Let’s hold of the self-congratulations… nope, it’s on. I am one month into the 18th year of (trying to do) taking/posting daily photos to flickr, yes 2025/365 is game on.
Like who’s counting? C’est moi. The last two years I started strong, perfect for 5 or 6 months but fell off the boat around June, tried to climb back, but came up really short. I have all 18 years curated into one flickr collection — a collection is like a collection of albums.
The funky thing about this corner of flickr is that there is no direct link to collections anywhere. I just know from experience if you take the url for your Photostream, like mine is https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/ and tack on collections you can get to your own (likely empty, but mine’s not).
But here in 2025 for January I racked up a 31 for31, and hope the blog pressure will make it a monthly thang. Taking a riff from being in the same boastful spot in 2024, Maybe I can pick 5 and make a story, kind of 5 Card Flickr Story-like
It’s a Pie Fine Year (so it seemed before January 20)
From This Perch
Under the wonders of a big open sky, the road is limitless.
Yet When Unworldly Creatures Come to Power…
I know it has nothing on having light and love in my heart.
But the best part of this 18th round is having Cori doing the daily photo thing along side of me! We have those special times at night side by side uploading to flickr, asking each other about our best pictures.
DWDD Round 18
It’s been likely blogged each year, but the root of all this points to one humble photographer/blog/and all around friend since the days of the Direct-L listerv, D’Arcy Norman, to whom which I ascribe a useful strategy of Doing What D’Arcy Does (DWDD). Again, D’Arcy had done a 356 project in flickr in 2007, which I had followed with interest. When I did his end of year recap, he twittered about doubt if he would repeat in 2008.
When I replied, “I Will if You Will” he was game, and that was the launch of a Flickr Group we set up for others to join in. (the irony is of the URL ending in 366photos being starting in. a leap year). D’Arcy later reclaimed to be doing this on his own domain where he is devotedly shared daily since. But I have kept the group alive, each year renaming it to reflect the current year, changing out the banner image and icon that comes from the pool of shared photos.
From maybe 50 people who joined in 2008, the daily photo group D’Arcy inspired now includes 1929 members who over the last 17 years have added 370,000 photos to the group. That is rather incredible, especially for what people think of these days as “social media” where this is a community of shared interest, that has almost no intercommunication. It just is.
And yep, I not only can easily find my first daily photo in this long adventure, I got a blog post too. The subject was of all things a llama named Mike I went on with friends for a hike into Strawberry Canyon on January 1, 2008. I had not remembered this detail, but my blog did- Mike the llama was named by its owners after Michael Jordon. Why that is important or makes me smile? Well it’s the connection, the story, the thread of life that an algorithm that merely averages can never tell you (yes, you can expect a zing at AI in every future blog post, at least until I write the epic one in my head)
And I wrote more 3 months in– ironically I mentioned something about how fancy pants D’Arcy was using Aperture to manage his photos. It was not long before I DWDD and Aperture to this day represents the best photo software I had the luck to use (no more, but this is another blog post).
It’s hardly anything new these days to be sharing photos. And I love seeing photos almost more than anything in the social streams. For many people, that becomes the place that stores and archives photos. Yet, in Instagram, which I have so many mixed feelings about, you cannot search your own photos (the only way to find photos is to scroll back in time), you cannot put a hyperlink in your captions to go outward. It’s a dead end place to dump your photos.
Likewise I know many wo count on Google Photos, because (a) it takes almost no effort and (b) it does a bunch of AI/algorithm stuff to organize things without any effort by you. Just dump the photos and let Google do whatever it does. I thought Dean Shareski had blogged it (he’s still at it albeit sporadically) but think now it was Intagrammed (again, no way I can find *****) how google did the magic to show all the places he golfed, all the photos with his family, all the photos with smiles. I do think it’s neat, like a card trick.
I cannot sat how valuable it is to me, largely because every photo I upload to flickr, not only the daily ones, have titles, captions, tags, and of course date/time stamps, that make it insanely useful for me to find where I was or whether I even went to a place in the past.
