I have been trying out the .Mac Web Galleries and am disappointed. While it does offer 10GB of storage, the features of the gallery itself are strictly for consumers showing snapshots.
1. The data transfer and website is very heavy. Its slow. Much slower than it needs to be. Someone clocked the initial download hit for scripts, etc. at 2MB.
2. All images are resized on the fly. There is very little thumbnailing and no possible way to see the image in its native resolution. When trying to view images full-size, the resizing messes up the image quality, at times quite severely. There is no fixed resolution view mode to show the image at high quality.
3. Reflections. I am showing photos, not eye-candy reflections at the bottom of the photos.
4. Upload options. There are none.
5. When clicking through full-size images and there are multiple pages of thumbnails, a user is told they are at the end of the gallery when they reach the end of the thumbnail “page”. In a test this caused every single user to miss the second half of the two-page gallery.
While this Gallery is as easy as possible to use for your average iPhoto user, I think that it could do a much better job with less of the bloat.
PicasaWeb, with all of its features and Google maps integration and an iPhoto plugin, is still lightweight and plagued by none of these problems. It just works. Of course, with the release of the new iLife 08, the Picasa iPhoto export plugin is broken, but the separate uploader app works and an update to the plugin will be released soon.
Here is an example for you to compare:
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