Flickirritated

Why is uploading to Flickr so exasperating?

I'm on a business trip to Tokyo and Hong Kong this week, and I've spent from about 8 this morning until now, around 1:38 PM Tokyo time, trying to get 165 photos to Flickr. I'm still uploading.

I've tried using 1001, Flock, and the Mac OS X Flickr Uploadr. Each has either timed out, crashed, or done nothing, sometimes all of the above. Right now I'm uploading the rest of what didn't manage to get uploaded after Flickr Uploadr crashed with 1001. Earlier, 1001 stalled forever doing nothing while trying to upload the first of a batch of photos. I'm hoping it'll do better this time.

What's more, why is it so hard, nearly so hard as to not be worth bothering, to specify a display or upload order for the photos? I like to upload and organize my photos such that they have a chronological progression. With most digital cameras, that means pictures with default file names (which become titles) should be ordered in incremental progression. Instead, all of the uploading tools I've used when uploading a batch do the opposite by default, showing newest photos first. I can understand this in a sense; you always want to display new photos by default, but within a batch of photos, I want to go from oldest to newest. There's no easy way to do this in the Flickr web interface that I've found, nor any support in any of the uploading clients I've used. I resort to using the Organize function, dragging and dropping each individually, one after another, checking to make sure I'm following the order with the files stored on my computer.

If your photos have EXIF data, and the camera is set correctly, you should be able to order in multiple ways by looking at the timestamp of each photo. But there's no support for that kind of feature.