For years, my photo management workflow has involved:
- Importing my photos into whatever Mac application I was using at the time—beginning with iPhoto, then later Aperture, most recently, Photos.
- Organizing those imports into a chronological folder structure of events.
For those really special events, selecting a sub-set of edited photos (usually less than 30) and uploading those into a new album at Flickr.
<
p>And so Flickr was the place that contained our family’s collection of publicly accessible, carefully curated photo albums.
Recently Flickr rolled out a new auto-uploader utility for Mac. Like many people, I decided to take advantage of the free terabyte of data Flickr now offer, and use the uploader to monitor and upload all photos from my Photos library. By default, all uploaded photos are marked private, and so I figured this system would serve as a good backup of my photo library.
After uploading some 30,000 images, however, I discovered a huge problem: The Flickr uploader created a new Flickr Album for every single folder of photos I’ve ever created in the above-listed Step 2.
So now, instead of a carefully curated set of perhaps 100 albums at Flickr, I now have over 1,400!
The situation is made worse:
- There’s no way to select multiple albums for batch-deletion.
- There’s no way to auto-arrange albums alphabetically in Flickr. So I now have albums with names like “1998 Nepal” listed ahead of albums like “2010 Trip to San Francisco”, and the only way to correct this is to manually drag the album around within the “Organizr” interface.
I recognize the convenience in auto-creating albums, and so I can’t really complain that Flickr chose to do that. But for goodness sake, Flickr, please improve album management, so that I can reasonably clean-up the particular mess I’ve found myself in.