This morning I was making a remark to Cori ob writing, about that seen from The Shining where Wendy Torrance discovers the real text of the “book” her haunted husband was “writing” -pages and pages of typewritten “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. I recalled I had visited the hotel in Colorado where Stephen King had stayed and the setting inspired his scary novel. In 15 seconds I found it.
June 22, 2015, and navigating the photos on either side, I can see the other Shining things I photographed, as well as placing this as a road/camping trip where I had camped with friends outside of Rocky Mountain National Park.
I make use of my own 21 year history archived in flickr all the time. It’s not because I dumped my photos there all named helpful titles like P927125.JPG but because I gave them all my own metadata. Captions.
This is truly the— yeah, the thing blogged before
I get these gains from the way I organize my stuff,. not what some algorithm someone else jigged does with it. I also have a principle of organizing all my photos first here at home, on my own machine (now with Lightroom) where I write all the titles, captions, tags before putting into flickr and definitely fore pushing them out to so called social media.
If you spray your images, your words to social media, they legally are yours, but you have gifted them to some platform and they will float away quickly down the river of time, and never serve a future purpose.
I don’t say this with any hope that others do the same, I am just staking my paws in the sand, to say I was here, I made stuff here, and I do it in a way that not only helps me, but saves the context, the meaning, that I can return to later to re-tell the story.
Like this? I love it.
Featured Photo: For each month, a photo of mine for that number. Her’s One. 2016/366/9 One Frozen Pine Needle flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
so… I moved off of Aperture several years ago, switching to the stock Photos app (which, curiously, is not an app for stock photos. or, I guess, it could be…). the only thing I miss so far is the “stacks” feature for burst photos. other than that? non-destructive edits, lots of metadata stuff, and syncs perfectly across all of my devices…
Aperture did everything I need, complex editing, writing metadata to the photos, external reference library (yes I hear you that Photos does this), the key thing was the flickr export plugin. Mostly I found editing was joyful and intuitive, probably just from years of use. I ran it on the old MPB as long as possible, running MOjave much past its prime. I think a BBEdit update forced me to jump an OS, and I figured that since I had the Adobe photo rent for photoshop I could jump to Lightroom.
It’s been hard, mostly to learn the editing and managing, and I still cuss it alot, but have a set up close to optimum. Yeah, I know Adobe sucks, but I hate changing!
Oh, I never even used stacks! Burst photos were never a thing for me. Gotta respect and ponder always DWDD.
I’ve always loved the idea of a daily photo. I certainly take at least one photo every day. Looking back at my Lightroom, it’s quite rare that a day passes by where I don’t snap at least one shot.
So posting a daily photo should be a breeze, right? Well, I never know which photo to post. For example, I take a cool shot in the morning, and I declare that my photo for the day. But then, in the evening, I take an incredible shot?
Looking at your Flickr albums, I see that you sometimes post a second photo for the same day. That sounds like a good solution.
Also, I completely love what you wrote about Instagram being a river where things just get lost. I can’t stand Instagram for so many reasons.
And also what you said about Google Photos. Heh. It’s like a card trick. Lots of really cool card tricks. I love Google Photos as a secondary place. But I’m certainly not relying on it as my main place for my photos.
I also keep my photos in Lightroom. My hard drive is my primary place for my photos. And occasionally, I upload photos from Lightroom into Flickr using Jeffrey Friedl’s Lightroom plugin.
However, that requires me to download my photos to my computer and then do all the titles and captions. Then uploading. I used to daily download my photos to Lightroom at night. But now these days I only download them about every week or so.
I’m curious. Since you said, you use Lightroom to upload your photos to Flickr every day. Are you using the desktop version of Lightroom? Or are you doing some fancypants stuff with a mobile Lightroom app?
PS I’ve been a long-time subscriber to your RSS feed. But with over 2,000 subscriptions, your feed often gets lost in the mix. A couple weeks ago, I made a smart folder that pulls out any posts that mention “Flickr” in the text. Hence your blog posts come back up to the surface.
