Get Off the Flickr Grid

As much as Paul Bausch loves Flickr (so much so that he coauthored Flickr Hacks), his:

inner geek isn’t completely thrilled with my move to Flickr. As much as I believe Flickr is a revolutionary application, a part of me is sad to see onfocus.com go without photos. And another part of me thinks that all of the awesome stuff that Flickr enables (community, conversation, collaboration, cataloging, aggregation, and so much more) should be done in a distributed way across the Web. The Web geek in me feels that photo sharing shouldn’t be owned by any one company, and photos themselves should ultimately be under the control of individual photographers.

Paul pines for the “distributed-photo-utopia” he once created with home-grown tools, and he’d like to get it back. So, in an effort to go “off the Flickr grid” (OTFG), he’ll be rewriting his personal photoblogging and software from scratch and documenting the process to help others go the DIY route. He’s already posted Part 1: Setting the Stage, in which he sets up a database to store information about his photos, downloads all of his original photos from the Flickr servers, and uses the Flickr API to gather information about those photos.

Here are his first two 12 posts in the series so far:

• Going Off the Flickr Grid
• OTFG Step 1: Setting the Stage
• OTFG Step 2: Thinking about Photo URLs
• OTFG Step 3: Authenticating the Import Script
• OTFG Step 4: Running the Import Script
• OTFG Step 5: Setting Up Sets
• OTFG Step 6: The Trouble with Comments
• OTFG Step 7: Import notes
• OTFG Step 8: Resizing Images
• OTFG Step 9: Authentication
• OTFG Step 10: Adding Photos
• OTFG Step 11: Displaying and Editing Photos

If you too are looking to get off the Flickr grid and have the technical chops and resources to do so, I recommend following along.

Related:

• Flickr Hacks