Using Flickr
I know most people read this site using an aggregator rather than actually visiting the web page, so I just wanted to point out that, after ages of tinkering with my own, minimalist photo gallery script, I’ve finally decided to abandon the project and “outsource.” Part of the reason is that I hit a technical impasse with my own, somewhat novel approach (I was trying to create the Blosxom of photo gallery scripts, but that’s a story for another post). A bigger reason, though, is that Jason Kottke’s remaindered links pointed me to Flickr, and I’m finding that I quite like it.
The VC pitch for Flickr would probably go something like this: it’s a social networking site with photo sharing as its centerpiece. Fortunately, the actual site is much cooler than that description would make it sound. While a lot of the Orkut/Tribe-esque social software trappings (interest groups, chat, “Flickr Mail”) feel a bit tacked on to me, I think Flickr does the photo sharing user experience better than anyone else I have ever seen.
From the clever annotation interface that Kottke lauds, to the built-in comments system, the thoughtful privacy controls, the weblog integration and post-by-email functionality, and the RSS and Atom “photostream” feeds, Flicker is full of thoughtful details that show a lot of thinking went into its design.
More interestingly to me, though, Flickr also seems to have borrowed rather intelligently from a lot of my own pet web development design principles. It features: friendly, easy-to-remember cruft-free URLs, del.icio.us-style tags to facilitate simple, ad-hoc categorization and Blosxom-esque URL-path-based filtering, and good search functionality combined with hefty storage (at least in the Pro version) à la Gmail.
In short, I’m suitably impressed. I do have a few suggestions, though:
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What Stewart Butterfield (president of Flickr creator Ludicorp) says on his weblog about supporting the proposed Fotonotes standard is cool, but right now I think there’s some low-hanging metadata that Flickr should really be exploiting: namely, EXIF. EXIF support is common to nearly all consumer digicams today, and EXIF tags contain a wealth of information that could be used for searching and sorting Flickr libraries. At the very least, Flickr should display my EXIF data.
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Ever since I noticed that the EXIF standard contains tags for GPS location, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of organizing my photos geographically. Since my ideal photo gallery app would have this feature, I naturally think it would be cool if Flickr implemented something along the lines of the GeoSnapper interface.
Things like GeoSnapper are always going to be somewhat impractical for the average user until digital cameras start to incorporate GPS, but it might be interesting to try implementing a system based on “location tags.” My thought here is that the first user to enter “Golden Gate Bridge” as a location could optionally enter GPS coordinates, and subsequent users would then get to benefit from the system’s previous knowledge of that location.
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I don’t believe the search function searches tags. I think it should, at least optionally.
All in all, though, I think Flickr is already an excellent product, and I eagerly await more information about its upcoming “Pro” version. Keep up the good work, Ludicorp!