WME Flickr Focus: April 2011

And now for the comeback! Following the mayhem of March, when my old Fotopic galleries disappeared virtually without trace, April has been an altogether much kinder month. The West Midlands Exploration bandwagon has rolled its way over onto Flickr, and the slow process of rebuilding my archive has begun...

I quite like Flickr - admittedly there are aspects of Fotopic that I miss, particularly the option to personalise your own webspace, but on the whole I'm pleased with my new photographic home. Flickr's use of collections made up of sets means that I've been able to replicate the basic structure of my old Fotopic galleries, and I like having the option to tag and geotag my photos, plotting their locations against a map and generally making my archive more searchable. My 'photostream' acts as a kind of blog presenting my latest updates, and I also have the handy option of making photos private so I can hide them until all the dating and commentary is in place.

So what am I up to? I plan to work through each of my old galleries in turn, uploading the photos behind the scenes and then releasing them when I'm happy with everything. To that end, the photos for WME Wolverhampton and WME Walsall are now in hand whilst I've just begun the uploads for WME Birmingham. Several photos have been released for public viewing, and my tally at the end of April stood at 222 pictures, 188 for Wolverhampton and 34 for Walsall. There is a massively long way to go but it is a start, and the links to both the Wolves and Walsall collections are now included on this blog along with that for the general photostream.

The challenge going forward is to keep going as best as I can. Hopefully more of my Wolverhampton and Walsall photos should be appearing over the coming weeks, possibly with a sprinkling of Birmingham too, and if all goes well I might be ready to upload some Dudley and Sandwell before much longer. I look forward to seeing it all take shape and I will be interested to find out whether Flickr generates any extra interest in my photos compared to Fotopic. The next few months could be fascinating, well for me at least...