I'm a desktop GNU/Linux user, and I got a Digital Camera to take photos of my son. Manipulating and printing the Digital photographs is more challenging than it ought to be. In the end I opted for using Flickr (as F-Spot allows an easy upload) and Photobox as it integrates well with Flickr (and allows FTP upload).

Kodakgallery.co.uk were good, except there is no easy multi-file upload for GNU/Linux users. There is a proprietary Firefox plug-in which works with Kodakgallery.com, but not the UK site as far as I could tell. Flickr have no UK printing partner. All these companies competing to hold your photos, when it is the developing that makes them the money - I guess user lock-in is more important than profits these days.

Multi-file upload on web pages seems to me something that W3 should have addressed in the standards by now. At work in 350pages we have a Java uploader which worked across Windows and GNU/Linux in both Firefox and Internet Explorer (where available), one can "drag and drop" files onto the uploader, and resize images before upload, but it has been slightly crippled by security changes in Firefox 3 to prevent the <INPUT> type "file" from leaking file path information, and the implementation has always been slower than it should be - some sort of polling problem, although the latest version is much improved.

We had some informal discussion at work about uploading multiple files, and I can see the argument that everyone wants something different, but that is an argument for providing extensions within the browser to resize images, or otherwise edit files before upload, not to omit the functionality and hope that the web site will provide a Flash or Java uploader that happens to work on this platform, and browser, or an unending list of single file upload buttons.

Aside from finding some tools that work together, I think the Slideshow in Flickr is leaking memory in Iceweasel, and F-Spot seems both occasionally to eat all my memory, and separately the upload to Flickr eats all available upload bandwidth till DNS queries start timing out. I'll try "wondershaper" to see if it sorts the issue, but I've not seen an application quite so aggressively steal all the bandwidth in a long time.