I have been in Albion, NY at the in-laws house for over a week now. What’s been going on?
- Isabella enjoyed her first Christmas in the snow.
- Michelle and I celebrated four years of matrimonial bliss1.
- I broke down and signed up for a free Flickr account.
I am largely disappointed with the state of photo sharing sites and software these days. I still have a moribund PHP gallery install which I have used in the past to share some photos, but I detest the ugly old-skool layout that it forces you to use. Textpattern, my current blogging software, has some rudimentary photo sharing built in, but it’s unwieldy for anything more than a few images. I use Snapfish to print pictures, and, while it does have unlimited storage and sharing, the site forces people to obtain an account and sign in to view uploaded photos. Verdict: not cool at all.
Hence, my attraction to Flickr. Flickr is the slickest web application aside from Gmail that I’ve used to date. It contains a Flash-based Organiser, many different upload methods to get your images up to the site (the Mac is not left in the cold here), and a well-designed interface all of which adds up to a application which is fun to use. So, even though the free account has some limitations (10 MB a month upload limit2, only 100 of the most recent pictures in the photostream can be seen at once time in the gallery view, some ad content, etc.), I think I’ll be using it instead of my moribund PHP gallery install for putting up new pictures.
So, until something better comes along, I present to you my Flickr photos. For those of you who prefer to chew on XML instead of webpages, there’s a couple of feeds available to satisify your hungry news aggregator: RSS2.0, Atom.
Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!
1 The chant “FOUR MORE YEARS!” is very appropriate here. (We are, of course, in the running for many, many more….)
2 I found out the hard way that one should shrink images before uploading. Otherwise, you will quickly eat up precious bandwidth for no purpose whatsoever. Since Flickr is all about web sharing, 640×480 is more than good enough.