pictures

Giant move to Flickr

Ok, I hope I am writing this for the last time. At least for the next 10 years or so.

I am doing a huge move of my photo gallery. I got bored with trying out all pieces of software, migrating back and forward, configuring this stuff, adding features, backing up, fixing links, etc, etc, etc.

Flickr wins!

I have decided to move my complete photo collection to Flickr. Yup, you heard me right. No, I am sane and in good mind.

Flickr has everything I need from a photo gallery tool – speed, flexibility, tags, permanent links, ratings, social interactions (comments, bookmarks, groups, ratings, etc), and much more. It integrates nicely with a whole bunch of third-party software. There are many third-party services based on Flickr, such as image editing tools, backup to DVD tools, print and ship tools. And Flickr is standard de facto for photo galleries.

I don’t see any good reason NOT to migrate, so let it be. I’ll keep you posted on my progress. Until the move is completely done and everything is uploaded and tagged properly, I’ll keep the local copy of the gallery. All new additions, however, will go directly to Flickr. I’ll also have some sort of sidebar applet with links to recent and random pictures. Stay tuned.

P.S.: This post pointed me towards this utility for batch uploads – very useful. Easy to use too.

P.P.S.: Years 1995 – 2002 are uploaded and somewhat tagged. The rest is coming soon.

Re: digitally tagging height

This is my response to this post in Sanjay’s blog. I originally wrote this as a comment, but before I pressed “Submit” button, I thought that it would be better to have it here, with all the crosslinks.

Sanjay noticed that pictures like the one of Maxim on his birthday are a cool new way of saving height measurements. That is instead of using old ways of pen, rule, and wall. He regrets only that there is no date and time information on the picture.

Well, that’s not a problem at all, my dear friend! Most of the modern digital cameras save a lot of meta information in the image file. With right tools that information is trivial to extract (Google search for “EXIF”).

I put a bit more thought into the idea and realized that it can actually be much more fun. With data and time of the image available from the image file itself, we are missing only one bit for a complete picture – the age of a child. Since there is no automatic way of getting it, a human interaction is necessary.

And where there is human interaction, there is social interaction. Flickr comes to mind. Consider this for a moment:

Parents make pictures of their kids against a height meter. Then, they upload these images to Flickr. Then, they tag these images with three tags. One tag for the age of the child, say “age14month” or “age2years”. One tag for the height itself, say “76cm” or “132cm”. And one additional tag to make these pictures easy to find, say “kidsgrow”. Maybe an image pool or user group would be a better way of goind about it.

With setup like this, there is a central location, where all such images are stored (backup). People can then easily find all pictures of their own kids, as well as other kids of the same age or the same height.

There are also a whole bunch of third-party applications that can utilize data from Flickr, like, for example, fd’s Flickr Toys.

How do you like the sound of that?

Pictures from New Year celebration

I know you’ve been waiting, so here they are – pictures from New Year celebration. They aren’t many, because a) I wasn’t in a mood and b) I was busy being Santa Claus. But those that are there give the idea of what went on.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-12-31_New_Year_Eve/