Nyataimori

My shots

i have fat ankles!

but seriously, excellent photos, BD. thanks!

i am stealing your photos from flickr, BD, and putting them on eloise too. i like to have them all in one place. also, i like to be able to comment on them. technically i could get my own flickr account and do it there, but…all in one place wins out. they’re in the same album as mine (but seperate).

But…but…but…notes!

(Seriously, it takes all of five seconds to sign up. Do I need to send you an invite myself to make it easier for you? Then you could add notes to my pictures, too.)

Flickr doesn’t currently do prints.

I’ve never been able to get into the notes feature (beyond the novelty of it).

I like the communityness of it too.

It’s true that Flickr doesn’t yet offer easy print ordering, but they have found a printing partner and plan to roll out the capability soon.

Geeknote: I bet some javascript guru could pretty easily write a greasemonkey script adding simple ofoto/shutterfly ordering capability to Flickr. I’m gonna go bug the gmonkey community.

Also, eloise is not free, just like the Discovery Channel is not free. Eloise is something you already pay for. There are lots of kids who don’t have the Discovery Channel. I grew up without the Discovery Channel. A free Flickr account, on the other hand, is free.

There are certain situations where the notes feature comes in pretty handy (a simple left-to-right enumeration here becomes difficult to keep track of if you also want to give character descriptions). Commenting on photos sometimes requires referring to a particular part of a photo, and the ability to highlight that part with a note makes things much easier.

I’ve tried hosting my own pictures, at which point I was using the same software backend that Eloise uses, and I had several problems with that setup. One of these was the software itself - I found it slow and clunky, and it was a pain to go through the upgrade process if I ever wanted to take advantage of new features available in new releases. On Flickr, someone else handles all those upgrades, and I just get to enjoy the frequent feature releases.

More important than the software itself, though, was the space issue. As my gallery expanded, I was quickly filling up my 1GB (now 2GB) of hosting space, and I would have had to either (a)pay for more hosting space, which gets real expensive real fast, or (b)start uploading lower-quality/smaller-size pictures, in which case the ability to order prints would do nothing for me.

It’s true that hosting my photos on Eloise would solve a lot of the issues I ran into when hosting my own photos, but I’m a picky bastard when it comes to the kinds of control I like to exert over my online presence, and I’d probably be bugging Gene with questions and requests much more than he or I would be comfortable with. I ask my friends for enough favors. If I’m contributing out-of-pocket for part of my web experience, I want bitching rights, and I don’t like to bitch at my friends.

Now don’t take any of this to mean that I think everyone else should be using Flickr. On the contrary, I think Eloise is perfect for the kinds of small-community-minded photosharing that’s usually done on CH. I don’t, however, think that the two are mutually exclusive, and I appreciate that Michele made the effort to sign up and comment on one of my pics.

In short: commenting. That’s why it’s good to have a Flickr account.

How do you think I made all my SF graffiti friends? I started posting pictures tagged with ribity and people found me. For finding like-minded people with very specific similar interests, Flickr makes the world seem so much smaller.

And I don’t think I’d mind if you guys ever want to duplicate my pictures in the eloise albums for persistency, but I’d prefer for comments on them to go in my photostream, just so I can read them (eloise doesn’t have rss feeds for comments). In the most ideal situation, there would also be links to the original pictures to make comments even easier…

Well, in light of those requests: why would it be beneficial to duplicate the albums? If it’s for commenting purposes, it takes less time to sign up for a free Flickr account than to duplicate the album, and then I’d actually read the comments…

If it’s so that all the pictures of the PHill group are in one place, well…I’m not sure if that can be helped much.

Sidenote: Gene, why do I have to manually enter <br> tags into my comments here?