(ISF) Re: Seeking photo archiving/sorting software recommendations

Hi Everyone -

Ari only sent this to me, I presume by mistake, and since his suggestion is one I now agree with - Flickr - I am sending it out to everyone - and quite possibly Flickr is better than Gallery.

I was going to respond to Ari with a question but I checked his links and see that Flickr resolved the problem we had with it. We purchased Flickr when Andy Carvin from wwwedu recommended it. It seemed easier than buying more server space and we liked how you could tag everything and the rest of the world on Flickr saw your photo if they had the same tag.

But it would not make 'albums' - it was one jumble of all of our photos with the latest ones coming first. We often add photos into albums later or do not put albums up in time order and then we change the order later. Worse - we could not give out a url for an album but rather had to give out the link for the whole collection.

I wrote to Flickr and they said, "Sorry, maybe someday."

While I did not check out what they allow you to do within them - it seems that someday has arrived. Now they not only allow you to have 'sets' - which is their nomenclature for albums - but to have collections of sets - which is something we would actually like to have. I will explore it further.

Thank you Ari - and everyone - check out the examples he gave - really nice stuff.

But also a word of warning. If you use any web service, Flickr or Gallery - keep back-ups - even if they are a disorganized collection. We use a shared server from a host company and they once lost our site when their server died. Fortunately it was before we combined our multiple urls so it did not include the Gallery. Now we also pay $5 every once in awhile to make a back-up of our whole site since we allow visitors to upload photos to the albums and do not have the originals ourselves.

Take care,

Ja Young

-----Ari Davidow < ari%40ivritype.com">ariivritype.com>-----
>>;You know, based on the original requirements, I would have to also recommend looking at flickr.com, the commercial service. You can make everything private, or limit access to a private group, or make some or all of the collection public. It's easy to annotate photos with metadata, to tag them, organize them into sets and collections, and use those images on your own website. They have a great batch uploaded. Not bad for $19.95 or $29.95/year (free for those who upload trivial amounts each month). There are some great examples of museums doing very, very interesting things with Flickr for their own websites. Explore http://americanimage.unm.edu/ for instance, or http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/graffiti/ Among the advantages are the fact that it's easy to use and easy to access the photos and metadata from any place that has a web browser.&gt;>

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Hi Ja,

First off, I love Flickr. I use it personally for all my photos. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gclabaugh/sets/ ). However, I don't think it scales well for an organization. For one, security is either all or nothing (you either are an owner of the site or you're not).

That aside, the biggest drawback is that are few tools for getting photos OUT (download) of Flickr. Other drawbacks include:

There is no bulk download (at least that I have found). You can only download one by one.

Getting back to the original size for a single picture takes a couple of mouse clicks.

Uploaded pictures are renamed to a random sequence of numbers/letters. (Original filename is lost)

So as a photo archiving system where you want to be able to find, retrieve and repurpose the photos, it's kind of clumsy. That's not what it is designed to do.

My 2cents.

Gavin

-----original message-----
>&gt;Ari only sent this to me, I presume by mistake, and since his suggestion is one I now agree with - Flickr - I am sending it out to everyone - and quite possibly Flickr is better than Gallery.
I was going to respond to Ari with a question but I checked his links and see that Flickr resolved the problem we had with it. We purchased Flickr when Andy Carvin from wwwedu recommended it. It seemed easier than buying more server space and we liked how you could tag everything and the rest of the world on Flickr saw your photo if they had the same tag. But it would not make 'albums' - it was one jumble of all of our photos with the latest ones coming first. We often add photos into albums later or do not put albums up in time order and then we change the order later. Worse - we could not give out a url for an album but rather had to give out the link for the whole collection. I wrote to Flickr and they said, "Sorry, maybe someday.&quot;
While I did not check out what they allow you to do within them - it seems that someday has arrived. Now they not only allow you to have 'sets' - which is their nomenclature for albums - but to have collections of sets - which is something we would actually like to have. I will explore it further. Thank you Ari - and everyone - check out the examples he gave - really nice stuff. But also a word of warning. If you use any web service, Flickr or Gallery - keep back-ups - even if they are a disorganized collection. We use a shared server from a host company and they once lost our site when their server died. Fortunately it was before we combined our multiple urls so it did not include the Gallery. Now we also pay $5 every once in awhile to make a back-up of our whole site since we allow visitors to upload photos to the albums and do not have the originals ourselves.>>

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