Thing 20: Flickr and Photo Sharing

Well, first I must confess. I started this exercise with a personal bias and I found it hard to get rid of. You see, I've been using a site called "webshots" for about 10 years now...WAAAAYYYY before i heard of 2.0 anything.

But I tried to give Flickr a fair chance. Must say I was turned off when I saw I had to first create a yahoo account and then a flickr account. perhaps it's just my mood now - and gemini that i am i could feel differently 10 minutes from now - but it's just not worth it. knowing i won't convert to flickr from webshots for sharing my photos, i'll resort to option 1...

at any rate, i did take the flickr tour and much is similar to webshots. there are a few niceties, however, that flickr offers, including the maps and making stuff. now, would i use any of those features? probably not.

what i look for in a tool like this is the ability to simply:
- upload photos - many at a time preferably.
- organize them into meaningful groups and i don't care whether you call them sets or albums or fred...
- label them. perhaps tag them too, but i'm happy with simple titles and/or captions.
- share them.

i like webshots in that i can have public albums as well as private ones. but overall what got me hooked on that particular product was the screensavers. the client includes desktop photo manager, screensaver, as well as upload manager. for years all i cared about were the professional photos i was able to get on any topic - from antelopes to zylophones - i could get a photo from webshots.


and by the way, it's possible to get oodles of pictures of crop circles from any photo sharing site, no doubt. but i only had to look as far as "my pictures" to find this one taken several years ago in wiltshire, england. what a fascinating trip that was!

so, sorry, flickr, i'm sure you're great for those not already sharing photos, but i'll stick with where i am, thanks.