Getting pictures on the blog has always been a bit of a challenge, and therefore hasn’t happened with any regularity.  The editor tired of the situation and cracked down on the technical staff to make it better.  Hopefully the situation is now improved and following us here will be more visually interesting.

The main change is a move to Flickr for the image hosting.  I didn’t exactly make an extensive evaluation of the options, so there may be significant downsides to this, but for now it seems to be working.

You’ve probably noticed the photos in the sidebar.  This will always show our most recently uploaded photos.  Additionally, the same photos can now be easily embedded in the blog posts themselves to supplement the content.

Probably the biggest advantage to using Flickr is that we have phones and cameras that can upload pictures there directly.  So, in theory anyway, a picture could be in the sidebar gallery within seconds of being taken, with nobody having to sit down at a computer to do it.  All of the recent pictures over there now were taken from my phone and transferred wirelessly.  

The only currently known downside to Flickr is the image quality.  Regardless of the image we capture and transfer, Flickr reduces it to their standard size.  This is actually a partial benefit since part of the previous picture posting routine was to do this reduction manually.  However, we are now scaling them up slightly for display in the blog posts, so there is a bit of loss going on.  Ironically, if you click on the photo, it will actually display smaller when it reloads from the Flickr website in its native size.  We’ll have to see how this works out in practice.

There will probably be a burst of new pictures added soon as Tanya goes through her camera and uploads older photos.  Some of the previous posts that were intended to have pictures at the time, but required technical assistance, may now get them.