Everyone uses flickr.com lately, or at least everyone who I have been paying attention to recently. I’ve known about it and have had the opportunity to use it since it’s infancy, but haven’t because of a few reasons that I’m just now beginning to realize. Some of them I think are flickr.com shortcomings, and others, just shortcomings with digital imaging in general:

1. My photos end up in a common flickr theme. Beyond my photographs and comments, there isn’t much that says “These are Michael’s photos”. The interface is fine, and essential, but I’d love to be able to modify the template to look more like my site. But that’s not how flickr works, and I understand that. Changing that suggests a change in how flickr works.

2. I hate uploading photographs to websites. Uploading a single photograph at a time is excruciating, not because of the time it takes to do it, but because of all the mouse clicks, and searching for the file. That sucks. I’m not sure if flickr does this, but Typepad has the best workaround – zip up a batch of photographs and upload a single file and it unzips and places the photos in a gallery. But even that sucks. I’m wishing a bit too hard here, but I want my digital SLR camera to be able to connect to some ubiquitous high speed wireless network no matter where I am and put the just taken photo in an album. Camera phones nearly have that ability now, but I want more. This isn’t flickr’s fault.

Update:
flickr has batch upload clients that take the sting off of upload, but I want to process to be transparent. I basically want iPhoto Pro (which doesn’t exist, but would be a more feature rich version iPhoto for people like myself who take massive quantities of huge file size photos in RAW format) to speak directly to my web enabled photo software. Like a web based iPhoto mirror that synchronizes on the fly without me having to lift a finger.

3. flickr, due to it’s popularity, put the skids on a really cool web based game. My warped thinking says “Don’t use flickr, and Game Never Ending will come back” which is probably as true as Astrology.

4. Say flickr or type flickr enough times and your mind turns it into something fowl sounding. It’s not a euphemism for anything, it just sounds like something I’d say after falling down a flight of stairs. Not sure if that’s flickr’s fault or mine.