A funny thing happened as I was getting ready to post some of my favorite photos from Hawaii on coaxialshutter — I found Flickr. I’d heard about Flickr before, but the idea of a web hosted photo organizer always sounded pretty absurd to me. Why squander precious upload bandwidth for something that there are perfectly capable local apps to handle. What would be the advantage of that? After giving it a brief spin though, I realized I had been completely wrong. I also realized that it would be pretty pointless to try to maintain my own photoblog in MovableType anymore. The template I’d been using was a fairly clever setup, but still had some glaring problems such as requiring manual resizing of photos before uploading and no real way to do any kind of batch uploads. Putting even a fraction of our 800 honeymoon pictures online would have been tedious. Flickr, on the other hand, makes a perfect photoblog. I’ve decided to scrap coaxialshutter and just use Flickr, since I have a feeling that will result in me actually getting more of my photos online than I would have otherwise. I’m limited to just 20MB of uploads per month with the free trial, but I’m impressed enough that I might actually end up subscribing. As cool as it is as a photoblog, I think where it really shines is the combination of shared public photos and tagging. When people tag their pictures and make them public (as many do) it becomes really easy to find other cool pictures, maybe even of some of the same things you’ve taken pictures of. It’s an interesting experience to see a shot of someplace you’ve been, taken by some other random person. For example, these shots of Poipu Beach on Kauai. At the risk of being overdramatic, it almost feels like it gives you the opportunity to examine your experiences from another viewpoint. Or not. But the point is, I think it’s pretty cool.

Comments

Comment by Dave on 2005-05-19 23:29:56 +0000

I’m glad that you’re enjoying Flickr!

I very much agree with your point on perspective. It’s neat to see what how other people photograph particular things. There’s as many tour guides as users, which I think is compelling and fantastic.

I’ve found that the forum groups are nice too.

Being able to fire pictures at Flickr from a cameraphone is good, but using Flickr has encouraged me to have my camera handy during times I otherwise might not have thought to before.

When I was trying it out, free users only got 10MB. I was very glad when they lowered (!) the Pro price to the equivalent of a steak dinner. It’s easily worth that.

Comment by Carrie on 2005-05-21 01:44:04 +0000

Oooo pretty pictures thus far. I hope you post more! 😀