When Photo Date Meta Info is Handy

By Wesley Fryer On December 27, 2011 · · Add Comment

It’s confession time: I fell off the ‘365 photos wagon’ on October 30th. Since January 1, 2011, I’d been faithfully posting one photo per day to my Tumblr blog. Every so often I’d miss some days and need to play catch-up, but for a variety of reasons that routine ended at the end of October. This week as the end of 2011 nears, I decided to play catch-up. I uploaded a bunch of photos to my Flickr account, and as I started to think of ways to post an appropriate photo for each day since October 31st I remembered Flickr supports image searches by date.

Using this “Flickr Advanced Search” option, I was able to readily find photos I took each day for the past two months. There were a few days I didn’t have photos and had to use images from adjoining days, but for the most part this method allowed me to photographically re-represent the past sixty days. I turned off the “autopost to Twitter” feature of my Tumblr blog during this process, since I didn’t want to inundate my Twitter-stream with sixty image posts in rapid succession. This was a worthwhile and fun process, since it helped me identify as well as archive some of my favorite images from the past two months. I used Tumblr’s browser-based option to “use a URL instead” and directly posted images I wanted from their Flickr pages. Here are a few of my favorites I re-discovered.

For my Photo365 project in 2012 I’m planning to use Instagram instead of Tumblr. If you haven’t tried posting a photo per day with a smartphone (and you have a smartphone, which really streamlines these processes/steps) I strongly encourage you to give it a try in 2012! Photo365 projects provide great ways to regularly practice photography, further develop “a photographer’s eye,” play with a variety of smartphone photography apps, and document your life experiences for posterity. See my December 15, 2010 post, “Tumblr for my 365 Photo Project in 2011” for more background on how I got started on this project.

Update 5:20 12/27/2011: I’m pleased to learn Instagr.am permits cross-posting to Tumblr in addition to Twitter and Facebook. As a result, I think I’ll try sharing my 2012 Photo 365 images with the Instagr.am iPhone app and cross-post from the app to Twitter, Facebook, and my Photo 365 blog.

The app could also cross-post to Flickr, but instead I’ve created a task/recipe with ifttt.com for Flickr cross-posting which will add some custom tags.

Technorati Tags: photo, date, meta, flickr, photo365, tumblr, instagram