Fremantle
· Flickr · archiving · Piwigo ·
Archiving on Flickr – Collections, catalogs and community await!, 23 May 2024:
Archiving, simply put, is placing something in storage, be it a file cabinet or a digital cloud.
I have mixed feelings about using Flickr as an archive. I don't really think it's a good idea, despite there being a bunch of good reasons for using it as such (keeps original files, allows open licensing, etc.). It does serve a good use as a way to host images that you use on other sites (e.g. static, low-resource ones), and it's generally a fairly cheap way to do that.
The downsides are that it's a single company (and US-based at that, which is perhaps these days becoming more of a downside than it used to be) and proprietary. If you want extra features or to run your own, you can't. There's also a bit of a lack in metadata, notably there's no way to store a specific author of a photo and so all photos appear as if they were authored by the account owner.
Given that whatever photo hosting system you use, you'd want to have a good backup process in place, it perhaps doesn't matter which provider you use — and so you might as well use one that uses open source software! Piwigo.com is like that, it gives you a good online photo management system, but if you want to host it yourself you can. You can also contribute to the software itself (although I must admit, I've never found it to be a coding community that's super open to outside contributions).
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(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds).
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samwilson.id.au