Linking to a Photo at Flickr

Devin with Bird Feeder

One of the nice things about running the photo gallery software yourself is being able to hook it right into the software for the main website. This is great because it gives you quite a bit of control over how to store and present the images. For instance on the old site all I had to do was drop the image in a directory and the software automatically presented it to the viewer. The only drawback was that it didn't allow for image captions or comments.

With Flickr all that is taken care of by the 'outside' host. However I'll need to figure out the best way to handle the images. Maybe posting a smaller image that links out to their gallery like the one in this post.

The image shown on this page is their "small" size which seems to work best. It's a scaled down version of the original, and it is what's shown on their preview page as well. To see the original sized image just click on it.

One MAJOR problem with this approach is "What if they go away". I mean if Flickr all of a sudden just ceases to exist what happens? The images themselves would still be safe because they will continue to exist in their original form on my hard drive. But, all the links to them scattered througout the Blog would be broken. That could be a BIG deal a year or two down the road.