Well Intern Joe has been getting me fired up on Flickr lately. At first glance, I saw it as just another photo posting site. Still not completely convinced that I'll use the "community" portion of the site, with the tags, and finding others photos, etc.

There are a couple very cool things about it though:

• Once you add friends, you are notified automagically when they add new photos.
  
• Uploading software. Bummer it's an install to your machine, but once you do it, then have shell extension "send toFlickr". Will resize on the way up if desired.
• Uses EXIF data to show info about each picture. Date/time taken, camera used, etc. (see below for more on that data)
  

In doing some early experiments, I have started to learn more about the EXIF data that accompanies the JPG pictures. It has info about the camera used to take the photo, along with date/time taken, exposure settings, etc.

2 issues so far:

1. Apparently when using the Windows XP power toy to resize pictures, you lose the EXIF data ??? I haven't completely confirmed this, but after resizing manually with XP, then uploading, all my pictures had a "date taken" equal to the "date uploaded" - a pretty good clue that the date taken data had been lost. So I tried again, this time using the original pics, and using the Flickr Uploadr tool - this time it looks like the date taken had survived.
2. It looks like sorting pics in a stream is automatically based on the date taken. Trying to confirm this. Once you've added pics to the stream, then you adjust the date taken, not sure if the pics are then reordered.
   

Anyway - in searching around for help on date sorting, and EXIF, Flickr help had this article.
Flickr: Forums: FlickrHelp: exif and filename mass-manipulation software [info] Intern Joe can probably use this since he's lost all the EXIF data in all the file moves (burn to CD, move to HD, backup, compress, etc)

Here are plenty of other people wondering the same thing. Random order, or reverse order of pics in a set is lame.

Posted 9:32 AM    |    0 comments    |    Permalink