I have not been feeling the flickr love lately.

I know every loves flickr and flickr this and flickr that, but I’m starting to kind of adamantly dislike it.

First, I guess we went pro for gallery and archival purposes all in one.

So, archiving: Well, the new photos we take are in CR2 format (camera raw, which holds a lot more information than jpgs). So in order to upload them to flickr, I have to convert them, or I just pull out the embedded jpg. So already, it doesn’t really work for archiving, because it’s not the full raw file. We’d want THAT file, not the lesser quality jpg.

Second, maybe if I had a couple hundred photos, and tagged each one carefully and knowingly as I uploaded them I wouldn’t feel this frustration, but I took all the photos from our old (now non-functional) gallery and uploaded them in many various sessions, with minimal or no tagging as I went. The photostream is in the order of uploading, not ordered by when the photo was actually taken. So the trip to Oregon we took when Ethan was 4 months old is kind of in the wrong “place” in the photostream because I uploaded it a few months ago. Again, not a big deal if we didn’t have a ton of photos, but we have over 4,000. When I went looking for Ethan pictures to use on his birthday post, it took way too long to find ones that I wanted to use.

I do like the sets, and how a photo can be a member of more than one set at a time. Maybe I need to load up the photos by date taken and make a set for each 3-6 month period or something similar. I should probably go ahead and use their “resize me!” before uploading option to save on bandwidth. Since it doesn’t really do too much good to have the original jpg there since we have the original CR2 file on our machines. I guess it is handy for backup though.

I am just wondering if I should keep uploading photos there or perhaps I should just put up the ones I particularly like and keep the majority of them on our server. You know the ones I mean, we have pages and pages of baby Ethan and baby Jocelyn pics where they are in the same place with a slightly different expression on their face. Maybe overkill for the flickr account. If I don’t upload them all though, then if I’m looking for something and not at home, I won’t see them.

Oh, what a quandary. There you go, there’s my flickr dilemma. To their credit, I LOVE the whole community thing they got going. That part rocks. It’s just finding the photo I’m looking for in a timely manner, that is what is kicking my ass.

Do you use flickr? What do you think? Do you like it? How do you use it? Do you upload EVERYTHING or just some stuff? Are you a diligent tagger? Do you ever get annoyed at your photostream? I can’t think of any of my friends that use flickr, so I may be reaching out into the unknown readers, which I *beleive* there are some (maybe even FIVE!!), but have never actually said anything to me. I know you’re there. I SEE YOU IN MY STATS! So step out of the shadows and spill it, yo, I need the info!

OK. I’m done.

And I have a batch of photos that I’ll probably be uploading to flickr this evening 🙂

– amy loves loves loves the Canon 30D