Off Topic With Ashley

I’ve been heming and hawing about buying myself a Flickr subscription for a while now. I finally went ahead and did it this afternoon.

I know I’ve been less than impressed with Flickr in the past, namely because they don’t actually publicise the limitations of free (even paid!) accounts until you’re about to reach them, but after doing my research Flickr is the best value for money.

I’ve been wanting to get my photos on-line for a number of years now; I want the security of having an extra copy on the opposite side of the globe, and I also want a way to share my (sometimes) high quality snaps with people. It works out impossible amounts cheaper to use Flickr than to try and host photos myself with even the cheapest web host, and Flickr is a respected brand so I can be sure my photos aren’t going to go missing.

The killer feature I really really like about Flickr is that I can “geotag” my photos. Doing that lets me pin-point exactly where a shot was taken in the world, and display it on the world map. This is a killer feature, because it it combines my map lovin’, technical geekery, and passing interest in photography into one very neat little feature.

So instead of playing OpenTTD I’ve been uploading photos all afternoon. I actually have a bit of a workflow  going too, which I’ll outline for posterity. Caution, mild geekery follows:

1. I take a lot of shit photos, so I’ve been going through them all and deleting the rubbish. I’ve found that once I do that, my photo albums generally end up with ten to twenty really good shots, which is a lot easier to manage than a hundred terrible ones.
2. Before 2005, a lot of the photos I took were with the old Konica Minolta DiMAGE S304. While it was a really neat camera for its day, I’m finding now that the white balance in a lot of photos was wrong, and they’re all generally a bit washed out. I’ve been going through them one by one and correcting them with a combination of plain old level adjustment, and I’ve found even a mild HDR processing can bring out more details.
3. Once I’ve trimmed and edited my photos, I’m uploading them to Flickr with a program called DFO. I find it’s easier to upload them all in one blob, and then edit things like titles and descriptions later on.
4. Once I’ve got enough uploaded, I’ve been sticking them in “sets” which is analoguous with the “folders” my current photos are in, and then tagging them.

I’ve also been going through all my old photos and trying to write down as much as I can remember about each photo. Flickr makes it really easy to add and display that kind of metadata, so it’s useful in two ways: firstly because it adds more meta value to the photo which means it’s interesting to people other than just myself, and secondly because it refreshes my own memory as to what was going on at that point. I really wish I’d annotated these in 2003, because a lot of the details have faded with time.

It’s going to take an absolute aeon to get this all done. I’ve only done three “sets” so far, but most of that time has been waiting for photos to upload so I’m uploading another 300 photos overnight, and I’m hoping it’ll make it quicker going tomorrow.

I’m rambling a bit now, so I’ll point you toward my Flickr profile, where you can follow my progress. I’m keeping a majority of my photos private for the time being, but I’ve made some of my less personal shots from Singapore in ’02 available for your perusal if you’re interested.