Flickr
After a few months of sorting through my photographs — and a fair bit of editing — I have completed the slow migration from arcade.withoutnations.com to my account at Flickr. There are a few reasons I felt this was necessary:
- Gallery is a wonderful, robust open-source platform for hosting and sharing photographs on a personal website. Unfortunately, the larger the database gets the slower it runs. The interface, while infinitely customizable, isn’t particularly user-friendly (an aside: the beta for 3.0 looks very promising, and I would encourage others to give it a try). Flickr exists to host and transfer tremendous amounts of data to users quickly.
- The social networking aspects of Flickr are unparalleled and steadily growing. Flickr can be seamlessly woven into dozens of applications and services — and where a gap exists, an API sits ready.
- The community at Flickr. As I connect with others and add contacts, I am committing myself to a community that encourages sharing and networking. Hosted here, I am only responsible to myself. Two years passed as I delayed uploading photos from my trips to Europe. With a firm deadline and the knowledge that people will be actively viewing new images, I pushed through and finally finished what I started.
- A simple, transparent method for implementing Creative Commons licensing.
The first attempt at integration with this site will be via the Flickr Gallery plugin by Dan Coulter. There seems to be quite a few options out of the box, but it also looks to have excellent support for the Flickr API search method, which allows for a great deal of flexibility.
The existing albums at arcade will remain live indefinitely. I was less selective when posting photos to Gallery, so there may be value in the additional images that haven’t been migrated.