Friday, June 11, 2010

Could Flickr's "Blog This" feature be improved?


Reflecting on signs of decay?
Originally uploaded by moonflowerdragon


Absolutely!

Where to start?
  1. Save to draft. I appreciate that Flickr might need to keep it simple so it remains cross-platform. We can style our post up according to our own blogging platform's editing methods. BUT, the way it is at the moment, blogging a photo directly from Flickr means a Publish without any polish, and that means autofeeds like Twitterfeed let people see a post in a state that we would probably *not* prefer, like this one was before I began this post-publication editing. 
  2. ALL proper attribution data.  As well as the image's title and uploader (which is all I get now) I need the date the image was published at Flickr and the licence by which I may publish it.  The description might also contain important information - unfortunately it might also contain too much information, so I'd at least like the option to include the description.
  3. Show me what will be sent.  When we set up our blog for Flickr we can choose a layout template for our posts - but unless we're blogging from Flickr often, who remembers how they chose?  And who remembers how to find the page that enables us to change the template, not that that page shows what our current choice is.  So, while composing my post (that I want to be able to send as draft) I want to see all the proper attribution (and optional) data laid out according to the Flickr-template I've chosen. Unfortunately this is what I was shown while composing, but not what was sent:

So are there alternatives?

AddThis enables save to draft, but doesn't grab code accessing the image - Perhaps there are other browser add-ons, or platform plug-ins & if so please tell me about them.

ImageCodr endeavours to provide what Flickr should in terms of proper attribution for Creative Commons licenses but doesn't, although as Flickr has not updated CC licences to 3.0, even ImageCodr cannot fix that fault with Flickr.

Unfortunately, for some reason the generated code only includes the image title on hover, not with the photo. And I still don't have the upload date or any relevant information that might have been provided in the description.

Use Embed code available from All sizes screen

Unfortunately this is what we get from that embed code:
Reflecting on signs of decay?

Just the photo and link, no attribution data at all.


kwout
If I kwout (with an image map) from the photostream I can select to show Title, licence, and date, and you can deduce uploader from automated title. However, description is missing, it is small, and it doesn't quite meet Flickr's terms because it doesn't directly to the photo's own page:

Alternatively, if I kwout (with image map) from the photo's page: the date, uploader and licence data are not within range of the image for kwout to grab, although you can see amongst the miscellanea in the description there is other relevant attribution information:

- = + = -

And because it was fun... the stimulus for this contemplation of problems blogging from Flickr ... was a post I created at Tumblr solving a puzzle for The Clueless Librarian:
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