BuddyPress.org

BuddyPress is to build a social network! For a newspaper you can use a simple CMS.

That drupal module looks strong, it has a lot of interaction with Picasa! However, I think photo galleries in a social network are more like a way to share moments rather than a tool to showcase personal work or store/backup images.

Personally, when I use the photo galleries at Facebook with my friends is to share photos related to something specific (a party, meeting, birthday, old photos from school, etc). They have enough quality to be downloaded (but they won’t be useful if you want to work with them later).

Using a third party service like Picasa or Flickr makes your site depend on other site to work, and forces your users to open an account on any of those services (users don’t like registrations, and even sometimes they don’t know how to link one account with other). I know this won’t be an issue for the average person in this forum, but future potential users will have problems, and we have to think every single thing to be as fool-proof as possible.

If you are concerned about storage, maybe you can use a professional service then (like Amazon S3). But if it’s about privacy then it would be better if you don’t host photo galleries at all. Privacy is another thing that needs to be reviewed at BuddyPress!