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!
Well look who’s come around! I was intrigued when Google introduced (bought?) Picasa, but it has never fulfilled its promise, kind of like Google Video is to YouTube (bought!). I hardly ever use my Flickr account, mainly because it costs money for the premium account and I’m a miser, and because I don’t have any photos to share, but I was always surprised that you were dismissive of it, because it has such an impressive array of features that I thought would appeal to a tech-savvy photo-taking fellow such as yourself. Welcome aboard.
I hope I didn’t come across as ‘dismissive’. With the explosion of ‘Web2.0’ one thing I’ve been a little suspicious of is the question of ‘what actually works?’ I mean there are lots and lots of services, but they’re aren’t all promising down the line – however some are necessary to test and apply the current trends of social/networking thought, and in that sense lots of these services are interesting. Like I say, to me it’s about features and options for the user – but enough babble let’s have fun with it! Yargghhhhhhh!!!