Flickr Convert Testimonial

Inspired by Torley as I often am I took the plunge and set up a Flikr account for myself. This huge weight has lifted off my shoulder and off my hard drive and I feel more agile. Packratting graphics has gotten to be a "problem" and instead of going out and getting an external drive right now to just continue my habit I decided there is a better way and I've been shown what that is by my husband and it seems to work pretty well.

An organizer who had gotten lazy about organizing my own things, this is me. I can tell YOU how to organize and keep things in a proper order but then I let my own files begin to overwhelm me and take over my precious and limited time. My computer is down to it's last 25gigs of space and in SL I have over 25,000 items in my inventory!! It's going to splode at some point if I don't take care of all this now. Plus I have new greater things coming in my life and I need to be ready to receive them.

My Flikr account didn't cost very much I think it was around $25.00 for a year.  You can create sets, add tags, make various levels of permission, add some personal touches and be part of other communities in Flikr, sharing with others pictures of all sorts, all that you can imagine.

Here are their bullet points on the different account levels.

• Unlimited uploads
• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited photosets
• Permanent archiving of high-resolution original images
• The ability to replace a photo
• Ad-free browsing and sharing

Compare that to what you get with a Free Account:

• 100 MB monthly upload limit
• 3 photosets
• Photostream views limited to the 200 most recent images
• Only smaller (resized) images accessible (though the originals saved in case you upgrade later)

Going through every picture in my SL inventory and saving it to my hard drive was a lot of work it is a one by one process but I attacked it like a kitten with a ball of yarn. Turn on some good music! It took me about 8 hours to grab about 1,000 snapshots out of SL from my inventory. I would do it in batches of 20-40 then I made a batch file converting script, WHY? because you can't seem to upload tga files to Flikr *sads* but I was able to learn about using these tools and that is good *happy*. It's not scary anymore and it's not too much to do, it isn't overwhelming me now, and it's actually quite easy. Once I converted the 20-40 files I used the Flikr bulk uploader tool and sat back as it uploaded the batched into my Pre-SL 12-06 folder. I gave up on trying to uniquely name them or tag them at this point, they got a number and a standard tag and poof into the Flikr uploader they went down those tubes of the Internet.

Warning going through that many pictures is like surfing lots of memories, some good some not as good, same with all the files on my hard drive.

I highly encourage you to get a Flikr account, for yourself and to add to our global community. You have something to contribute, your special you! I also like how I am so agile now to access these files from any computer hooked to the Internet. So far I am loving the new technology we are seeing pop up for using the Internet.

My goal is to use Flikr for all my graphic file storage needs. I'll let you know how this plays out.

Comments

[Torley]

My beloved wife, how proud I am of you! *big huggerz* I must say this because it's very important, and I say very important things to you... repetaedly!

What you've written about touches on several areas of the future of humanity I've been thinking about. Loftly as that sounds, it comes down to one's essential needs in a social capacity. Let me elaborate:

* Networked storage as a convenience. While uploading is still decidedly slower than, say, transferring files on a local network, one stored, as you mentioned to me the other night, your files can be accessed from anywhere in the world with a decent Internet connection. You don't have to worry about, "Did I bring this with me?" It's a parallel, of course, for Second Life's own "persistent world" and how the grid goes on when you sleep.

* A transitory shift for Flickr from "real-world" photosharing service to include more of an online archive of real lives being lived virtually. Back when I was producing electronic music, I couldn't make heads or tails of the arguments between analog vs. digital synth gear. They're all human-made machines, after all. But then, I think of the controversy that ensued when Bob Dylan performed on electric guitar. It's ridiculous! In much the same way, I believe digital photography — in the truest sense of the word, originating from within the machine — is in its infancy, insofar as going beyond mere "screen shots" and elevating live, spontaneous capture of realtime events you don't have control over — as opposed to a calculated 3D render — to a performance art. In a watermelon rind, it's not so much about the source material (be it pixels or physical) as the emotions it generates. This has always, and will be, a hallmark of great art.

* New compression methodologies use to get more "bang for your buck", even on relatively thin pipes. You mentioned TGA, Ravie — remember that if you want to upload lossless (no loss in quality) images to Flickr, you can batch-convert to PNG, 24-bit. It's what I did for my textures. You've got a good eye for quality, girl, so you do your thang!

* In addition, tagging for me used to be quite a quagmire: I used to spend time tagging just about every photos; now, I do it on an as-needed basis. The stuff you need to retrieve frequently will become blindingly apparent by its very nature: for example, if friends keep commenting on a photo of yours, link to it, etc. it'll likely rise in Flickr's Interestingness rankings ( http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/ --- look for gorgeous photos there). That's a good sign for you to spend the time tagging so even more can find it!

* In a great example of participatory media, a kind fellow — Hyderabadiz — added a number of tags to the SLurl Logo @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/228538998/ In my experience, this has rarely happened, but it's just so apt that it did here, and that the tag "social networking" happened to be amongst the terms.

* Textures as micro-art. I'll explore this later, but I believe it's a worthy seed ripe for germination.

Enough intellectual discourse for now.

Know that Torley loves you, Torley encourages you to develop your craft, and I'm soooo happy growing with you *smewchies* as we continue to walk, hand-in-hand, together. :D

[Hyderabadiz]

Thanks for the appreciation.
Best, MT

[CogDog]

And you seem pretty young for being "106 and taken" ;-)

[efukt]

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[margaret]

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