I’ve decided to slowly migrate the redjar gallery from Menalto Gallery to Flickr. Gallery just isn’t doing it for me. Feature bloat in the wrong areas and regular security vulnerabilities top my list. Flickr has it’s own downsides, loss of control and flexibility, but with a little work I think I can work around them. The benefits of Flickr are that I don’t need to worry about maintenance. They get to worry about things like security vulnerabilties and backups. And of course there is the community. For instance, if you are looking for a creative commons licensed photo of Amsterdam, or puppies, or whatever, Flickr is a great place to start.
It is going to be a mult-phase process. So far, in the past couple days I’ve migrated over 6500 photos in over 300 albums from gallery to Flickr using the gallery2flickr script. It fails to export the album title and description, so I had to take care of that with my own combination of scripts, Flickr API, and some kludgy TextWrangler find and replace.
One thing I haven’t taken care of yet is addressing the fact that when you upload an image to flickr, the original file name gets blown away. I can understand them changing the name so that all photos follow a convention, while avoiding name collisions, but there really should be a metadata field accessible via the public API that stores the original filename. My planned solution is to add a tag for each photo in the form of, “original_filename_IMG_123.jpg”, where IMG_123.jpg is the original filename. Another alternative that I haven’t looked at is the possiblity of stuffing the original filename in the EXIF data and seeing if it is maintained. I’ve never played enough the EXIF to know how straight forward that is.
The next phase, and the key to my even considering using Flickr is to use the Flickr API to put the photos on redjar.org, hopefully without the viewer even really knowing that they are hosted by Flickr (beyond the API requirement that there be a link back to the photo on Flickr).
I’ve looked at a couple projects that do just this including f*gallery (no CMS dependencies but also not very advanced and not being actively developed), FAlbum (WordPress plugin) and this Flickr module for “CMS Made Simple” which is the closest to what I’m after, but of course is tied to “CMS Made Simple”. However, none of them go quite far enough. I don’t even want the image src to use flickr.com, I still want it to be a redjar.org URL. Why? Because I am absolutely sure, that in a few years, the next Flickr will come along that will make Flickr’s offering look rediculous, and I’ll want to switch, hopefully without breaking URL’s.
By the way… strangely, after my Flickr account reached 100% of the 2 GB per month upload limit, my uploads just kept chugging along. Weird, but I’m not complaining.
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I’m facing the same problem as you: Where to store my ever-growing collection of photography reliably and easily so I can use them at my website? Flickr API seems quite tempting, if some software utilizing it goes out of development I can switch to another; then again I’ve gotten quite good impression and recommendations about Gallery also.
You may want to check out yet another Flickr-Wordpress-plugin: http://sevennine.net/projects/f-gallery/
Comment by rdnk 04.05.06 @ 4:12 pmLeave a comment
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