A little rant about Flickr

Aug 13

A little rant about Flickr

Its a pretty good service all in all, and mostly this is a rant about my not realising its limitations, rather than directly about the service they provide. Firstly, and this is clearly stated - but I managed to miss it - it has a measly limit of 3 photo-sets for the free account. Me being an organised person on the whole, wanting more than 3 seats to organise my photo's, means buying a pro account for $25 a year. Now I wouldn't be so bothered about paying that if:

I was bad at keeping my own backups - which I'm normally not
It worked properly with my own choice of browser - Opera - which is doesn't always
It allowed me to print/interface with a UK photo-printing service - I use Photobox for example
It was a bit cheaper - at ~£15 a year seems a tad pricey for the amount I use it

So, as those things considered, I won't be uploading many pics until I know what I'm going to do. :(

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3 comments

§ NightSpirit said on : 16/08/06 @ 15:07
That's not good :( I guess they have to make their money somehow tho. I read that there is a Gallery plugin for b2evo in the works but might be a while before it turns into a useable replacement.

You could always try a seperate standalone package and run it beside b2evo on this hosting account?
§ fraser® said on : 17/08/06 @ 12:24
I originally looked at Gallery, and a few others, but decided that FlickR was much more feature rich. Despite its shortcoming, and my rant above, I still think its the best out there and a truly great site/application.

The biggest concern for me is the storage space. I have about 500Mb of hosting space, and a self-hosted gallery would eat into that in no time Doubling that to 1Gb would cost me an extra £20 a year, so FlickR's £15 a year starts to look reasonable - especially considering I'm essentially buying use of their software too.

I plan to do some work with the FlickR API in the near future, to see how well I can get it to integrate with my B2Evo setup... so based on that outcome, I'll decide if I'm buying into it or not.
§ NightSpirit said on : 18/08/06 @ 18:55
When I first read that I thought that 500MB would easily be enough but then checked out the Photos dir on my HD and it comes to 1.1GB for only 46 sets :/ However, that does include some avi files that were taken at the same time too which pushes up the size taken. Also, some of the photos are very hi-res which probably would not really be needed on an online gallery - saving down to a reasonable 1024x768 size drops the filesize down to 10%.With that in mind you wouldn't need to worry about the quota until you hit 80 sets or so (depending on how much you post in the rest of the blog).

Obviously tho it will depend on your plans for the images.

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