flickr is now my beeyotch

For the last few years, I’ve had two picture websites. My Flickr account was mainly used for my ‘blog world’ so I could easily share pictures with my online friends and also post to my blog. I also had another site on my own server that I used to share pictures with my real-life family and friends. Because I felt this inexplicable need to keep the two worlds separate, even though most people I know in real life totally read this blog regularly EVEN THOUGH THEY NEVER COMMENT AND THINK I DON’T KNOW (to them I say: I don’t mind that you read! Comment away!)

Anyway. Last week I had a revelation that spending 2 hours a few nights each week uploading mostly IDENTICAL pictures and videos to two different websites was kind of dumb. I have 8,742 other things I could be doing with that time, like staring blindly at the wall or watching trashy television shows (which, if we’re being honest, aren’t those two activities equal? heh) So I emailed my family and said, Hey, I’m getting a life and you’ll need to sign up at Flickr to see my pictures. Cool? Here’s my link, yo. (okay, so it read a LITTLE BIT different than that, but you get the idea.)

After making this decision, I realized though that a lot of my older pictures were missing from my Flickr account, so I decided to upload them. However, if you’ve ever used Flickr, you know that when you upload something new, it is added at the beginning of your photostream (or is it ‘end’? I guess it depends on your perspective) It does this regardless of the date the photo was taken. Hm. Since I am incredibly picky (read: anal retentive) about things like chronology and order in my life, I wanted them to appear in the order that they were taken, not uploaded. Flickr’s Organizr allows you to edit the ‘uploaded on’ date manually to adjust your stream, but I would need to do this for hundreds and hundreds of pictures. Not my idea of a fun time. (Apparently they don’t have a batch-process for this because they feel it will compromise the ‘photostream’ aspect of the service. WHAT-EVS. pffft.) The other issue I had was that I didn’t sign up for Flickr until 2004, so it wouldn’t let me change the dates of my pictures to anything before that. GRR.

(Warning. The rest of this post gets a little geeky. You’ve been warned.)

Enter h4ppier photos- a handy little mass-photo-management tool for Flickr that I stumbled upon while searching the Flickr forums for a way to batch-edit the upload dates. It is truly awesome. Using the advanced features, I was able to make the ‘uploaded on’ date match the ‘taken on’ date that’s already embedded in the EXIF information on each picture with the click of a button- even to dates before I was a member at Flickr. HA! I love finding ways around stuff like that.

In case you were wondering about how I’ve been going about all this, here are the basic steps I took:

1. Upload a batch of photos using Flickr Uploadr. Label them all as viewable by ‘Only Me’ so that while I’m working, nobody sees a picture of me from 5 years ago and is all: ‘????’
2. Use h4ppier photos to search for all of my ‘Completely Private’ photos (to see this option, you’ll need to check the option at the very top for ‘Very H4ppy’ and do a default search to see the privacy options)
3. Once it finds the private photos, click the ‘Make the upload date match the taken date for these photos’ button. Voila! They will now be taken to their rightful place IN ORDER in the photostream. All is now right with the Universe.
4. You could use the other options here to add tags, add them to sets, etc. but I usually do that on the initial upload, or in the Organizr. But if you wanted to do that here, that’s cool too.
5. Once you’ve made all the changes you want to a group of pictures, you can then make the photos public (or in my case, most of the personal ones are ‘Friends and Family only’) Just do a final search for all the private photos, and then change the privacy option to whatever you want.

That’s it!

I’m still in the process of uploading stuff- I think I’m in the middle of 2003 right now. Here’s a link to all of the new stuff I’ve added this week. The bulk of my digital pictures on my hard drive only goes back to about 2002, so I’m almost there! Again, because I am a freakshow, it will give me great satisfaction to know that all of my photos are nicely organized and categorized here on the internet, in one place.

I’ve also been playing around with marking some of them on my Flickr map, mostly vacations and things like that. I organized my sets and collections better, with more descriptive names. And when I’m all done uploading, I’ll probably try to batch-tag a bunch of stuff. Because, kids? (say it with me now) I AM ANAL.

So anyway. That’s what I’ve been up to, when I haven’t been wiping snot from my daughter’s face and getting screamed at because of it. She really hates that.

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