I’ve been dribbling pictures from my laptop to my Flickr account for days now, and I’m finally feeling like I’ve made a dent in the backlog. I just posted pictures from Sophie’s first birthday. She’s almost 2½ now; the pictures have been sitting on my laptop unsorted for almost 18 months. Every time I burn through another batch of ancient pictures I feel even better about Flickr.

I’m making progress on my PictureSync problems. Apparently the reason that it wouldn’t save my Flickr password as a conflict with a version of PictureSync that I tried out last October. There was some weird remnant from the old PictureSync still sitting in my keychain that I couldn’t figure out how to delete, so I renamed my Flickr account in PictureSync from ‘Flickr’ to ‘Flickr (Scott)’, and now everything works. There are still a couple weird AppleScript bugs that pop up from time to time, but it’s usable now. I’ll probably send the shareware payment off tomorrow and hope that the remaining bugs will be fixed soon.

I’ve also been playing with 1001, an OS X interface to Flickr from the author of ecto, my favorite blog editor. I set it up on my wife’s Mac mini so she can see the pictures that I put on Flickr automatically. I also installed 1001’s Flickr screensaver on her Mac–it’s kind of cool to see pictures that I posted a half-hour ago show up on her screen all on their own. Once I have a few more pictures up, I’ll start pushing Flickr on random family members; it seems like the perfect way to share family pictures in our increasingly widely distributed family.

In fact, the whole social-networking aspect of Flickr has taken me by surprise. I’ve already had a couple old friends pop up out of the blue. There’s a lot more interconnection in Flickr contacts then I would have expected. It’s not six degrees of separation: it’s two or three degrees at most.

Weird example–1001’s home page has a few example pictures, and the last one looked kind of familiar to me. I haven’t seen the picture before, but the guy on the left looks a lot like Boris Mann; Boris and I have been swapping comments on each other’s blogs for quite a while now. A bit of searching and I found the original picture of Boris and Roland Tanglao. Even though I’ve never actually met Boris, I’ve met at least three or four of the people on his Flickr contacts list and I read the blogs of several others. I picked a few other people on his contact list and looked at their contact lists, and I kept finding more people I knew. I’m not sure if this is all that useful, but it’s certainly interesting, and it’s given me a chance to see a lot of fascinating pictures.

It makes me want to go out and shoot something interesting. Over the past year, probably 95% of my photography has been pictures of family and friends; they’re important to have, but they aren’t very exciting. Unfortunately, they’ve been all that I’ve had time to take recently. Now that I’ve started clearing up the old backlog, maybe I’ll have time to take more pictures for the fun of it, not just because we need pictures from some random family gathering.