So, I’ve been thinking a lot about photos lately. And specifically what tools could we use at the Yale School of Drama to make the sharing and re-using of photos easy for students and faculty?
We could use some hosted application on a server at Yale. This would have the advantage that we know where the images are stored, are directly responsible for their security (backups/reuse), can control access and have more control over what software is used. The disadvantages are that we have to maintain the hardware/software, upgrade it over time and — the big killer for me — when students graduate (which they always do eventually) it is tough for them to take their stuff with them. This last point is the big killer in my mind — how likely will students be to use our service with this issue?
I’ve been a big flickr fan for a while now, joining early on as a paying member before they were bought by Yahoo (and were still all up in Vancouver.) So as I’m thinking about a photo sharing site, flickr is my model. Its really easy to share photos, post them on a blog, create a group of users, and control access. Flickr provides some nice photo tools, such as the badges, and other software now have extensions which take advantage of the Flickr API. I saw an example of one for Joomba in a recent Yale web developer user meeting, and have just set up one in my WordPress blog here. So its hard to convince me that Flickr isn’t the feature set we’d want — and if it has that why not use it? I wonder if they’ve got a Flickr-U type of program…..
BTW the WordPress plugin I’m trying out is falbum — www.randombyte.net/blog/projects/falbum/ . Seeing as I just set it up like 10 minutes ago I still have a lot to learn. I will say that while its install instructions are good, they really don’t provide much in the way of usage instructions. I got it working quickly, but I’m pretty technical and honestly think I got a little lucky. And so far I’ve just got the default page working. So it will take a little more exploring before I’m ready to give it both thumbs up — but so far its looking good.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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