Flickr Down!

July 19, 2006

Talk about timing. I just recently settled on Flickr to be my online photo repository of choice. Just last night, I spent a fair amount of time adding some pictures to Flickr and then sent the invitations out to friends and family. While many accepted during the day today, I’m sure that many would be heading Flickr’s way sometime this evening. I actually went through several conversations with my brothers about my choosing Flickr versus Gallery in the past couple of weeks. I can hear them now: “Exactly how much are you paying for your “awesome” online photo sharing site?”

And the really crappy thing is that I can’t even participate in their coloring contest because the camera is in Indiana with my wife and kids.

Oh well, I’m still a believer. The timing just sucks. I’ll consider it a test of faith. I just need to not panic.

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment 

Flickr and Adobe Photoshop Elements

July 5, 2006

I’m trying to finally jump on the Flickr bandwagon but am holding back at the moment because I already manage all of my images in Adobe Photoshop Elements (also affectionately known as APE or PSE). I started with the original Photoshop Album 2.0 and like a pawn went along for the ride through 3.0 and now to 4.0. Overall I really like PSE (especially now that I have a new computer) and I don’t want to give it up anytime soon.

My biggest complaint about PSE is that while they offer a number of sharing and publishing options, they don’t have an easy way to modify the generic web templates. I’ve toyed around with modifying one of their templates but I really don’t want static galleries of my pictures. I’d really like to just put the whole thing online. For a while, I toyed with the idea of creating some web pages that would read from the PSE database (an Access database in disguise) but I’m to the point now where I think that it would just be easier to use Flickr for what I need.

But, if I’m going to do that then I don’t want to lose all of the organization effort that I’ve already put into my pictures. My first trials at uploading images with Uploadr were losing the tags. I don’t need everything that PSE offers or can do, but at the bare minimum, I don’t want to lose my tags, nor do I want to have to jump through hoops to re-add/associate them. After a lot of Googling, I found the gold nugget that I needed in Organizing Photos - Part III.

The metadata is stored in a mostly inaccessible database (it’s really an Access database, but with an unfriendly table structure). However, the organizer has the ability to write metadata to standard IPTC tags as well. This met my requirement for an escape route. It writes these tags automatically whenever you export images from the organizer, and you can also manually request that write the tags to the source images as well (which can provide some insurance in the event that your database gets lost or corrupt, etc).

Initially I assumed that it did it automatically but the sentence is worded “… has the ability …” which meant that there must be a preference option to enable that functionality. But my assumption was incorrect. There is actually a File menu option to do it. Individually to the selected pictures. Grrr. Not sure why they couldn’t just do it to all pictures automatically. Regardless, by selecting my pictures, clicking File > Write Tag Info to Files and then dragging my files from PSE to Flickr Uploadr, I was able to get tagged photos from one app to another. Yay!

Oh, and don’t forget to go to your Flickr account and turn on the option to Auto-Magically Rotate your pictures.

Some other related links:

I hope that putting all of this together helps someone down the road. Can’t wait to have two-way syncing between the two!

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | 1 Comment 

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