Images

Flickr F*ck

/ Clodjee / Leave a comment

It’s the Dropbox rip-off all over again!

I’ve just been reminded today that my picture albums are about to be taken hostage. Not long after Yahoo had sold Flickr to SmugMug, they announced drastic changes in their policy. Their offering was too good and not profitable enough so they decided to jack up their price and radically reduce the advantages of free accounts. By doing so they are seriously screwing up their existing customers in what amounts to nothing less than corporate highway robbery!

The free accounts will be reduced to 1,000 photos and videos (instead of 1 Tb). Customers can update to Flickr Pro to have unlimited storage for C$65.88 (C$5.49 / mo) in a scheme that is basically upgrade or die! We have until January 8th to decide, after that our accounts will be frozen until February 5th, when the excess pictures will be DELETED! That’s outrageous!

This puts me in quite a dilemma. Since it has been one of the best sharing photos sites, I’ve been using the Flickr free account a lot for a while—although I’ve almost stopped using it since I upgraded to MacOS Mojave because the Photos app doesn’t allow us to easily upload to Flickr anymore. However, I still have 57 photo albums on it, which contains over 3000 pictures (0.6% of 1 Tb). 

So, should I upgrade or not? If I don’t I will lose my albums—but it doesn’t really matter since all those pictures are still in my Photos libraries anyway. It is just that there, I cannot share those pictures. And I don’t really want to pay yet another subscription service (I am already paying for several of them) and I am already using other services that could serve as Flickr alternative — although not as good… What are the photo sharing options that I already have?

  • Adobe Portfolio — included with my Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan (US$137.83 for 20 Gb, Photoshop, Lightroom) but seems to double the use of WordPress. Although the whole Adobe Creative Cloud offers A LOT of potential that I still have to explore…
  • Amazon Photo — unlimited photo storage (plus 5 Gb for video and files) already included with my Amazon Prime subscription (C$79), but you can share only links and is not web-based like Flickr was… (Ex.: Cats 2017-18) 
  • Dropbox — free (using 37% of 6.8 Gb) but not able to easily share files anymore (unless I pay C$129 for 1 Tb or C$279 for 2 Tb & Showcase)
  • Facebook — free, but not very practical (any limits?)
  • Google Photo — free (using 6.3% of 15 Gb) but not practical because you can share only links (ex: Blogger album or Flower 2018 [from Flickr])
  • iCloud — I am already paying $3.99 for 200 Gb (so far using only 40%) to host my pictures, but there’s no real option to share pictures or albums…
  • Imgur — free, no limit (sounds great! But doesn’t look very elegant)
  • Instagram — free & cute, but again not very practical for photo albums
  • Photobucket — free, slow, offers only 2.5 Gb (2% used) with very intrusive ads (or pay $48.36 for 25 Gb)
  • Pinterest — free, but not very practical for photo albums (good to pins pics from other sites though)
  • Vimeo — 250 Gb included with my Plus subscription ($108), but it’s for video only and would be superfluous and redundant if I go with WordPress Premium…
  • WordPress — included with my Personal hosting ($48) I already have 6 Gb (using only 48%), but I am considering upgrading to Premium for 13 Gb ($96 but it also includes advanced social media, simple payments, site monetization and video support), but no nice way to share large albums. But I am sure I could work out something… (there are widgets for Gallery or Instagram)

After testing (again) all those alternatives (wasting an entire afternoon of writing doing so) I sadly report that none of them seems totally satisfactory. However, I refuse to pay the ransom that Flicker is asking for my picture albums… F*ck you Flickr !

I’ll probably workout something on WordPress, either directly or create a page that forward to a subsidiary site (Amazon, Google or Imgur) through links… We’ll see.

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Happy Holidays to all !

/ Clodjee / Leave a comment

Gratin assaisonné à tous

🌲☃️ 

Season’s greetings to all

Happy Holidays!

 🎁   🙏  🍀

A défaut de vous souhaitez la paix dans le monde (soyons réaliste!), je vous offre à tous, amis et lecteurs, mes voeux de quiétude et d’ordre, de bonheur et de joie, de santé et de prospérité tant pour ce solstice qui clôt un autre cycle solaire que pour la nouvelle année qui s’amorce et que nous espérons meilleures (Pour nos amis américains, je souhaite également une destitution sans peine et un prompt rétablissement 🤪). Peu importe ce que vous célébrez (Noël, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, Saturnales, etc.) je vous souhaite tous de joyeuses fêtes!

