In typically perverse fashion I’ve decided to put an increasing amount of my work on Flickr just as it seems the platform is possibly going downhill fast, with a begging letter from the CEO which also includes a 25% off offer for the ‘Pro’ subscription to those with free Flikr accounts .
I’ve had a free Flickr account for a long time, simply because I needed one to subscribe to another, now defunct organisation. I put a fairly small number of pictures on it, I think around 75, and then forgot about it.
What made me think about it again was simply the fact that my web space is filling up and near its limit, not in terms of space but for the number of files. There is a limit on my account of 262,144 files and I’m currently at the 225,419 mark.
262,144 seems to be quite an important number in computing, which I’m sure is connected to the fact that in binary it is 1000000000000000000 (in hex 40000) and has some connection to the way in which the accounts are set up in Linux. It seems a pretty huge number, but I find that my web space currently contains just short of 200,000 image files. In November 2019 on My London Diary I added another 837 images, along with another 31 html files, and over the whole year over 14,000 files, while other web sites and this blog added at least another thousand or two. So things are getting rather close to the limit. Either I’m going to have to delete some or get another web account of some sort.
I don’t actually generate much income directly from the web, but make everything available free online and without advertising. I do occasionally sell prints or get repro fees because people have seen work on the web, but it hardly pays my costs (and certainly doesn’t repay the hours of work I put in.) I do it more because I want to share my photography and my thoughts with other people.
Importantly for me, there is a lot more work that I would like to share. Fifteen or twenty years of work in both black and white and colour, particularly on London, that has hardly been seen except by myself and a few friends and colleagues, with just perhaps just a few hundred of the probably more than a hundred thousand of the images having been published or exhibited. It includes several major projects along with much other work.
I had hoped earlier this year that a major institution would take ‘My London Diary‘ under its wing, enabling me to free almost 200,000 files from my personal account, but after some discussion and lengthy deliberation they decided that they just did not have the resources to do so. I’m open to offers from any other body that would like to host this unique record of around 20 years of London’s history covering protests and other events on the streets – and for that matter my earlier film-based work.
I decided to do a little research on ways that would be effective both in terms of cost and time in sharing my work on-line and thought seriously about two platforms, Instagram and Flickr. Neither seemed particularly suitable and both have interfaces that really don’t work well for what I want to do. I tried out putting a little work on each of them and in the end decided that for all its peculiarities (and it has a seriously dated and inconsistent interface) Flickr seemed the better for my purposes. So I’ve now signed up for a ‘Pro’ account that will enable me to put as many images as I like on line.
At the moment there are three new albums of my old pictures on Flickr: 1977 London Pictures
There are also a few pictures from the 2000’s, including albums on Paris and on Croydon’s Trams which I added in 2007 when I first set up my Flikr Account. Then I made the mistake of only putting on the files at a small size and low quality, using the images from my web site, while I am now uploading 2400 pixel wide repro quality files which display the work much better. Of course these may now be used by the unscrupulous who are prepared to ignore the copyright notice, but I hope that there are enough honest people around who will contact me and pay to make the risk worthwhile.
All of those London pictures in the albums above are also available on my web site, but you can now see them rather larger and better on Flikr along with the comments that I wrote when putting most of them on Facebook a day at a time.I’ll also probably at some time put the images that are on my Hull web site onto Flickr in hight quality, and then remove both the Hull and London sites from the web, leaving just a residual site which links to the Flikr albums. Together with removing a few other old sites this might give me space for another year or so of My London Diary.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
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