now with flickr

well, I’ve gone ahead and done it now, haven’t I! Yes, yes I have actually!

I’ve been contemplating this for a loooooong time now, and finally went ahead and not only uploaded my first photo to Flickr, but also bought a Pro account. Honestly, I’ve been waiting – and waiting… and waiting – for Google to develop their Picasa Web Albums but they just haven’t moved with it much (they’re more interested in installing ‘buy & print’ services than in searching and commenting). I love Picasa on my local machine, but I need something that others can access, browse, tag, comment, etc. – I WANT THIS.

Plus, increasingly so, I want to move lots and lots and lots of my personal archives online. I take lots and lots and lots of photos. I estimate somewhere around 22,000 in the past 3 years 1 month (that’s how long I’ve had my Sony DSC-V1 – at the time I bought it, a 5MP camera was one of the best on the consumer non-SLR market). I want to put larger works online, but don’t necessarily want to host everything on my own server/s. and Flickr is incredibly user-friendly! It all adds up!

As with my Normal Space projects, I plan on investing the exhibition functions, archive capabilities, and other limitations of alternative social spaces – Flickr is as good a place as any to start. (And they offer desktop software now which means it’s reallllllly easy to upload!)

This is all probably really obvious to hordes of other users (as in the 2+ million users already posting on Flickr!) but as an artist it’s always important to question – to suspend – these motives, and their applications. I’ve finally come to terms with them and hopefully in the coming months and years we can put these spaces to the test!