Tuesday, May 08, 2007

My head is spinning....

Flickr is a lot different from yahoo.

It's almost like myspace, I think, with pictures and forums and friends and groups and profiles...wow. I didn't know all of that was available and I've already received an invitation to be a contact from another sewing enthusiast, which is cool, but I haven't a clue what to do with it. I'm not just at the bottom of the learning curve, I'm down in the well...

So, I poked around a bit on Flickr's site and found a topic on the message board about Yahoo closing and I learned that I may have 'blown it' by signing up already, rather than waiting for the 'official announcement of how to move your pictures'. Apparently, the folks at Flickr are not ready to transfer the photos, won't be ready until later this summer, then the freebie 'pro' account will be available to new customers only. By then I will not be a 'new customer', since I signed up over the weekend.


Bummer. Why don't they print the fine print when you actually need to read it?

Along the way to finding that information, I discovered that there are a number of Flickr participants who are Serious About Photography as Art. They don't sound happy that folks like me, who use the pictures simply to share a non-photography-related aspect of life, will be clogging up their bandwidths.

I'm just a *little* overwhelmed by it.

All I want is a place where I can post pictures so they can
1) be linked individually (I even *prefer* a clickable link...not one where the photo always shows up in the text) and
2) be viewed in different sizes; it's nice to be able to look at details up close and personal.

Oh, and it's Greatly Desirable that these simple services be free. ;)

Photoworks originally allowed both of those things; it required a little hoop-jumping but it was possible. Then at the end of 2004 they reformatted all the pictures and their whole site (leaving the photos unavailable for something like 8 months) and eventually their new system has eliminated both options. However, the picture you see when looking through the album with the 'full screen' option is a little bigger than the one you can see through Yahoo.

Sigh. I guess I'm just going to have to poke around on Flickr a while to learn what's what and how to do the whole community thing. I wonder when I'm going to have time to do that...

Anyway, I have moved a couple of batches of photos to Photoworks...things that won't need individual pictures, like last years' SWAP group and the little photo tute on how to put on pseudo-Biblical head drapes...and deleted duplicate photos and such, so I've only got 51 pictures on Yahoo that will need to be transferred.

But still.

2 comments:

  1. My sympathies, dearie. The computers just want to eat our time! I've been using Flickr since December and have managed quite happily to ignore the whole social aspect of it. I like it overall and totally don't trust yahoo/google offerings anymore!

    ReplyDelete
  2. The irony is that Flickr is now a Yahoo product...I thought I'd be better off just transferring photos within the company.

    I guess this will just keep me in healthy mental exercise, right? ;)

    ReplyDelete

Real comments are always welcome! Spam comments will never see light of day ;-)