Connectivity

I’ve been trying to get this blog to connect to a few other applications lately: Facebook, Coppermine, Flickr, Picassa, Aperture. So far, the only thing I’ve really hit have been Coppermine and Flickr, with the Coppermine being a bloop single. I’m 95% sure I’m going to upgrade from iPhoto to Aperture. The latest version, 2.0, feels much faster than the 1.5 version I demoed a few months ago, and even a bit faster than iPhoto, though that’s not saying much. When your iPhoto library is 65 gigs, it slows a bit. The most immediate downside to me, is that there is no direct Aperture to Coppermine plugin. I can buy a plugin to upload as FTP, or just manually FTP the files up, but I’d prefer not to, as I’d have to reenter any tagging information. There is a free Flickr plugin for Aperture however. Additionally, I can easily (so far) connect to Flickr from this blog, and show photos off. So far, it seems slower than my Coppermine Gallery software, but acceptable for use.

One other plus of using Aperture, is that it’s easier to watermark an image, to put my own logo on the image. I don’t have a real reason to do that yet, but it’s probably a good idea for all images on the web to be marked in that fashion.

Flickr connectivity is nice for an additional reason: AppleTV 2.0. With the recent upgrades to the AppleTV system, one can browse Flickr photostreams . It still requires a hack to get an RSS feed to show up on the AppleTV, but I’m not willing to go that far for systems I’m not using everyday myself. So Flickr is the best way to go for the time being. Two nights ago, looking at PapaBradstein‘s feed, the pics didn’t look so hot on the HDTV. I’m not sure why, but it could be the AppleTV is pulling the pictures from the standard web size, and not the largest available size. A quick check of a few images shows a 800×600 size, so that might be part of the problem on the big screen tv.

I’m not sure which direction I’ll jump yet, between Coppermine and Flickr. If there’s a decent utility for direct uploading into Coppermine from Aperture, I’ll go for that, but if not, I’ll slowly transition over to Flickr.