Over a year later, and I haven’t missed it. Haven’t even considered having or wanting to post anything there. If I post photos, I typically do it through the ephemera section of this here blog, or if it’s a bunch of photos, I’ll create a gallery and post that.

The one thing I’ve missed, and the thing that caused me to recreate my Flickr account, is the “My Friends” page on Flickr. I’d debated just subscribing to the RSS feeds for each of the people I want to follow, but the single page for seeing all recent photos is just too simple and compelling. For now…

So. Anyway. Over a year since I’ve posted anything to Flickr. Almost 6 months since I deleted my account. No regrets. It’s totally possible to host your own photos, easily. But the social glue side of things is harder to directly replace.

One thing I’ve noticed is that I don’t get the constant ego-buzz of people using my photos. It used to be, I’d get a few emails each week, saying my stuff was in books/videos/websites/magazines/etc… It’s happened post-Flickr as well, but much less often. And that’s OK with me. I’ll just have to artificially prop up my sense of self worth some other way…

update: I wondered what the self-hosting thing looks like from a files-uploaded-to-server perspective.

The /gallery photo sets are separate, but only add up to 677MB total, for sets going back to 2003. Not a big deal…

One of the things I missed from my now-nonexistent Flickr account was the “Sets” page, with links to historical photo sets. Easy to rectify. I just exported a bunch of the more relevant/interesting/fun sets from Aperture, as static “web page” exports. I created a “gallery” folder on the server, and dumped them all in there. I could have just let directory indexing provide an ugly automatic menu of photo sets available, but that’s not good enough. So I googled together some simple PHP code that builds a visual gallery page, with links to each photo set.

The thumbnails are pulled by randomly picking an image in the “thumbnails” folder in each set. They’re different each time the gallery page loads. I also added in a link to my “ephemera” photostream. There’s no RSS, no comments, no animated-GIF-unicorn-awards. Just the photos.

I picked a photo size of 840px because it’s big enough, and is coincidentally the same as the width of my blog posts so if I want to use any of the photos, I can just use them directly without any futzing.

Once the Pro account is deactivated, Flickr only makes the last 200 photos in my photostream available. The other 8,796 items will be taken offline unless I pay to keep my Pro account active. Which I won’t be doing. I’d be more than happy to leave the photos there so people could use them, but since they’re going to be taken offline by Flickr anyway, I’ll be deleting them from the service. I’m not sure why Flickr doesn’t just leave them available, since they make money by placing ads on the pages (for non-Pro members, anyway). Whatever. I could continue to pay the $25/year to keep my photos available for use under Creative Commons, but that seems rather silly.

Thanks for the (almost) 8 years and nearly 2 million views, Flickr. It’s been fun, but it’s time for me to move on.

meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Turns out, it’s not possible to just delete nearly 9,000 photos. Looks like the account has to be deleted to do it properly. So be it…

So I tried out [a plugin that sniffs the images embedded in posts](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-linked-images-to-gallery-v01/), and automatically downloads a copy of the image to your own server, then modifies the html to point to the copy of the image stored in the blog rather than the one out in the ether. It can be set to only grab photos posted to Flickr, or all images not hosted on your own domain.

I just ran the batch process on my own blog. It grabbed 307 images from my Flickr account, copied them to my server, and updated the HTML on the posts. Automatically. Perfect. Now, if my Flickr account disappears for any reason, the images stay.

Nancy White’s been playing, and saved a screenshot of the output of her mini story. Which she then uploaded to Flickr, and tagged as “5cardnv”. Where it is then placed into the pool of photos for random selection for new stories. Recursion in visual storytelling. Gotta love it.

I’d upload my 5-card-story containing the recursion to Flickr and tag it as 5cardnv, but I’m afraid something would implode due to excessive recursion.

Of course, you have to be familiar with the rules because they exist for a reason. But you also need to know when to just ignore them, or flat out contradict them.

This shot breaks almost every rule in the book. Composition. Lighting. Exposure. Focus. White balance. But, the emotion and life that pour out of it make it worth laughing at the rules. It’s one of my favorite photos of all time.

For a really good and fun overview of some decent photography rules, be sure to check out the Photography Rules group on Flickr – started by a fellow Calgarian.

The mummy was back again this year, and I got a shot of it with a wider angle lens.

That just changed. Now I’m using the awesome new Aperture geotagging plugin Maperture, adding latitude and longitude data directly within Aperture before uploading to Flickr etc… That means I get to keep my metadata.

Here’s what the Maperture metadata entering screen looks like:

and once posted to Flickr, the geotagging data is still available:

And, thankfully, the coordinates seem to match up pretty closely. I’d tried using Google Earth via the Flickr Export plugin for Aperture to add the geotag data before, and there was a mismatch when viewed on Flickr. Maperture seems to work great so far!

Here’s #5,000 – my 2008/366photos from today, of my son Evan being a typical pyromaniac kid at the campground this morning