Here’s the skinny… first, you have to go set your printing preferences. There are all sorts of levels on this, so you can only allow yourself to print your photos or you can allow everyone to be able to print them (and everywhere inbetween). Once you’ve done this, a button appears above the image to order prints. It looks like you can’t specify this preference on just one photo or a group of photos, which would be nice (all of the photos from a party or roadtrip). Your shopping cart is kept right within the Flickr site so you can browse around and pick which photos you want. You get ten free prints, so get a couple to test the photo quality (I’m going to do this soon myself). You can have them ship the photos to you or you can pick them up at your local Target store in as little as four hours (for an extra nickle per picture, but no shipping fees).

As if that’s not enough, you’ll see that they’re rolling out a “pilot program” of partner programs that will allow you to “do more” with your photos. The first one is a CD/DVD printing service from englaze. For $10 you can get a CD with an archive (of up to 50) of your Flickr photos. Each 100 photos after the first 50 costs another $4 (let’s see, if your images were 1MB per image, it’d cost you $38 to fill up a CD with 700 images). To get a larger capacity DVD costs $35 for the first 1000 and $10 for every 1500 after that (that’s a whopping $65 for a full disc of 4700 images at 1MB per file). Needless to say, I am less than impressed with this pricing. Hell, for $65, I’d ship you a DVD with your photos on it. I’d even throw in an invoice explaining that approximately $2 of the price went into materials and shipping, $15 for labor, and the other $48 was pure markup.

The other service that Englaze is providing is a DVD with a slideshow of your Flickr photos. This one costs $20 for 50 photos and $5 for every additional 100 photos. Their site has a preview of what the slideshow will look like. It looks to me like the effects range from zooming out to panning to…well…zooming out and panning at the same time. Not that I’m asking for star wipes or anything. I just can’t imagine watching hundreds of photos do the same inane zoom for very long. The site also gives you a bunch of HIGH-larious MIDI files (be sure to check out “Reflection 1″, those MIDI pan pipes are making Zamfir cry) that you can choose from to lay over your zooming pictures. This will ensure to drive anyone mad who dares to view your slideshow DVD. Worth 20 bucks? I’d say so.

The third feature is actually kinda cool. You can order a sheet of stamps with one of your photos printed on them. That’s right, real US Postal stamps. I assume that a few of you out in cyber-land still use the US Postal Service. Why not send your letters in style with one of your sweet photographs of your cat? The stamps are large (1 1/2 inches by 2 inches) and you can adjust and crop your photos to suit your whims. The only drawback to this is that you’re going to pay an extra $10 for every $7 of postage. It’s a pretty cool idea though and I’m sure there’s a decent segment of the Flickr crowd who will get these stamps printed. I just wish the stamps said something about Flickr on them. That’d be a cool way to evangelize.

So in conclusion: thumbs up on the photo printing and the stamps, but the whole CD thing is overpriced and pretty useless, if you ask me. Not a great thing to start your “pilot program” with.

My Get Fuzzy calendar has notified me that today is Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement). I’m not sure what is a traditional wish on Yom Kippur…so Merry Yom Kippur, everyone!

The crazy printing cats at QOOP are continuing to refine their service for printing Flickr photos in books and posters* in advance of its official launch – they’ve added a way to select particular photos in large sets to include or exclude which gives you more control. Looking nice!

Now, before we get all excited, we need to realize something. QOOP is not offering to give you prints of your photos. You can only get sets of photos printed in book or poster form. There is no way to get 4″x6″ prints right now. Stewart said that they were working on something else top secret, but no hints as to what that would be at the moment. Why they would let you print books and not individual prints is a little baffling to me. Either way, the books and posters look pretty cool.

If you’re itching to print your photos straight from flickr, you may be out of luck for now. If you’re using Firefox and have the Greasemonkey extension installed, you can try out the Flickr/Shutterfly Integrator script by Danny Dawson. If you’re using any other browser, or you don’t want to use Greasemonkey, you can’t say I didn’t try to help you.

I’m really hoping that this secret plot between QOOP and Flickr involves getting us easy photo printing from our Flickr pages. That’d be downright nifty.

The Endless Beta by François Joseph de Kermadec

Some say it is a good thing, it shows respect for the consumer, a desire to continually improve and remodel a product. I say it is silly, insulting and counter productive – but don’t take my word for it.

Tomorrow is Columbus day. I hope that you’re enjoying your day off. I don’t get one.

How is it different than other gallery apps, you might ask. Well, first of all, it’s designed to look slick and professional (as mentioned above). Also, the page is hosted on Cary’s site and doesn’t do thumbnail views (except when you mouse over the bar at the bottom). It is basically just a slide show, but a very cool one.  The cross-fading and resizing effects for different aspect ratios of images are spiffy. You’ll have to go check it out to see what I mean.

My Pro site: http://www.mykards.com/pro/proAlbum.php?id=danco

Halloween is coming. I, for one, will be in Salem, Massachusetts.

We’re developing ShoZu, a new mobile app for Flickr users to take the hassle out of getting photos from your cameraphone onto to your Flickr account. It’s beta stuff at present, and we’d like some people to test it out for us.

If you’re interested, follow this www.shozu.com to find out if your phone is supported and register for the beta trial.

From the website:

ShoZu is a mobile application for Flickr users. Reasons to use ShoZu include

• Uploading photos to Flickr is easier, more robust, and cheaper, than e-mail
• Data transfer does not interrupt your normal use of the phone
• You can add descriptions and tags from the phone at any time (before or after upload).

ShoZu currently supports Symbian OS handsets*, but we’re also working on other platforms, including Java.

It sounds pretty cool. If only I had a camera phone.

Red vs. Blue

Pirates vs. Ninjas (Pirates win!)

Robots vs. Zombies

That’s all for today, most likely. Off to celebrate my fiance’s birthday.

 A few days after Katrina hit New Orleans, Flickr user “words fail” started a Katrina Relief Auction group.  The idea was that people would offer prints of their photos and others could bid on them.  The winners would send all donations directly to the Red Cross and forward their receipt onto the admins of the group.  So far, around twenty thousand dollars have been pledged and over fourteen thousand dollars have been confirmed as donations.  The response was amazing and more than anyone had expected.  The second round of bidding is over now and I don’t know if there will be a third.  Doesn’t mean you can’t donate to the Red Cross though.

 A while back, I started a project called phpFlickr.  It’s simply a PHP class that acts as a wrapper to the Flickr API.  One day, I got an email from someone who explained that he was setting up a website for a charity in NOLA.  He was using Drupal and wanted to use Flickr for photo management.  The only problem was that he didn’t know much about PHP.  I gladly offered my help and a friend of mine helped me port a WordPress plugin that I was working on over to Drupal so that he could display his photo galleries.  The charity is called Feed the Relief and would appreciate any donations, help, or attention that you could give them.

Anyway, enough about me. The Flickr API makes it possible to develop just about any kind of app you want to create. These applications can be web-based, command-line, or even run on mobile devices. Even without these options, Flickr is an awesome site based more around sharing photos with a community than getting you to buy prints of photos (in fact, they haven’t started offering that yet, though I hear it’s upcoming).

This blog is going to be a place where I will collect all sorts of information and happenings about the site that we all love. If you don’t love it yet, go try it out, chances are it’ll grow on you. If you have any news or tips you want to share, post them as a comment and I’ll put up a post about it.

Have a nice day!