foothills

well this is my forum so i thought i would share some experiential insights on using flickr for photo management. using flickr is fantastic as your photos do not sit stagnantly either on a static web page or on a site that is merely a data vault. it is designed to increase exposure so that if there is some shred of interest someone else has they are able to easily query the meta information you have made available and do an intelligent search to cull your photos. it also provides a nearly infinite amount of storage by only imposing a 4 gigabyte limit per month. this means you could theoretically have 48 gigs of photos on flickr and pay a mere 29.95 per YEAR to store them. this is very cool. its very cool after you get the photos up there. uploading in the windows world is terrible. flickr has a utility that allows you to upload photoraphs with no frills, and no way to edit all of the meta information before you upload. which leaves you to use the flickr organizr, which is a cumbersome slow inadequate but necessary utility. there are quite a few programs and quite a few hacks. i tried out jUploader which is written in java. it is pretty quick, it allows you to edit meta info, and it is low impact. however, it does really dumb things like overwrites all the fields when you do a batch edit even if you are really doing an append. that is stupid. i tried out picajet, a picasa like program that offers flickr uploading directly. many people on review sites swear the program is fantastic. those people are all currently serving time in ‘i dont know what the fuck a good program really is’ land. you will notice the retardo theme here i am trying to find a slick program that uses the flickr uploading api in windows. not going to happen. fortunately for me my transition to linux is becoming more and more an ease-the-pain conversion than it is a ugh-do-i-have-to. and so i will get to use the AWESOME file system plugin that is based apparently on FUSE which will mount the flickr photos online in a virtual file system on my computer. this is important in multiple ways. 1) meta information is all accessible via normal searching parameters locally 2) i can synchronize merely by copying. transparent uploads. love it. 3) synching can be done on a scheduled basis 4) it wont be 4000 years before i post photos. i am being unduly harsh on windows of course. in fact i doubt i will be comfortable in linux until the end of spring 2007 as i will need a full academic year to get through the usability learning curve. and i do know of the picasa + python uploading technique which could be all that and a bag of salt and vinegar. and who knows maybe someone will port the filesystem driver to windows. i dont know if its that easy or not as i have no idea how hard it was in linux. still. i do know that proper local photo management is a priority and i refuse to use some bloat core program like adobe elements or acdsee 8 or flickr organizr to maintain my photos.