version of it that isn't even reduced correctly, which results in bad jaggies.
So where am I now? I found a free/donation place named PBase and the place is pretty nice. It's run by one guy on a huge server. He does everything for free, there are no banner ads of any sort on the site. And he lives off donations. So, soon I've made my donation to the site because it's pretty stable and run well. So far I've put up the Fourth of July 2001 BBQ pictures up there and some Solara pictures and the site seems to be FAST. Plus, I can upload my images as a single zip file (or tar file for ya'll Linux/Unix peoples :)) and it'll undo the package for ya! Cool. :) Check it out.