week 2.2 (flickr)

I set up a Flickr account (http://flickr.com/photos/ldjaffe) but had to do the uploads from home since that is where my iPhoto library is.

I found out that flickr's uploader isn't compatible with Safari, but that's hardly news. I got bogged down trying to figure out Uploadr's "authorization" process which was launching Firefox in another window. I think maybe because this is a kind of backwards assignment the process of finding photos to upload into Flickr was more awkward than it needs to be. It doesn't really let you browse the iPhoto library with ease so I had to first find photos in my iPhoto library, note the date and filename and then browse directories accordingly. It's a little cumbersome.

By comparison, I have had a Shutterfly account for a few years and that let's me "share" (upload) photos directly from iPhotos via a free plug-in. That way I can be looking at a photo in iPhoto and decide then and there to upload it without a lot of extra steps. I will note that Shutterfly has a different focus - they sell prints and sharing is a secondary proccess. I did set up a shared album for this assignment. http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AaM2jhq0bs2FE¬ag=1 But there is no general access to photos in Shutterfly.

Back to Flickr ... I'm slowly getting on top of some of the basics. For instance, I noticed that some photos were tagged with the camera model. I tagged mine accordingly and then did a tag search for this model. I saw a lot of photos come up without the tag and discovered camera information ("taken with..." ) embedded in a "further information" section. I spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to add or edit this part before discovering that it was included automatically when I uploaded my photos.

My other issue is that the "My Photos" display defaults to showing the photos in the order they were loaded. I was working backwards through my iPhoto album during the upload process and so the images are in reverse order. I was able to resort the photos in the set (there is a sort order option), but I can't discover any way to change the order on this opening screen. it is a small thing but annoying.