Completely torn over mobile photos
The above photo was posted to Flickr from my iPhone a few minutes ago. I wanted to show off, in all its glory, the new desktop picture I’m using on both my Macbook and external monitor courtesy of Mark Bixby.
But this brings up something that I’m completely torn over. Where should I post my mobile photos? I have a mobile photos category here on my blog, a Brightkite account that makes it dead-simple to post photos and remember where they were taken an in context, and a Flickr account.
It seems like every time I snap a photo with my iPhone I have a different idea of where I think it should go. I like having everything I submit to the Web here on my site. I think photos of what I’m currently eating at a restaurant is best kept on Brightkite for a lot of reasons, and perhaps an artsy mobile photo like this one would be best submitted to Flickr. Is that the answer? Should I diversify where I submit my mobile photos?
And better yet, why do I care so much? Should I care? Does anyone else care?
UGH!
August 9th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
I pretty much agree with what you put. Mobile photos like what your eating, how bad traffic is, and things of that nature fit better on Brightkite as Brightkite is all about where you are at. I think if you are going to post multiple photos, artsy photos, or any others that doesn’t really have to do with where you are would be best for flickr.
August 9th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
I’ve been torn with a similar problem. I liked how easy Brightkite made it to upload photos to my location, I liked using things like Postie to update via email, but I wanted to keep all my photos in one, well-known spot like Flickr.
I ended up using ShoZu on my Windows Mobile phone. First, it made it really easy to upload pics to Flickr: as soon as I take an image with my phone, it pops up and asks if I want to upload. I can even set it to do all that automatically in the background. My phone has GPS, so ShoZu geotags the photos before upload, too. My flickr photos were already shown on the site, but I made a separate page just for mobile images that uses Yahoo Pipes to display a map of all my Flickr photos I geotagged with ShoZu. One way to do it, certainly not for everyone, but keeping all my photos in one place (yet still making them easily consumable on my site) was important to me.
I know you use an iPhone, not a WinMo phone like mine, but there is a ShoZu client for it I think. Not sure if it has the same features as the one I use, though.
August 9th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
I’d say keep mobile photos on Flickr. Brightkite has no way to show sets of mobile photos as a “gallery” set right? Meaning you can’t simply send a friend to a set of mobile photo that the can browse through.
August 9th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Since I got an iPhone I’ve been uploading mobile photos like crazy; I love it!
I send photos to twitpic, Brightkite, and Utterz (I don’t care much for Utterz though; never did). If it’s a photograph I _really_ like, then I’ll post it to Flickr aswell.
Personally, I prefer to view photos on Flickr; I’ll always view lots of photos at a time, whereas I’ll only skim over the most recent shots on bkite.
I can understand you like to have the photos on your site too, but I rarely view them on here because there’s no way to fave, tag, etc (like on Flickr).
It doesn’t seem to hard to add a couple more addresses when sending a mobile photo, but if I had to choose, I’d choose Flickr.
August 10th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Ehm, I mail to my twitpic account and use their badge, pretty cool I must say. There are lot’s of other site to do this, but I kind of like twitpic’s simplicity. I have been thinking to setup different accounts for different kind of pictures themes though.
August 12th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I’ve really grown to like Brightkite since getting an iPhone, but Flickr’s generally been the place for me. I agree with djsteen that it’s more fun to view photos in bulk on Flickr. BUT, I do like seeing where photos were taken and seeing them in context like you do on Brightkite.
Decisions, decisions… sorry I’m not much help.
August 19th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
I like using Flickr because you can view it on most mobile devices. Using this method you can mail to flickr, bounce to blog and post to twitter all at once: http://blog.twelvehorses.com/marketing-tools/posting-flickr-photos-on-twitter-automagically/
Or you can use twitxr to tweet and backload to flickr: http://twitxr.com/wolfy/
Another good option is drop.io. you can sync that with twitter and email photos directly there. that’s nice because there is no login for commenting.
-M