So for quite a number of weeks — and especially over the last one — I’ve been playing with Flickr as my online photo album of choice. There were a number of reasons for this — a mature feature set, a weight of usage by people, familiarity with the system from some other uses, etc. 

I already had a Flickr account I’ve been using with my mobile phone pix, but I decided to create a new one for our “official” group album: “The Consortium.” So far I’ve loaded some classic family pix, some of my Denver architectural shots, and various sets from this year, including our New York trip (including the wedding), my India trip, and some photos from the Democratic National Convention.

The whole arrangement works pretty decently out of Adobe Photoshop Elements, which I use (currently) as my photo organizer. There are still a few hiccups in exporting from one to the other — date / sorting data sometimes gets lost, the picture “titles” work out to the photo file name (and so have to be edited), and the system sort of implodes if I try to load more than 100 photos in a set.

My biggest problem at the moment is my own disk space — my hard drive keeps teetering on the edge of “Very Low Drive Space!” and I have a lot of photos as yet uncataloged over on an external hard drive, which I cannot shift to my main drive, but which I’m reluctant to load as-is because I hate having my photos split across hard drives. That said, I might not have much choice, though in theory I’m due for a computer upgrade in January.

Anyway, this page remains the central index for all our pictures (across the multiple systems I have them stored in). With a bit of persistence, I can actually get a goodly chunk of the outstanding photos loaded before people forget what it was I was taking pictures of. I’d really rather not have it on my plate as “one of those things I do when I retire, assuming I survive that long and can remember anything about the events in question and anybody still cares.”