Before you pick up the pitchfork and torches, listen to me: I love Flickr. I love that it has opened a world of digital photography that has made our lives so much richer. It has helped forge relationships by providing tools for communities of photographers to band together, whether professional or amateur.
But you see, I had a photolog before Flickr came along. So did Derek. So did a lot of people. Some of us made ours by hand, others bent blogging engines like Movabletype and Wordpress to suit our needs. Then Flickr came along, and we subsequently surrendered. We didn’t have the expertise to build anything as ajaxy or web 2.0ry. We didn’t have drag-and-drop uploaders and on-the-fly resizing. Our photologs started to look so old. So web 1.0.
So we got ourselves Flickr accounts, uploaded our collections and melded with the crowd. Photologs that once graced the internet stopped being updated. Our photos were now in the largest photo repository in the world, in a container that looked exactly like everybody elses’.
I love Flickr, but it isn’t home. My photos call out to me.
I miss having a photolog — before it became a “photoblog”. I still wonder why I closed mine down as I prefer the aesthetics of large-image to textual blogging. Nevertheless, I guess most people have migrated to Flickr because it’s shiny and pretty, you have networks and a hungry audience before you without the hassle of drawing visitors to your site, and the obligation to post isn’t as strong, since most people have many contacts and they won’t miss you that much. photolog.org is a gem, name and content.
It seems like one solution would be to post and store photos to flickr, using all the web 2.0 jazz for organizing and uploading. Then you could feed your photo stream into a customized photoblog. I’m looking to do this, and I’d love to hear about any photologs out there that would display a flickr feed.