Problem: Lots of Pictures – Solution: Flickr

Digital photography is great.  It make it practical to take hundreds or thousands of pictures without the cost of developing and printing.  I have had the chance to travel quite a bit.  In the old days for a two or three week trip I would take about 30 roles of 36 exposure film, about 1000 pictures.  Then I would would have to wait for it to be developed and printed, usually after I could save enough money to do it.  Now I can take thousands of pictures see them immediately and not worry about the cost .  This let me take lots more pictures so I have better chance of getting that great shot.

Now there is a down side to taking thousands of pictures.  You have to do something with them and that is a lot of  pictures to do something with. One my recent trip I took about 2500 pictures.  That is a lot of pictures to look through.  I want to share them with others that were on the trip and I wanted to print some albums with them.  I wanted to try out one of the Internet photo sharing sites.  I had used the Kodak site in the past and was pleased with the print results I got, but is seems that some of the newer sites were more popular.  I read several reviews of sites and decided to try out Flickr.

Here is what I did.

1. Used a DVD burner that will copy camera memory cards directly to a DVD.  This work well and didn’t take too long.  It was nice that it would copy several cards to a DVD but  it didn’t tell me if the whole card would fit on the DVD so I had to do one of them over since I couldn’t tell what pictures got on the DVD and what ones did not.  It also renamed all the files, which is needed when you copy several cards to one drive, but does make it a little hard to keep them in the order you took them.
2. Copied them all to my hard drive in folders for each DVD.
3. Made a copy of them for editing. Just in case I messed up some.
4. Reviewed them one at a time and deleted any from the edited group that were bad (out of focus, shots of the floor, stuff like that)
5. Sorted the edited copies into folders for each location on the trip.  This ended up being about 30 folders.
6. Used a little utility to rename all the photos in each folder to have the name of the location in the file name.  I actually haven’t need this yet, but it seemed like it might be helpful.
7. Signed up for a Flikr account and downloaded the desktop uploader.  I signed up for the pro account.  It cost aobut $25 per year.  It allowed me to upload the large volumn of pictures I had all at once and gave me unlimited storage, sets, and access to my original files.
8. Started uploading the pictures.  I uploaded a folder at a time.  Added a general descripton and tags for each location and put them in a Flickr set.  The desktop app made this easy.  It does take a while to do all the uploading.  I did it over about two days for about 2100 hires pictures.
9. Since there was a large group, I want them all to be able to find the pictures they were in so I used the Flickr online app to go through each group and add tags with the names of the families in each picture.  This also took several hours.  The tool let me drag all the ones for family into a work area and change the tags for them all at once.
10. I also specified the geographical location of some of the pictures.  I have more to do on this one, but I think it will be nice when I get it done.  I wish I had all my pictures loaded with the geograhical locations specified.  That would be neat to see.
11. Now they were ready.  I sent out Flickr inviatations to those in the group.  Some already had Flickr accounts and some did not.  Now they can see my pictures and download them or print them if they want.  Some have also started uploading their pictures to Flickr so I can see them.

So far so good.  I have had a good experience using Flickr.  I like the upload tools and the online tools.  I could chosed to make the pictures public or private and event add a Creative Commons Licences to them (I still need to decide about this one). Flickr let me deal with a large amout of photos pretty easily.  It seems all the printing from Flickr is done by third parties so I will try them out and see how I like the results. 

I also downloaded an iPhone app, Moble Fotos,  that lets me view my Flickr stream on my iPhone.  Seems to work very well.  Now I have all these pictures every where I go.

Do you have experience with Flickr or some other site?  How did they work to solve your photo sharing problem.

Related posts:

1. Cooliris – a cool online image viewer
2. Problem: Track Travel Itinerary Solution: Tripit