I’ve been sorting through my New Zealand photos… I’ve done a first screening pass – where I pick which ones are publishable – and am now going through and naming all of them (and commenting on some). After that comes a second screening, where I double-check the ones I chose the first time round. And then I do colour matching… no, I’m only kidding. :) I do the colour adjustments as I review them..
Anyway, getting past my bad dry humour, I’m up to about Wellington, which is close to half way, but one of the sets is out of order, so I’m probably closer to a third of the way through. It doesn’t look like there’s much happening this weekend, though, so I might get them done then.
That or go to Vegas. I’m still tossing that idea around.
Anyway, I realised when I started going through the photos that they wouldn’t fit on my .Mac account, even as reduced copies. And people prefer originals when they’re thieving off photos of themselves, in all their vanity…
So, I looked a bit at Picasa Web Albums, Dropshots, Snapfish – those that others from Contiki have used to post their photos. They all look okay, but the problem is integration. My photos are in iPhoto. It’s insatiable lust for RAM aside, I like iPhoto. I use Image Rodeo to upload photos to my website, which is a manual process involving a bazillion command-tabs and copy-pastes. Tedious enough. But then there’s these web album places which want you to go through their web pages & upload forms, then sit around for hours at a time waiting for five-at-a-time to upload. No thanks.
It just so happened though that, in my pile of 22 Versiontracker.com backdated daily mailings, there was listed a plugin for iPhoto for Flickr exporting. Now, for those who haven’t heard – which seems to be everyone, going by the Contiki group :/ – Flickr is the website for sharing photos. It’s owned by Google1 these days (can’t recall if they started it or not… I don’t think they did). Anyway, it’s all groovy, and this iPhoto plugin works a treat.
Except for free accounts there’s a 100 MiB per month limit on uploads. Given I have about 7 gig of NZ photos (of which maybe a quarter I’ll upload, so still ~2 gig), that’s going to take a very long time to get all up there.
So, after a bit of procrastination, I signed up for a paid account, which has no limits. Yay.
I also looked at just buying more .Mac space, but the highest you can go to is 4 gig, and costs a fair bit more than Flickr membership. It’s more flexible, of course, but… 80% of the crap on my website is just photos (and another 10% is just movies, for which we have YouTube nowadays)… so I think I’m more the poster-child for Flickr+YouTube than .Mac.
The big advantage with Flickr, over virtually every other site I’ve looked at, is that they don’t bat an eyelid at you uploading full size originals. I’ve never put the originals of any of my photos on my website because they take too much space. But if Flickr reckon they can handle 10 gig of my photos, well, good for them. We’ll see how it goes. :)
I’ve put some up already, while testing bits and pieces. I probably won’t bother going through and putting everything on Flickr, at least not initially; what’s on my website currently, won’t be going anywhere. But the New Zealand photos will be Flickr only.
You can view my stuff on Flickr here, hypothetically (if nothing else, my username there is “wadetregaskis”, so you can search for that). I’ll of course make announcements here when I add stuff there. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds and all sorts, if that works for you.
- Interjection from 2023: no, it’s not. Never was. I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote that. ↩︎
