Back in September, I was talking about Flickr, the leader in the photo-sharing space. I said “I’ve yet to be convinced that the best place for my online photos isn’t on my own site”. I had similar conversations with Boris and Roland.
In truth, I’m still unsure about how Flickr, my website and my data storage should interact. Should I keep a local copy of every photo I store on Flickr? Does Roland keep a local copy of each of his 6108 photos? Probably. If I do, haven’t I just doubled the amount of effort I have to expend to organize my photos? I see the power and usefulness of Flickr tags, but what’s the local equivalent? I don’t keep local copies, what happens if Flickr disappears? What about older photos–can I really be bothered to add those to Flickr? Probably not.
Despite these questions, the convenience of Flickr has won me over. Yesterday I stepped up, paid the cash and became a Pro user.
Flickr dudes, here’s an idea: partner with some hardware vendor and sell Wifi-enabled digital picture frames that display JPEGs. Let me plug in a Flickr tag (or any RSS feed) and have the photo frame display new photos as they get uploaded (or cycle through a particular set of existing photos). Something like this, I guess, but RSS and Wifi-enabled. Hey, here’s a wireless one. All you’ve got to do is build the software interface. One other request for Flickr: I want to be able to see the most viewed and most commented photos on the site.
var zg_nsids = ‘37996644096@N01’;
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Hey, I really like this idea! Maybe there would be copyright issues, since the frame might turn each photo into a piece of art, but this would be a lot of fun to have!
yes i keep a local copy but you have to do that whether you store them on your web server or on Flickr’s
the only thing that would make me not store a local copy is if Flickr offered DVDs of your photos as Boris has suggested to them ad infinitum
yup all want from Flickr for Christmas is:
1. DVD backup (yes i will pay for this)
2. the ability to upload unlimited photos per month; 1 gig doesn’t cut it for me; I need about 2.5 gigs to upload all my photos at full res and I will need double that if I buy a digital SLR which I plan to do in late 2005 or 2006 and yes I wil pay for this
3. printing
and BTW, they just added the most viewed and most commented for your photos, still don’t have that site wide but i bet they are working on it!
I’ve responded on my blog at http://jtauber.com/blog/2004/12/22/flickr_and_datalibre
Darren wrote, “I see the power and usefulness of Flickr tags, but what’s the local equivalent?”
The local equiv might be Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) [http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/main.html]. It gives you a framework for embedding custom metadata into photos (PDF docs, also.) Unfortunately, Flickr and all the rest don’t support XMP. Yet.
The other possibility might be editing the EXIF data to include tag info. I’ve heard Flickr users asking for EXIF searching capability. Perhaps it’s in the works?
Speaking of EXIF…
What kind of camera/tool are you using to upload to Flickr, Darren? You don’t seem to have any EXIF info associated with your pics?
Boris: A Powershot A-70. Thus far, nothing has gone directly from my camera to Flickr. I sometimes run them through NeatImage and always through Photoshop. Presumably, that data gets lost when I resave the files.
Consider this a, uh, manual trackback :).
EXIF is good. Consider changing your workflow so that information isn’t stripped.
I have a bunch of pictures from our first digital camera, stretching back over the last 3-4 years. I don’t need to organize them at all, because the EXIF information is still there. e.g. some pictures from a trip to Algonquin Park, automatically in the order they were taken.
And then there’s all the camera/exposure type info, which can be interesting. And even if not, why strip metadata if you get it for free?
(oh oh. I think I’m a) addicated to metatdata and b) a metadata evangelist)