passively organize your flickr photos

disorganized flickr photos

fuck. my flickr photostream is a once-great-but-now-fallen garden that’s been neglected for years, overrun with invasive tendrils and noxious fungi and creepy-crawlies. my photos are disorganized, untitled, untagged. and many of my photos have been locked away from viewing because they’re completely private.

a travesty:

yet, using flickr’s organizr to organize thousands of photos taken over several years seems to be a form of rumsfeldian torture. organizr requires me to actively pick sets of photos and then manually apply properties to those sets. this method works decently well for small sets, but it doesn’t scale up. organizing thousands of photos through flickr’s organizr is simply too much work.

fiddle sticks. what to do?

after some thought, i decided that i need a peripheral technology to help me organize photos. it has to be easy, kind of fun, and it has to translate small passive bursts of attention into large gains (over time) in organizing my photos.

so i built what i needed over a couple weekends. it just randomly spews photos onto your screen. when you see one you care about, you update its title, description, tags, and permissions. it’s easy. and kind of fun. just go to http://lazyr.spiffywebco.com. fix up some photos when you feel like taking a break from work.

screen shots

yeah, the title screen leaves no room for ambiguity:

it’s a very focused single-page app:

more screenshots