Happy new year to you all, did you enjoy all the wind and the rain?

Sandy had an interesting piece about his experiences with Flickr, and the few niggles he has encountered along the way. I just bought a Pro account, which allows you benefits such as unlimited upload bandwidth, no cap on the total number of photos or their resolutions. I decided to go for this since this site is rather dependent on Flickr for all the images I include in posts.

By using the Flickr API (with the wonderful flickr.rb) I can access all of my photos from within my gallery, allowing me to show my latest additions off to those visiting my blog. I plan to add a pane to my blog editor allowing me to search for and insert images without any tedious copy and paste, but with my current workload, and my wish to move my site to Rails 1.2 and it’s RESTful methods, it’s not going to be implemented till at least the end of the month.

So back to flickr, and those niggles. First up, Sandy would like to see Flickr allow your photos to be shown in the order they were taken, rather than that in which they were uploaded. While not explicitly supported (Discussion about possible implementation) you can get see your photos on a calendar from your “archive”: page. Almost there, but like Sandy, I’d like an option to globally show my photos in the order they were taken.

The second niggle was that of Flickr clevery inserting the keywords ‘Photo Sharing” into their generated link on each photo’s page:


<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/douglasfshearer/337366577/" title="@ *Photo Sharing* @"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/163/337366577_9ee4e721a9_o.jpg" width="1280" height="800" alt="Badger Badger Badger Wallpaper" /></a>

Certainly explains their high Google ranking for those keywords! Since I prefer to use Textile formatting, I manually make up my links without all the extra keywording:


!http://farm1.static.flickr.com/163/337366577_9ee4e721a9_m.jpg!:http://flickr.com/photos/douglasfshearer/337366577/

Which gives:


<a href="http://flickr.com/photos/douglasfshearer/337366577/"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/163/337366577_9ee4e721a9_m.jpg&#8221; title=&#8221;&#8221; alt=&#8221;&#8221; /></a>

Sorted! If you’re willing to put the effort in.

Last, but certainly not least, is the matter of the cost of a Flickr Pro account. At $25 (£12.50 currently) for a year, it’s not really going to break the bank. However, when you consider the cost of storage and bandwidth for each individual user, I would very much doubt that you get the best value in terms of these costs. I do however think that the other features of Flickr make it very worthwhile, so I’m happy to pay for it at the moment.

Still not happy? Try out Smugmug (Very customisable!) or Zooomr (Very clever uploader, and higher upload limits on a free account than Flickr). It’s an open market, I’m certainly not scared to jump ship if I feel the features are right.

I do like Flickr, and so does the badger.