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The whole idea of my work on the web has always been, to put it bluntly, "keep it simple, stupid".
I've never really been a big fan of complex web design. It has its place, mind you - but putting in Java apps, PHP, CGI, databases, etc. for what amounts to an image gallery has never seemed like the right thing. Sure, I could use packages like Gallery, but I don't feel like managing such a system.
So this is what I've been doing since around 1997, when The Sunset Grill went up on northarc.com. This - and TSG - have been using a series of shell scripts and perl scripts to generate simple HTML for about fourteen years, with the rationale that not everybody is going to have a fast connection, gobs of RAM, and infinite disk space on their computers, with the latest version of the latest operating system. I want my pages to easily load for a user who is using a slow connection and an older browser.
There are other things, too, which boil down to the "airplane rule". The more complex something is, the more points of failure it will have. (A four-engine aircraft will have four times the chances of an engine failure of a one-engine aircraft.) I figure this, I'm lazy - and I only want a few points of failure. So I don't use a database for file management, PHP or CGI for a code base, or Java for client-side code - if the images don't show up, they're missing or the browser's broken. If the pages throw an error, the error tells the story.
It's granted, then, that there are pages like Picasa. On the other hand, the less code, the faster the page loads itself. No waiting for Picasa or Photobucket to load its brains to the browser.
Granted, it's not pretty.
But, this is how my code rolls.
I won't speak for any other users who maintain their own content on the server, but this is just my own personal work.
-Dennis