For want of peace in the world (let’s be realistic!), I offer you all, friends and readers, my wishes for quietude and order, happiness and joy, health and prosperity for this solstice which closes another solar cycle as well as for the new year that is beginning and that we hope better (For our American friends, I also wish a painless impeachment and a speedy recovery 🤪). No matter what you celebrate (Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, Saturnalia, etc.) I wish you all happy holidays!

🏛    ⛪️    🕌    🕍    🕋    ⛩

عطلات سعيدة للجميع

祝大家節日快樂

Feliĉaj Ferioj al ĉiuj

Frohe Feiertage für alle

Ευχάριστες διακοπές σε όλους

Happy Holidays nan tout

חג שמח לכולם

सभी के लिए खुश छुट्टियाँ

Buone Feste a tutti

すべてにハッピーホリデー

Beatus festis in omnes

Счастливые праздники для всех

Felices fiestas a todos

Chúc mừng ngày lễ cho tất cả

 

christmas-decorations-divider-400-87

Pictorial chronicle

/ Clodjee / Leave a comment

Today’s bounty

Today I took a day off at the library to go… visit another library! This afternoon, my wife and I went to the Atwater Library and Computer Center. Founded in 1828 as the Montreal Mechanics’ Institution (the first in continental British North America) to “educate workers for the emerging industries”, it is now registered as charity and acts as a community library, digital learning centre and meeting place. It is a private library but it is opened to everyone (for an annual membership fee of $35 — and, as they say, “[u]nlike municipal libraries, we don’t ask people to show ID documents or proof of their address”). Like all anglophone cultural institutions it relies mostly on donations and volunteer service. It receives over 100,000 visitors annually as it offers “courses and workshops to help young and old master technology in the digital age, (…) literary and educational events, financial literacy sessions, exhibitions on literature and history, (…) and much more.” The library is housed in a heritage building (built between 1818 and 1820) located in Westmount (1200 Atwater Ave., corner of Tupper St.). It is a beautiful place. The floor of the mezzanine is made of glass panels. It has a respectable collections of books and audio-visual documents (nearly 40,000 titles).

The facade
First floor and mezzanine
Mezzanine with its floor made of glass panels
View down from the mezzanine

Our main reason to visit the library was its Annual Fall Books sale. The donations of documents that doesn’t make it to the library’s collection are sold to help raise funds. There’s a wide selection of new and used books, CDs, DVDs available at very reasonable prices (between $0.50 for paperbacks and $1 for hard covers, to a range of $5 to $20 for larger art books). There was a lot of interesting books, but I had to limit myself because most of them were rather voluminous. I found quite a bounty.

Today's Bounty

It purchased only two books but they were quite a find. First, I got The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker ($15, a huge book of 11.25 x 13.25 inches, 2 inches thick and weighting about six pounds!) which presents a collection of the editorial and comical illustrations published in the famous magazine since its founding in 1925 up to 2004 (date of publication of the book). I really love those cartoons and can’t wait to read that (although it’s quite heavy to manipulate)! [ Amazon / Biblio / Goodreads / WorldCat ]

Since I am currently writing about Books of Hours, it is quite serendipitous that the second book I purchased was The Belles Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry ($5). It offers colour reproductions (with commentary) of every folio of the beautiful devotional illuminated manuscript (now hosted in The Cloisters Collection of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art). It was commissioned around 1409 by Jean, duc de Berry to the Limbourg brothers just a few years before they also illustrated the more famous Très Riches Heures for the same patron. It is a very beautiful and amazing book. It will probably take me a while before going through it.  [ Amazon / Biblio / Goodreads / Wikipedia / WorldCat ]

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Pictorial chronicle

/ Clodjee / Leave a comment

The death of a garden

[ iPhone 8+, 2018/10/27 ]

I guess the gardening season is over. The frost has killed the herbs, vegetables and flowers. We’ve started removing the flower pots, cleaning up and preparing the back yard for winter. It is both sad and satisfying at the same time… Even in its death, a garden can be beautiful and bring joy to the heart.

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Pictorial chronicle

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Déroutante erreur / Baffling system error

Baffling error message

“Une exception non gérée s’est produite dans un composant de votre application. Si vous cliquez sur Continuer, votre application va ignorer cette erreur et essayer de continuer. La collection a été modifiée; l’opération d’énumération peut ne pas s’exécuter.”

Voici un étrange message d’erreur apparu sur un poste au travail aujourd’hui. Le libellé en français ne fait guère de sens… mais, bon, nous n’en sommes pas à une absurdité près…

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