How to best use Flickr Pro with Aperture

[FrenchPB]

Hey all,

I'd like to get a pro account on Flickr to display my digital pics online.

Since a pro acocunt has no storage limit, I thought I'd use that to have an online backup of all my pictures.

The way I wanted to do it was to upload a full album (original picture quality) with restricted access (only for me and my family for example), and then, have the best pics public for everyone to see.

Since I use Aperture to manage all my pics, I wanted an album to become a 'set' on Flickr, and the starred pictures (3 stars or more for example), to be public on Flickr.

However, it looks like I can only set rights to the whole set on Aperture, and not on a selection of pictures. That really annoys me for the following reason : using stars to select the best pics would allow me to keep my selection in the future, even if I use a website other than Flickr (I'd just to to my album on aperture, filter the pics with 3 stars or more, and then upload that selection to any other place on the internet).

If I have to go to flickr to change access rights for ever single pics, that'd mean I'd have to do the same work twice (once on aperture to keep those selections, and once on flickr).

Am I missing something ? Is there any other way to do what I want, which is :

- backup all my albums to flickr with specific access rights
- have starred pictures become public on flickr

Thanks, that was not an easy post to write cause it gets a little bit complicated ^^

 

[emorydunn]

Flickr really isn't a good place to backup your photos. It's a photo sharing site, and while the pro account does give you unlimited storage that's about the only thing it has in common with a true backup method.

First, you will only be able to send JPEGs to Flickr, so if your Aperture library were to be lost you'd just have flat JPEGs, you couldn't go back and change anything.

Second (and the biggest reason) is Flickr doesn't have a way to download all of your images all at once, you can only download one image at a time and it's still not particularly easy to do that either.

If you want online photo backup then you should look at a dedicated online backup site.

 

[FrenchPB]

Flickr really isn't a good place to backup your photos. It's a photo sharing site, and while the pro account does give you unlimited storage that's about the only thing it has in common with a true backup method.

First, you will only be able to send JPEGs to Flickr, so if your Aperture library were to be lost you'd just have flat JPEGs, you couldn't go back and change anything.

Second (and the biggest reason) is Flickr doesn't have a way to download all of your images all at once, you can only download one image at a time and it's still not particularly easy to do that either.

If you want online photo backup then you should look at a dedicated online backup site.

Thanks for the advice. Do you think a pro account is interesting on flickr, or should I learn to limit myself to 200 pics ?

 

[Designer Dale]

The Pro account is more than an unlimited number of photos. You can merge sets into collections and such. If you are really into having an organized on-line gallery, it's worth a look. Zenfolio and Smug Mug are worth a look if you are willing to pay for a service. As noted above, these are not for back-up.

Dale

 

[emorydunn]

Thanks for the advice. Do you think a pro account is interesting on flickr, or should I learn to limit myself to 200 pics ?

I started out with a free account (obviously) without the intention of paying since I didn't think I'd use it that much but I really like it. Although, more than the total image limit is the limit to the number of photos you can upload per month which I quickly went over.

I'd say that you try it out and if you find yourself bumping into the free account limits then upgrade.

One more thing, while I'm thinking about Aperture and Flickr is the new update seems to have brought a lot more control to merge the two. Aperture now shows all of my Flickr sets (showing how many 'random' sets I've made), not just the ones made in Aperture. Also, syncing tags, captions, and such is really nice.

 

[FrenchPB]

After tryint out flickr, picasa, and facebook among others, I think I'll just use flickr to post my best pictures, and try to stay under the 200 pics limit. I find that the compression quality is very good on flickr, and that I won't need to upload original files to have a good quality displayed.

Compression quality is terrible on picasa compared to flickr, so I won't use that one.

In the end, I'll keep albums (sets) on facebook, to show to my friends and families pictures of a whole event, trip, etc.

I've heard that facebook will also have an improved photo gallery soon, any news about that ?

Both facebook and flickr are linked to aperture, so that will be easy to maintain.

 

[adversus]

I use a plugin called FlickrExport in Aperture, it offers much more control than the default Aperture Flickr interface does.

As far as backups, as others have said, don't rely on flickr as a backup archive.

If you are serious about photography and don't want to chance loosing your hard worked images, I have three words for you:

Time Capsule + Mozy