Not that it is anything new to scream and shout about, but I've signed up for a Flickr Pro account, and have been uploading images like there's no tomorrow. Currently I'm up to the wedding, so a few more albums to go yet. You can see my Flickr photos and my Flickr profile by following said links.

So why, I hear you screaming at the monitor, am I doing this when I have a perfectly good gallery system already in place? Well, I've been working on a new gallery for a couple of weeks, the main reason being it currently is a php gallery, and I'd rather it matched the rest of the site and was in ASP.Net. Secondly it is another good little .net project for me to get my teeth stuck into, and it means I fully understand and control how the gallery works. Finally I couldn't put captions to my images easily enough, and that annoyed me.

So why Flickr? Well, I'd nearly sorted out my own XML .net version of a gallery, when backing up my vast bank of photos became an issue. I don't want to loose all of my photographic gems, but the resized versions on the website aren't the full res versions I'd want backed up. Step up Flickr and their pro account. You see I can upload my full res photos to them, they'll backup the photos for me, plus handle organising them, putting captions on them, tag them, provide feeds to them, etc, etc. There are many, many benefits, not least that people will find my photos from browsing Flickr, and won't have to visit my site, and the bandwith will all be at the Flickr end. Finally, though, the main reason is the great Flickr API. I'm going to be modifying my new gallery code to access the pictures direct from Flickr, and beam them into your cgriley.com browser windows.

Why bother doing this when Flickr displays them perfectly well? Because I can, because I rather like my new gallery interface, and because I like to give people a consistent browsing experience when on my site.

I think I've covered most questions the inquisitive might have about my motives here - if you do have any further questions, please comment, in the meantime check out our photos again on Flickr, read the funny captions, and then when the new gallery is released (which I'll post about) you can enjoy them on my website.