flickr gets all desktopy

August 18, 2004 12:13 PM

Flickr's been around as a photo posting/gallery/sharing kind of place for almost a year now, but today they launched something pretty impressive (ignore the dumb name): Organizr. Check out the demo movies or try it out yourself if you already have photos there. This is the first time I've used a web application that rivaled my desktop application of choice (iPhoto, for photos). Pretty impressive what you can do in Flash these days, besides singing kittens and work-dodging games.
posted by mathowie (18 comments total)

I posted about this on my personal site, but seriously I think this is some really amazing stuff that I've never seen in a web application before.

Plus, the wacky thing is that it says the whole thing was built on top of their now-public APIs, so I could conceivably think of a better way to manage photos in Flash, and go ahead and build that myself. Or I suppose I could write glue code for iPhoto and just keep using that from my desktop. It's too bad photos are such large files these days. I'd love to use flickr as a remote backup, but they'd have to charge a lot if I was dumping 10Gb of photos there.
posted by mathowie at 12:24 PM on August 18, 2004

save all photos to gmail account.
have organizr pull from there.
autoemail yourself a new gmail invite when you fill up a gig of storage.

looks neat.
posted by darkpony at 12:35 PM on August 18, 2004

More proof that Flash has finally matured into a legitimate application development tool. While some have realized that the Web may someday be the new command line, many don't realize that the future has already arrived.
posted by gwint at 12:44 PM on August 18, 2004

Flickr's been shaping up very nicely ever since Ludicorp sussed that it wasn't a networking tool but a photo management tool. The organizr is very neat, although I'm not convinced that the new photo sets weren't pre-rendered obsolete by the excellent tags feature (similar to Gmail's labels). Between tags, notes, privacy settings and groups I think Flickr has shat on iPhoto for months - but then I don't take a volume of photos that is problematic for flickr. That said, if I was that serious about photography I doubt I'd think twice about paying for a pro account - depending on how the pricing turns out.
posted by nthdegx at 1:20 PM on August 18, 2004

Thanks all! (I work here at Flickr).

Flickr's been around as a photo posting/gallery/sharing kind of place for almost a year now...

We've only been around for 7 months actually, but Eric and Cal are such webdev geniuses they are not only able to create stuff like Organizr, but can turn a year into 7 months.

It's voodoo, I tell you.
posted by aniretac at 1:40 PM on August 18, 2004

It looks great but for now I think I'll just stick with Adobe Photoshop Album for my pictures. The main reason being I don't have to fuss about uploading megabytes after megabytes, and the pictures are in full resolution, which *if* I am not mistaken is not the case with Flickr.
posted by riffola at 1:54 PM on August 18, 2004

I really, really like Flickr, but I haven't figured out where it actually fits in with my work flow. So I have a photo blog where select images go, (near) unlimited hosting space, a flickr account, and over 50 gigs of images on my harddrive. I just haven't figured out where Flickr can go. I put some pictures up on Flickr of a night on the town (when out of towners came in) so that people could see them (and so that I wouldn't dilute my photo blog) and that seemed to work. But I want a way to link all four spots where I have images, and perhaps Organizr is a start. I wonder if there was a way to integrate iPhoto with Flickr & Organizr. Additionally (aniretac) I wish that there was a more fine grained tuning of who I allow images to be shown to. Instead of just "friend" or "family" fields, perhaps project by project, or user created fields that limit who can see the images.
posted by plemeljr at 2:00 PM on August 18, 2004

How does Flikr work, exactly? The site is skimpy on details.
posted by eustacescrubb at 2:01 PM on August 18, 2004

I think it would be nice if there was some means to store the photos on Flickr elsewhere. You could then back up the photos to a web server with your ISP that you have faster access to. I agree with Mathowie, uploading a 3 meg photo to Flickr over typical broadband is a bit of a suck. That said, I think it's a very cool service. It is a very simple way for people to share photos.
posted by chunking express at 2:03 PM on August 18, 2004

riffola, flickr keeps your originals at full size. They changed it a few months back.
posted by mathowie at 2:22 PM on August 18, 2004

3 people are working on an iPhoto plugin for adding photos to Flickr even now, as we speak :) And please see our API docs if you want to build your own tools for interfacing with Flickr.

Are you looking for details not found here, eustacescrubb ?
posted by ericost at 2:23 PM on August 18, 2004

plemeljr: One thing you can do is create a Flickr group for a project and add photos to the group's "pool". Photos in a group's pool are visible to anybody that belongs to the group, regardless of the photos' other permissions, so it's an easy way to share with a specific group of people. Groups can be totally private also.
posted by ericost at 2:30 PM on August 18, 2004

Flickr has been great for me to add "addendum" photos to my photo site via the badge. My own site gets the FEATURE images and Flickr gets all the other stuff and the scans of older photos of mine that weren't taken by me (and tagged appropriately).

Don't completely rule out the networking thing though. I still use iPhoto (and will continue to do so) and I would not be using Flickr if I didn't have the ability to get nice comments every so often.
posted by stefnet at 2:53 PM on August 18, 2004

Holy shit this is cool. As a professional flash software developer, I am definitely going to mess with this.

If I can stay away from the beer on my days off.....
posted by lumpenprole at 3:24 PM on August 18, 2004

flickr keeps your originals at full size. They changed it a few months back.

Oh neat! I'll give it a proper try once again.
posted by riffola at 3:37 PM on August 18, 2004

I got married two weeks ago and I've been using Flickr as an easy to way for guests to upload their photos into one central repository. I can't think of any other way I could have easily gathered 400+ guest photos in less than two weeks...what would my other options have been? Teaching non-techy family friends to use FTP? Bleah, no thanks.

Flickr definitely still has some kinks to work out, but the developers have been incredibly responsive to questions/suggestions. I've become a total zealot over the last few weeks. Organizr is definitely a step forward, and I can't wait to see what comes out of the API.
posted by arielmeadow at 4:37 PM on August 18, 2004

ericost,

I was looking for more technical details - where the photos are kept, how big they can be if they're uploaded to your server, what my copyright and privacy protections are if I use the service, how customizable the template design is (i.e., can I integrate it with a current site's design), how fast your server's upload speed is, etc, etc.
posted by eustacescrubb at 5:45 PM on August 18, 2004

Flickr continues to amaze. I am a major fanboy of the team there. Them folks make me tingle in geeky places I haven't tingled in in years.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:36 AM on August 19, 2004