Phil Gyford

Writing

Saturday 16 July 2005

PreviousIndexNext Moving photos

Over the past few weeks I’ve been laboriously moving around 500 photos I used to have on this site over to Flickr. Even though I love Flickr, I was still wary about putting all my photos on an external site. Despite the fact I have copies of all the pitcures, it feels a bit like giving someone precious objects to look after. But as all my new photos go there anyway, it seemed strange to only have the older ones here. Also, images that aren’t in Flickr simply don’t seem as useful and connected to other people. I can now easily view all my snaps of Yoz for example. Should the need arise.

It has to be said, this was a horrendously dull process. Even using the Flickr Export Plugin for iPhoto it’s probably taken several days in total to complete the move. All the photos are grouped into sets, just as they were on this site. And I’ve manually set all the “Taken on” dates correctly. And painstakingly added the appropriate tags to each and every one. And set up htaccess redirects to Flickr for every photo and every set.

I also made a single page on my site to act as a way through to my Flickr’d photos. The recent photos are a styled Flickr Badge and the long list of photo sets is built using the excellent Flickr Photosets Movable Type Plugin. My only complaint there is a niggle with Flickr’s Photoset API: the sets in a list are only returned in the order they were created (or the reverse of that). There appears to be no way to respect the careful order of my sets on Flickr. Any thoughts on ways round this appreciated…

Comments

Was there a special trick for doing this without having old photos show up in your most recent photos? I don't remember anything but recent photos showing up on my contacts page.

Posted by Paul Mison on 28 July 2005, 10:37 pm | Link

I marked all the photos I uploaded as Private, and then, after I'd finished, I waited until I'd uploaded 10 'new' photos before marking all the Private photos as Public. That way none of the older stuff appeared in my RSS feed.

I think the only way I found of mass-changing the privacy was to use the Organizr and change it on a set-by-set basis.

Posted by Phil Gyford on 29 July 2005, 8:23 am | Link

Ah, I wondered if it was something like that. Yes, I've used Organizr before to mass-change privacy. Thanks.

Posted by Paul Mison on 29 July 2005, 12:29 pm | Link

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