My Friend Flickr

Or maybe my un-friend.

It makes my head spin.

[Sure, I'll have some cheese to go with my whine]

It seems so gol-dang cool, but the physical act of doing anything more advanced than spending mucho time browsing other people's pictures makes me hyperventilate.

I am determined to complete the assignment and will post again with my picture, but for now I'm trying to get my reflections done during a slow night on the desk.

It is cool to be able to look at other libraries' signage, displays, furniture etc. I can see using this as a source of ideas and an easy way to share information visually. Assuming I can leap over the technical hurdles of actually uploading something, it seems like a great way to share photos with friends and family. The thought of my precious personal photos living on someone else's server, a machine over which I have no control, makes me a little queasy.

[As if I actually have any control over my own PC. Har, that's a good one.]

Of course all of the toys are a lot of fun too, but at the end of the day the whole thing just feels unwieldy and disorganized to me. I get confused about sets and collections, and I think there's something about groups, but that's people, not pictures, right? So the library set (or maybe it's the collection?) is not the same thing as the library group?

Probably it will be clearer if I actually use it, but in theory it just seems like a big muddle. When you search for something common, like cats, you get thousands upon thousands of images with no discernibly reliable way to narrow things down a bit. If photos are well-tagged, of course you can use that but not all photos are well-tagged, and don't EVEN get me started on the lack of authority control.

And while I love the extensive tags that some people use (which are especially fabulous for categorizing your own personal photos), the multiple access points can result in photos showing up in your search that appear to have nothing to do with your query.

I'm actually complaining about too many access points. I need to go lie down.

Flickr's community standards guidelines just make me laugh and laugh.They basically say, if you think anyone, anywhere in the world might find your photo offensive, don't make it public. I think that gives the average Flickr-using Joe waaay too much credit for being culturally sensitive.

So I guess to sum up, I think Flickr is uber-cool for one's own personal use. When you start getting the rest of the world involved in viewing your vacation photos, not so much.

Not very 2.0 of me, eh?