Flickr and the great migration of ‘06
I’m currently in the process of moving several thousand photos from my personal gallery (along with captions and titles) into Flickr. Once this migration is complete, it’ll be much easier for me to switch hosts. Plus, more people will be able to see my photos and I’ll do without the annoyances of moderating photo comment spam (although, surprisingly, I just received my first comment spams on Flickr the other day).
I haven’t thought about what I’m going to do with this blog. Originally I kept my personal blog separate from my thesis/work/professional stuff. But I’m also tired of managing two blogging systems (wordpress and blogger). Minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but I also have to think about where I’m going to post something before I start to write it. I’ll just use the tagging system to manage the personal and professional stuff, and maybe when I have some time I’ll come up with some wordpress trickery to more visually distinguish the entries.
I’m starting to get a little annoyed by the linear-ness of blogs, just as I am with the navigational system on Flickr. As I am currently in the process of doubling the number of photos on my account, the whole thing is coming across as clunky. Add the Flash memory leak issue in Safari, and the Organizr is rapidly becoming my nemesis. (Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of Firefox either.) Of course a web app isn’t going to match the responsiveness of a desktop application, but I’d still like a more manageable, less resource-intensive way of dealing with large numbers of photos. I imagine the people who run Flickr already realize that accumulating massive numbers of photos will require novel methods of navigation.
For instance, after adding 500 new (old, really) photos, I wanted to check out some of the newer ones I’d taken. With the page-based navigation scheme at the bottom of the page, this required about ten clicks. Viewing and exploring photos is one thing, but methinks managing photos will require a different paradigm. Even going back and tagging all of the photos is a huge pain. I’d settle for some low-rez, quick-loading images when assigning tags—they’re my photos after all and I know what I’m looking at. If I want, I could always load a higher-rez version to confirm the details.
Assuming I’m going to be a customer of Flickr for the rest of my life (now that they have my photos locked away), I hope they’ll offer more, shall we say, modal management tools. That is, optimize my browsing experience. Optimize my photo management experience. Optimize my uploading experience (I have to use a third-party program to upload my 1000 photos, or else face a 5-at-a-time browser-based upload mechanism…what gives?!). Optimize my tagging experience. Let me switch between them easily, but demarcate them clearly. Again, I can’t imagine that the one-at-a-time method of viewing photos in Flickr will work when dealing with the millions of photos I will have in my photostream in, say, ten years.
Once my photo migration is complete (which may take another month considering the 2GB upload limit), I still have a bunch of problems with technorati to take care of (they don’t do well with subdomains, I found out), google sitemaps to create, analytics to install, and phase two of updating my portfolio. In addition to all the other projects I’m working on. Good to be busy I suppose.
In other news, I’ll be in NYC next week doing a write-up of a symposium. And here’s a nice sunrise:
