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Clearing the Cache

Photo Management

The world is becoming a huge photo album of pictures from everyone’s digital cameras. I almost think that digital photography is as everyday as blogging. It’s been amazing how low the prices have gone for a good digital camera, and now the skills of an amateur photographer isn’t hindered because their wallet isn’t as deep as the professionals. So now, we all have tons of digital photographs, what do we do with them?

I got into blogging a little later than most, but the concept had always intrigued me. The same thing with Flickr. It’s a very intriguing web application that allows people to share pictures with a slick presentation and organization. So I decided to try it out yesterday and I’m most impressed.

The set up for Flickr is pretty easy, although somewhat different than what one might expect. There are the free accounts (which I use currently) which allow for 20 megabytes of upload per month. That’s not 20 megabytes of storage mind you, but how much you can upload per month. It might not seem like much, given today 3 megabyte/6 megapixel images, but when the images are compressed for web usage, you can load quite a lot of images with just 20 megabytes. There’s also the pro account, which gives you 2 gigabytes per month at the cost of a little over 2 dollars per month.

What impressed me the most is how smooth their interface is. It’s easy to name, caption, add notes, and tag your photos. Tagging the photos assigns keywords to the photo for quicker searches later on. It’s something many other applications do, and I’ve been too lazy to do it. Since I’m starting fresh with Flickr, figured it would be a good time to start.

The “notes” feature is also fun, as you can assign a caption just to a specific area of a photo, which would be great for “How-Tos” and photographs that need descriptions correlating to a specific spot. I wish there was a way to turn off all the “hotspot squares” for the notes also, if I wanted to see the image for itself, I guess I could just view it full-size.

What I look forward to is the community that Flickr promotes. You can set your photos to be public, then people can comment and note on your photos. That’s what I’ve wanted for our blog, but perhaps there’s no need to re-invent the wheel… especially when the one that exists has more features than I could invest time implementing.

Check out my Flickr gallery (or Clark’s) and see for yourself if this is something you’d like. I think it would be a great online backup of digital photos. The pro account would be necessary then, as 20 megabytes is too little for archive purposes. While you’re there, have fun looking at what people all around the world consider interesting enough to photograph.