Flickrty

Flickr is a online photo sharing service that I've had my eye on for a while, so recently I gave their free service a spin. It's rather good - easy to use, fast and with a good number of both web-based and offline management tools. Their free service has a few restrictions, though:

• Maximum 20MB data upload per month
• Limited to the most recent 200 photos
• Maximum three sets (groups) of photos

The first two limits are manageable, but I hit the three set limit pretty almost straight away. Regularly adding new galleries of pictures or uploading a bunch of old galleries would be prohibitive. So, after a brief period of consideration I decided to go with Flickr Pro, which removes the set and active photo limits, and bumps the upload limit to 2GB a month. Pro is US$25 for a year's subscription, which I thought was quite reasonable for what essentially is an unlimited cat photo hosting service.

The first step once I got Pro was to include my latest photos on the front page of Hamfisted, which is done through what they call a Flickr Badge, and I call an external Javascript file. I ended up eviscerating their generated CSS and HTML a fair bit to make it look right. The second step, moving all my pictures off Hamfisted, will take a fair while and will basically gut the site. I've just started moving my picture stream over at the moment, and it goes slowly, but the work should give me a bit of time to think of a new site structure, if not an entirely new site design. I managed to bash out the London Holiday, London Eye and Vancouver Aquarium galleries pretty damn fast though, so maybe it won't take as long as I'd thought.

There are a few things I don't like about Flickr. You can't datestamp photos to before the date that you joined the site, which messes up old galleries a fair bit. The Uploadr should allow for descriptions and titling before it uploads, instead of uploading pictures to be displayed as IMG_23224.jpg and then be fixed afterwards. I'd also like the main stream to be treated like a set, so I can re-sort pictures where they need it. Apart from these minor quibbles though, it's all pretty swanky.

The community aspect of Flickr is also quite compelling. I can make comments and notes on other people's photos, and track my small list of Contacts' photographic adventures via the site. Some of the best photos by Flickr members are displayed in the Explore section, rated by the Flickr staff according to Interestingness. Flipping through these make me want to be a better photographer, or at least go out and spend a bunch of money on a better camera, since it's obviously the only reason my shots aren't fantastic.