I use Flickr since a couple of months, http://www.flickr.com/. It is fantastic how many beautiful and interesting photos are around there. Everyone can upload digital photos, registration is free. Standard users with a free account can upload pictures for 100 MB a month. Upload for Pro users is unlimited.
There are now more than 1 billion photos on Flickr.
Photography is one of my hobbies – I have a Canon EOS 300D - and I know that it’s often difficult and requires a lot of time and sometimes luck to make a good shot.
So when I see a very good shot on Flickr I sometimes load it to my PC.
Easy:
On the photo page: Mouse – right click – save picture as… click on Save – the photo is saved.
On the Photo Download page: Click download link – Save – Save as – Save – Done
Task fulfilled.
Really?
…No.
Partially at best
I have one photo on my harddisc, that’s all. Everything else which makes Flickr so fascinating is lost.
No description, no tags, no comments.
Who has taken this picture and where and when?
Which camera was used?
Is there a different size of this picture?
Can I used this photo for something else or does it have a copyright?
I don’t know.
And I can’t find out.
Lost in Flickr space.
Sometimes I can find a picture again.
If I can use concise words to describe the photo
and those words appear in photo description or tags
and not too many photos are found
and I have some time to browse through the results
and the web isn’t too slow
and I’m on-line.
All in all it’s a rare event.
What are the alternatives?
a) I could save the whole web page from the browser with: File -> Save as:
The photo is then in a subdirectory to the local web page – together with dozens of other small images and icons. This is not useful; I have only very seldom saved web pages from the browser.
If it does work at all. Sometimes I get a message ‘Error Saving Web Page’ with Internet Explorer.
b) I could set a bookmark to the page. I have a bookmark to the Flickr home page, but not to single photos. Large numbers of bookmarks are confusing.
c) I could copy the photo and some data from a Flickr Photo Page selectively. There are hundreds of Flickr utilities. A great list is here
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/03/great-flickr-tools-collection/
I have looked through this list and found some interesting utilities. A few programs copy photos to the PC, e.g. as mass downloader. But I have not found a program to copy one picture and the related meta data.
No problem for me, I'm a software developer.
I will write a little utility to copy one photo and meta data from Flickr to a PC
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