From HTML tables to Flickr: How do you archive your photographs?

January 11th, 2007 | Category: Content,Heidi's Entries,Recommendations,Tips and Tricks
written by: Heidi Cool
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I first got my paws on a digital camera when I was working for Development Programs. My plan was to take photos of events and places on campus so that I could use those photos on the Web sites I built for the department. This turned out to be rather useful, but also time-consuming. While it didn't take much time to take the photos, it would often take hours to archive the photos.

The system I first worked out was to touch up the images (eliminating red-eye as necessary), rotate the vertical shots, resize copies of each, then create a Web site that would provide thumbnails and medium sized copies of the photos for viewing by me and others in the department. At first I used tables to display the images, but found it to be rather time consuming to produce. Later I switched to frames so that users could see the thumbnail and the enlarged image together. This also saved time because I could re-use most of the code from one archive to the next.

Alas I still wasn't satisfied. It still took quite awhile, even using photoshop actions, to process the images and I didn't like using frames for my archives when my rule of thumb and advice to others was to eschew them whenever possible. Friends started sending me links to their archives on sites like Snapfish, but the technology at the time still seemed awkward. Kevin found a better solution with Google's Picasa, but it wasn't quite what I wanted either. In the meantime, my photos languished in folders as I had less and less time to post them.

Then my friend David showed me his Flickr account. It was easy-to-use, easy-to-organize, inexpensive and already well-tested by my friend. I signed up last November and haven't looked back since. While Flickr doesn't fulfill my each and every whim, it does exactly what it should and a lot more.

How Flickr saves me time

Flickr provides some handy tools for uploading images that allow you to upload large batches all at once. You can assign these individually or in batches to specific sets (photo albums) so that you easily separate the photos of Aunt Bertha's Birthday from those blurry shots you took with your cell phone at 2:30 a.m. New Year's Eve. You can also assign tags (key words) to each photo so that you can view images by keyword or set.

When uploading images Flickr will resize them into thumbnails as well as larger sizes so that you don't have to. You can also specify how large you want the largest images to be.

Repurposing images

On this page I used a Flickr badge to bring in some tiny thumbnails from Flickr, though I'm not sure when else I might use it. A more useful option is to pull in one of Flickr's RSS feeds. Currently Flickr provides feeds of your entire archive and feeds for tags. I created this page—featuring a feed of photos I had tagged "Turning Point"—using the MTRSSFeed plug-in that Jeremy has installed on the blog system. (I made that a static page rather than a blog entry because I didn't want to fill up Planet Case with 20 photos.)

While exploring ways to use Flickr on other sites, I also found a nifty tool called Pictobrowser. This lets you set up a slideshow type album of images from sets, tags or groups that you can then post onto another page. I used Pictobrowser to create this page of photos from Parade the Circle.

While I've not yet tried it, Flickr also offers a tool for posting images directly to your blog. It supports a number of formats including Movable Type.

Next time...

So far I've covered only some of the most basic aspects of Flickr, though those alone make it useful to me. Next time I'll write more about Flickr keywords and groups. In the meantime, how do you organize your images? Do you use another online service? Do you upload images manually? Do you leave them to fester in folders on your hard drive? Let us know!

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20 Comments »
  1. Heidi, you may want to check out Splashr, "Splashr is a tool for presenting Flickr photos". I actually haven't tried it yet since I just found it this morning, but I thought you might be interested

    Comment by Rob Hawkins — January 12, 2007 @1:14 pm

  2. oop, forget the url: http://www.splashr.com/

    Comment by rob hawkins — January 12, 2007 @1:19 pm

  3. Rob, Thanks for the heads-up on Splashr. I just went and tested it out. On the pro-side it gives you quite a few different ways to present your images. On the con-side it recommends using iframes or a pop-up window to display them—although with some effort one can work around that. Here is the sample page I made, along with my notes on how I did it. p.s. I noticed on your site that you went to U.S.; I went to H.B. Welcome back to Cleveland!

    Comment by Heidi Cool — January 12, 2007 @2:43 pm

  4. Heidi, very nice sample page. I want to find some time to play with it too. H.B, huh. I grew up right near there. I remember going to some festival or something will my Malvern Elementary friends. Small world isn't it. And thanks for the welcome...though it has been about a year at this point.

