Flickers

I’ve been seized by the Muse of Photography (Clio?) and been pounding on my long-lagging digital photo library, making some nice progress (though still constrained by tight disk space on the machine).

One thing I’m playing with is, again, screwing around with where I actually post these things. Originally I was doing everything in Gallery on the web site, but the version there broke and was not amenable to easy fixing. Then I started doing other web page generators, and then …

… well, I haven’t actually posted anything for several months.

I’m now reevaluating using Flickr as the place to post my pics, once I’m done sifting and sorting and editing them in Photoshop Expressions. My biggest concerns over Flickr have been (and/or are) both the nature of a hosted service, and just how Flickr is.

First off, if I post them on Flickr, they’re not in my hot little hands. I still have a concern over relying on an external host who can abruptly go tits-up, or change their service agreement, or get bought by Microsoft, or something. When it comes to something like my photos, which I consider an historic archive (albeit only of personal value), I want them safe. 

Granted, residing on my ISP’s space isn’t 100% certain, either, but I have a lot of faith in Hosting Matters, more than in the various hosted services that have abruptly closed down and vanished from the face of the Net.

Well, I suspect Flickr won’t be one of those; its critical mass is such that I don’t expect it to collapse. It might be bought by Microsoft at some point (as part of Yahoo), or it might suffer a big change of service, but so much is currently on Flickr that I seriously doubt anyone would be willing to screw it up big time at this point. The same can’t be said for a lot of other photo sites, whether from big names or small. (How long will Kodak, or Adobe, or some other independent site, actually maintain the same business model and actually stick around?)

The only other I might consider as an alternative would be Google’s Picasa. But that’s got less critical mass than Flickr, and in this case I don’t trust Google to not get some new bright idea in their head and go hallooing off after it. Aside from Google integration, too, it doesn’t really seem to have any added advantages over Flickr.

Most importantly, I’m not relying on Flickr. All my photos will also be on my (backed up, right?) own machine, with the tags and dates and captions all embedded in their EXIF info. If, using this model, Flickr were to suddenly die, it would be an inconvenience, not a disaster.

Belt and suspenders, man …

So PSE will actually export directly to Flickr, which is nice (the more steps that are removed from this process, the more likely I am to keep things up to date(er)). I played around with it last night (way too late, I fear), and it seems to do more or less what I want.

I’m not thrilled on the other hand (and this was the other anti-Flickr factor) with the, um, limits of presentation on Flickr. You can have any interface and info on the screen, as long as it’s — well, the interface and info they provide. Which is kind of bare-bones, not to say ugly. And Flickr looks at the EXIF date to determine the date of the picture, rather than the ITPC codes (which is how PSE stores the date info), which means that the dates on picture will be incorrect. I can fix that in some of the captions, and it doesn’t hurt the picture, but it’s still annoying.

That said, my original aversion to Flickr has faded a bit, as I’ve used it both to host the cell phone snapshots I take for this blog, and as I’ve seen how it works for Doyce and Kate at their wedding site. I’m not 100% happy with it, but if it makes it easier and faster to get my pictures online, that pays for a lot of less-than-optimal.

I’ll “announce” it when the “new” site on Flickr is ready to go into production.