Hi Matt long time reader! I’m honored I have been bumped in your queue of feeds. 2000 is impressive!, I’m at maybe 150. Totally Dunbar number.
It’s taken more than a year to settle into a Lightroom flow, and I am still bumbling around. It does have quite the array of editing features. I plan ideally to write a more detailed post of my process.
I use the desktop Lightroom Classic, typically on my ancient workhorse, a 2013 MacBookPro. I edit all my titles, captions, tags there and upload with Friedl’s plugin. I have one publish set that is just what goes directly to flickr. Then I have a folder of some special ones, e.g. one where I toss in my daily photo, and some smart ones that add to groups/albums depending on tags. Mostly the photos go up with the first Publish, and the second I do as a folder, which mostly just adds metadata.
I shoot daily, and have great intentions of reviewing/uploading at night, but I do fall behind. Any doubles are ones I may have just mistagged! I end up at the end of the year cleaning up dupes or gaps.
The selection process is not uniform! That’s the fun part. When shooting I might feel like one I took is “The One” but often its in editing that I change my mind. Sometimes it is one I feel is really good for color, composition, other times its just what the image represents, something that happened that day.
Glad to know you are in the mix and of a like mindset and thanks again for a true old fashioned comment!
Ah, fellow Lightroom Classic user. I’m running mine on a Macbook mid-2015.
Hot tip. Have you downloaded the newest version of Photoshop 2025, and you get some warning about CPU usage? I ignore the message and keep going, because everything seems to work. Well, that warning is really much more deadly.
Do not download the newest version of Photoshop on your “old” Macbook. As said, my home laptop is a Macbook mid-2015. My laptop provided for me by my job is another Macbook mid-2015. Earlier this year, my work Macbook got fried by Photoshop. Not even on a large file. Just a regular iPhone photo, and I was adjusting the curves. My Spotify started to skip for ten seconds, and then the screen went black. I reboot, and go back to work. Ten minutes later, I’m in Photoshop 2025 again, and Spotify starts skipping again. This time, my screen goes black for good. And the laptop is fried.
Skip ahead to one week ago. The same thing happens to my home laptop. Doing a simple adjustment on a photo in Photoshop. Spotify playing. Spotify starts to skip. I immediately shut down the computer before it gets fried. I removed Photoshop 2025, and I’m running Photoshop 2021 that doesn’t give me a CPU warning everytime I start Photoshop. I still play it safe when I’m in Photoshop, and I don’t have any other apps open.
I’ve been thinking about playing around with syncing the Lightroom iOS app with Lightroom Classic. Because then I might upload my photos more often. But I almost rather just have the old school workflow of downloading first to my computer, so I know everything gets transferred correctly.
It’s good to know that you sometimes edit or change your daily pick. I have to shift my mind away from the Instagram mode that once a photo is posted, it’s posted. And frankly, I don’t know why my mind would think in Instagram mode, because I’ve pretty much stopped using it for the year or two.
And side-point. Somewhere I saw you posted about 43 Things. That site recently popped into my head from another 43 Things user, John Lee. It made me wonder how 20 years later nobody has recreated a site that does what 43 Things did. It’s really amusing reading your post from 2005 about how you got a beta view of 43 Things, and how 43 Things does so many things right, especially with all the tagging of posts and RSS feeds.
My 2013 Macbook Pro hit its Photoshop update wall at the 2023 version (it’s running Big Sur), luckily I have not had an over heating, but certainly it works the fan! I’m fortunate my work machine is a 2021 M1 so I can use newer versions (ahh but I learned that some photos I edited in Lightroom on the newer machine could not be imported on the old machine).
I have never even used the Lightroom app, I still feel most comfortable moving photos from the iphone onto the latptop. There’s no right way to do any of this, just finding the right flow.
Yeah, I can hardly find anyone who remembers 43 Things! It’s just sad that what people call “social media” is really a small subset IMHO of what it used to mean. Oh well, old days are gone. There was a few spinoffs of 43 Things I now forget. And LibrayThing is still a thing!