OddThinking

Don’t confuse this with trying to push you toward Flickr, but a couple of additional data points:

On PRIV3: You list Friends/Family/Public. This is really Me only/Friends/Family/Public, and a strange other thing called a “pass”

Passes are long-ish URLs you can generate that you can distribute to open up a specific photo set (or, collection, from memory) to anyone who has the URL. You can cancel the pass at any time. This is my preferred way of granting temporary access to family photos to friends and family unable or unwilling to get/login to their own Yahoo account.

Passes can be revoked at any time. You can monitor the number of people visiting on them, but you can’t tell who they are (of course).

A non-obvious downside of Flickr, is that something is up with large portions of the community of Flickr users. When Flickr added the ability to host short videos, there were howls of protests from a surprisingly large number of Flickr subscribers. How dare Flickr offer more features! How dare they… try out new stuff & give users more options…

I don’t really understand it, but it worries me.

I’m not exactly an expert, but I am a happy pro subscriber. Your requirements seem to be a bit more stringent than mine, but your criticism seems more than fair.

CAT9: I think you can do this, using Collections (ie have a collection per “type”).

CAT10: Not exactly what you want, but you can group photos by date (taken or uploaded). Flickr doesn’t assume all photos in a set have the same date, so the idea of grouping sets by date doesn’t really make sense.

WF1: I use the Flickr uploader plugin for Aperture, and it inserts the photo ID and URL into the original photo’s metadata on my hard disk, also adds a (local) “flickr” tag. Makes it very easy to locate the original photo, and in fact you can re-upload the photo if needed (eg better image tweaking).

Seconded Chris’ recommendation of the pass – it sounds weird but is quite useful in practice. I don’t think it addresses your Vegas requirements though.

Alastair,

Thanks for your suggestions.

Re: Cat9

I assume you mean “sets” rather than “collections”? There is a subtle difference between Flickr sets and Cat9. In Flickr, you can create custom sets of photographs. In my own software, I was experimenting with a sets of albums (or occasions, as I called them). I used a tree structure to sort the albums by type. I was never particularly happy with the result.

For example, all the weddings albums were grouped together, but not all the wedding photos were grouped together.

Okay, that’s not a good example, so let me give two better ones. All of your corporate events could be grouped together, so a coworker could browse by event, choose one of interest and then look at the photos of it.

I have a special (handwritten, hard-coded!) page which only lists all the circus festival albums, because there is a large audience who are only interested in those, and are not interested in what I did last New Year’s Eve.

Making a set with all the circus festival pictures I have taken would result in many hundreds of photos, which would be like drinking from the proverbial fire hose.

Re: Cat10

Another interesting one.

In my custom software, I originally didn’t have dates associated with albums.

I did create a date field in my scheme for photos, but I never got around to populating it; it didn’t seem necessary.

For my albums, I created a “sort order” field. It wasn’t long before I was typing in, for example, 20081201 as the sort order value.

Looking again at Flickr, it is true I can’t sort the sets by date, but I can choose the order by hand, so I am free to sort each one according to date as I add them, which should be enough to put a Y in the Cat10 box.

(If you are worried that every time an experienced person looks at my evaluations (e.g. th evaluations of Smugmug and Flickr Pro), they find I have overlooked significant features in my summary, you are not the only one.)

Re: WF1

Interesting; I am uncomfortable about the way that Picasa, JAlbum (to a lesser extent) and Aperture (I guess, but am not sure) modify my original photos and/or subdirectories – especially on photos that have already been backed up to optical media. I consider the backups to be the master copies, and the ones on my hard-drive merely temporary, cached copies. So modifying the versions on my hard-drive seems wrong to me.

I suspect that I am going to have to get over that; my workflow will change as I adopt a new system.

(Another change I will have to take care of – my scanned images have bad EXIF data, especially the dates.)

Re: Passes

I can see how guest passes solve the Vegas situation. Add private photos, not shared to family or friends. Create a set called “Vegas”. Email a set guest pass to the co-conspirators on the trip, and remind them not to share it with their spouses/bosses/elephant-handlers.

(Thanks Chris for explaining about Guest Passes. I went back to Flickr to have a look, and they are pretty well hidden!)

Re: CAT10

I assume you mean “sets” rather than “collections”?

No I mean collections, a pro only feature. I haven’t used them myself but have a read and see if they meet your requirement.

Re: WF1

Aperture definitely has a concept of a backup but it’s different to yours. In Aperture a backup is called a “vault” and it’s on R/W storage. I keep mine on a separate HD. Each time you start up Aperture it tells you in the splash screen how many photos you have added to the library since the last backup.

This scheme works well for me because I am (in theory at least) constantly preening the library, touching up and reorganising photos from the past. Also I’m taking a lot more raw photos these days and so my library at 28G is already quite awkward to backup to optical media.

In other words, modifying images on your hard drive is the right thing to do. Think of it as modifying files under source control – it’s fine as long as you remember to commit the changes back to the repository!

Alastair,

Thanks for the pointers to collections, which I hadn’t heard of. Reading through, it sounds like exactly what I am looking for.

As for the source-control model of photographs, I can see that I am going to have to change my thinking, but, right now, that model scares me.

Having a vault on the same machine as the originals is risky. Computers get stolen.

I have a slight feeling of dread for the past 6 months that I have been out of paid employment, because both of my piles of optical storage disks are in the same building. Houses catch fire. I used to use my desk drawer at work as my off-site storage.

With source-control, you need to back up the whole repository regularly, so going to such a model will mean more back up disks, not less.

Maybe you both need to back up in bigger chunks, and arrange a system of email-coordinated backup rotation with trusted friends for off-site backups.

Actually, I think your desk drawer is still available for off-site storage.

I’ve been pondering a backup solution that involves 3 identical disk-drives, a RAID-1 disk controller, a fire-resistant media-cabinet and a sign.

Two of the drives would be in my computer, mirrored. That protects me from drive failure.

Every now and again, I would pull out one of the drives and replace it with the spare. The re-mirroring process would run in the background, at the hardware level, so I wouldn’t need to stop working.

The spare drive is my backup, which would protect me from accidental formats.

The spare drive would be in the fire-resistant safe to protect me from fire.

I’d keep my will in there too, because the law hasn’t yet caught up with good data-protection practices. You may only have one official copy of your will. Madness.

The sign would say: “Dear thief. I know you are in a rush, but please read this. This safe does not contain anything with a re-sale value. To prove it, the combination is 1234. Take my TV and computer; leave my backups alone.” Hopefully, that would protect me against theft.