    Comment by Rob Hawkins — January 12, 2007 @6:30 pm

  5. Splashr does give a lot of interesting options. If you find the time I expect you'll be able to tweak the javascript even more. I like pulling in the straight rss feed from Flickr, but there aren't many ways to style it given the output they provide. Some of these options could work very well for people who want to include an album on their site rather than linking outside it. Yes, it is a small planet. My dad went to Malvern, mom went to Lomond and I went to Boulevard. My grandfather went to Boulevard too, but back then it was elementary, junior high and high school.

    Comment by Heidi Cool — January 16, 2007 @11:51 am

  6. Hey, Heidi. Trish here. On a completely person, non-photo-related subject, I've got a new blog too. And I'm tagging you for the "Six Weird Things" game. http://trishwah.blogspot.com/2007/01/six-weird-things.html

    Comment by Trish Schreiber — January 17, 2007 @11:02 am

  7. Gee Trish,
    I'm not sure if this blog is the right place to post things like I can light matches with my toes—given that the technique doesn't require html. Perhaps I'll have to rouse my other blog from hibernation. Of course that one was dedicated primarily to fiction, so I might have to break even more rules and incorporate the 6 wierd things into a short story. Glad to hear you are settling in well in Pa.

    Comment by Heidi Cool — January 17, 2007 @6:20 pm

  8. I dabble in a little photography when I have the free time and I usually use Smug Mug instead of Flickr because of the unlimited bandwidth and also because they're ad-free and allow password protection. Flickr is a little too social for my liking. I know you can make some photos private but somehow I'm just don't feel reassured that they're up there. Other than that, I usually store some of my favorite pictures in my 80g iPod video.

    Comment by Maki — February 18, 2007 @10:28 am

  9. I agree, Flickr and similar services don't often easy ways to distinguish what is public and private - better to control your own content on something like a blog.

    Comment by Kroq — March 11, 2007 @3:20 am

  10. I use Flickr, but sometimes I don't want my pictures being public. Do you know any other options?

    Comment by Digital Street — June 25, 2007 @5:19 am

  11. Flickr lets you choose whether to make your pictures public or private or a per photo basis. If you choose to make them private you can make them visible only to you or to a group of friends that you select. Authentication is done through Flickr, so they will need an account, but it can be a free one. Photographers concerned about theft may also choose to only upload low-resolution images that they make public while keeping their high resolution images private. This seems a good option for those who may want to sell their images.

    Comment by Heidi Cool — June 25, 2007 @11:13 am

  12. I just stumbled upon another good Flickr slideshow creator at http://www.slideflickr.com/.

    Comment by Heidi Cool — July 3, 2007 @10:23 pm

  13. I use Flickr but more to organize some pictures than to share with friends. Useful tool anyway.

    Comment by TBD — July 9, 2007 @4:28 am

  14. Whatever happened to picasa? I used that back in '05... it sucked big time mind you. In fact I stopped uploading images to my blogger blog simply because I hated picasa so much!

    Comment by Snowboardjohn — July 9, 2007 @8:18 pm

  15. Picasa is still around. I tried it a few years ago too, but I wanted to customize my albums and it took a bit of tweaking. Plus at the time I still had to load the albums on my own Web server so it didn't add any organizational value. Apparently now they have a Web option that gives you 1 gb of storage for free. But Flickr works so well for my purposes, I don't really see the need to try this.

    Comment by Heidi Cool — July 10, 2007 @5:49 pm

  16. I've been using Picassa lately and have been impressed with it, especially the ability to automatically select photos from a page and turn them into a slideshow. Granted, I haven't used Flickr much, so I can't really compare the two.

    Comment by jelon — January 19, 2008 @2:24 pm

  17. agree with TBD, picasa sometimes makes me frustated, flickr never disappoint me until now, btw, nice tips you wrote here

    Comment by ariel — June 17, 2008 @2:30 pm

  18. hey.. nice tips..

    Comment by anas — June 21, 2008 @1:25 am

  19. hey, nice tips..

    Comment by anas — June 21, 2008 @1:30 am

  20. Hi.. That's Nice Info, Helpfull for me, thanks.

    Comment by Darmin — June 21, 2008 @6:34 pm

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