Flickr Frustrations

3382403145_fc5d6fce10_b I used to keep all my theatre images on DotPhoto (some 60,000+ images). Everything from before summer 2008 is still there. Although they say they have a 1GB limit on albums, they’ve never removed older images (although they’ve threatened to once or twice). I upload full resolution images, and once in a while someone orders a print.

Recently, on the advice of the new Slidell Little Theatre web developer (I’ve had that job for ten years, and I am very happy to give it up!), I started using Flickr for my theatre images.

3382354137_b64af01423_b Flickr is great for displaying images. I also have a personal account there, and some of my latest photos are displayed in the sidebar on this blog. But when you start uploading thousands of images, the organization begins to break down.

The show I’m uploading now, Little Shop of Horrors, has about 1400 images. Starting from this show, I decided to upload lower resolution images, to get away from the 3 or 4 day upload process. If anyone from the show reading this needs a print, let me know and I’ll send you a full resolution copy.

So I fired up my Flickr upload tool, added the images (about 500MB worth) and started the upload. When I got home that evening, it had crashed. No way to tell which images had failed.

3383154836_90808f918a_b I uploaded them into a set, so I could organize alphabetically. From there, I could determine that I was missing 37 files at the beginning and 514 files at the end. That was the easy part. But if I’m missing files in the middle (no, I’m not going to do the math until I get these uploaded), it’s going to be hard to figure out which ones are missing. As far as I can tell, there is no way to display filenames without either going to each image, or mousing over the image in thumbnail view and wait until the tooltip pops up. Either way, it’s a bit of a pain.

I’m going to start uploading smaller batches. It’ll take a little longer, but I guess not as long as having to do everything over again.

I just wish there was an easier way…