New posts and a photo rant/apology

Hey all...

Some rare sunshine up here in Copenhagen so we took advantage of it to take a refreshing 1.5 hour walk in the brisk 40 degree weather. Mogens and Grethe live along a chain of ponds on the other side of the dunes from the sea so we walked from harbor to harbor and enjoyed watching the swans, ducks and seagulls doing their thing. (And it beat the storm we had on Thursday with howling winds carrying snow/sleet around)

Posted some more Italian entries (Florence, Siena, and San Gimignano) and loaded some more photos. Herein lies the rant/apology. I actually spend a lot of time when loading the photos putting them in an order that tells a story and writing descriptions and comments on them to give them a context and a reason for being (though the S.G. photos are not a good example of that). Most of this is for our own benefit. Otherwise when we looked back at them after the trip we would have no idea what/where they were or why we took them. (Heck...that's already happening when I look at older pics!). But it's also so that if any of you are brave/foolhardy enough to look at more of our pics than just those linked to the entries you'll be looking at something with some semblance of order that tells you a story about our trip.

However, I'm discovering that Flickr's technology seems to do everything possible to subvert that goal. I was already grumpy about the fact that the photo stream loads things first in, last out (I must be missing accounting class) so that if you look at the photo stream from the latest everything is backwards. Occasionally when I'm feeling really inspired I reverse the order I load them in to try to fix that (like with the Milan pictures) but usually I trust that viewers can figure that out.

But I realize that clicking one by one through the photostream is not the most user friendly way to do it and most of you (if you have gotten that far) probably look at pics in a slide show (often after searching on tags). And here's where things really kinda suck, experience-wise. Not only does the slide show not include the titles or descriptions with the photos (like Ofoto or places like that do), but I've recently noticed while showing some pictures to friends here that searching by tags seems to just put them in some random order, so they will be even more confusing/annoying/boring to look at. So 1) I apologize to all of you who have been slogging through the photos anyway as you are not getting the benefit of the slide shows as I had organized them; 2) I'm ranting and grumpy because I do actually put a lot of time into it and want people to be able to get the full benefit of that work; and 3) therefore would appreciate it if anyone knows flickr better than we do (which wouldn't be hard) and therefore might know a way to fix this problem. Thanks.

Now that I have more or less finished updating the photos I may actually have a little time to write the blog entries I am responsible for so hopefully you'll be seeing more from me soon than just administrative notes.

becca