Hello flickr.

I've finally decided to ditch textamerica for flickr. It's been a long time coming. Unfortunately I haven't had the time to migrate my photos until now, a process which is painfully difficult given that textamerica does not support RSS or provide any other export functionality.

So far I'm pretty impressed with flickr. I even bought a 1 year paid account. I like how they limit upload traffic per month rather than download traffic and/or photo size/quality, though it would be cool if they offered an option to purchase additional upload bandwidth. I've got about 2.7GB of photos to upload, so we'll be taking flickr to the max.

One thing that concerns me slightly is its being acquired by Yahoo. I'm not a fan or a user of any of Yahoo's paid or ad-supported services, and really really hope they don't screw this one up. That said, flickr does have RSS support, so it won't be too painful to move next time if the service begins to lack.

I've noticed a few areas of flickr that could use improvement:

1. flickr has batch functions to allow you to change some properties of many pictures at once (like titles and descriptions). Unfortunately, you can't change photo dates this way, and there are 2 separate screens for changing the "date uploaded" and the "date taken". So importing this information from my old photo gallery was a manual, and painfully slow, process.

2. The flickr badge isn't very customizable. This is the feature that allows you to showcase a few of your newest photos on your blog or other web site. It would be cool if you could specify which types of photos you want to display (by tag, or set).

3. It would be nice if there were some way to automatically generate sets from tags. So, for example, I could have a set for my moblog without manually adding each photo to it. It would also be nice to be able to have sets of sets. Shallow hierarchies become rather difficult to work with.

The good news is that these feature requests seem to be coming up over and over in the flickr forums. So hopefully, if the company wants to stay ahead of the game, they'll fulfill the requests of their users.

So, that's about all I've got for now. I finished another great book, which I plan to write about here soon. The new flickr photo gallery should be online soon.