A quick thought about collections in Flickr...
Frivolous post, this. A desired feature for Flickr would be to be able to add public photos to groups and pools without the user having to join the group in question. That would make it like Amazon listmania stuff, which is an enormously cool way of collecting interesting metadata. I mean, let's be honest - if someone can link to them individually on their weblogs, then they should be able to make a collection out of them. It would be neat. Maybe you could slap a quick proviso - "X user wants to add your photo to the collection Y - yes / no / [x] always use this option" - or something.
I suggest this after discovering a dark and evil (and very very funny) primal need to collect together the best photographs of much-missed friend and former colleague Cal (in costume) - a set of photos which would bring out his true majesty and greatness. I miss you, dude - and I'm really looking forward to hanging out in a week or so. Please don't break my legs:
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
...or maybe flickr could offer a way to organize your favourites in "sets" instead? just a thought
→ Posted by: Lars Wästfelt at November 28, 2005 3:19 PM
Something else I've been thinking about in the way of social Flickr-ing: some way of sending a message "blech has posted a photo of you: do you mind if it's made public, friends only, private or do you want it deleted?" to the person in the photo. Depending on their reply, the required action would happen.
It's *almost* doable with the API, but there's no messaging, so you'd have to send Real Email, which means it might get spamtrapped and so on. Even so, might be worth knocking up as a proof of concept.
On the other hand, how many people care about photos of themselves being published?
→ Posted by: Paul Mison at November 28, 2005 4:19 PM
"It's *almost* doable with the API, but there's no messaging"
Well, FlickrMail addresses are well-known via the user's NSID so it would be entirely trivial to script.
→ Posted by: Phil Wilson at November 28, 2005 6:30 PM
Phil: yes, but I'd rather use the built-in Flickr messaging/email thingy, partly because it keeps everything inside the service, and partly because real email is getting a bit useless because of spam.
Still, as I said, I shouldn't not do it just because of that hole.
→ Posted by: Paul Mison at November 28, 2005 8:14 PM
Ah-ha...I second Lars. I have (so far) faved nearly 4,000 photos, all pretty much related to my main area of interest ("Mexico"). I now need to - or would dearly wish to - allocate them to "sets of my faves" (or something). I posted this request on Flickr, but so far....nada.
→ Posted by: Steve Bridger at November 28, 2005 9:56 PM
There are so many Flickr features I want, and this is indeed one of them. Tag bundles, a la de.icio.us, and sets within sets are at the top of my list right now.
→ Posted by: Dan Bruno at November 28, 2005 11:50 PM
Not friv at all. The ability to be a public curator of others' work will surely lead to greater public goods.
→ Posted by: Matt Whyndham at November 29, 2005 10:51 AM