I’m in the movie theater. The guy in front of me is playing with his new iPhone. Ahead of her is a woman working on her laptop. In the mosques in Istanbul I took pictures of everyone taking pictures of their families and walking around staring into their video cameras. At my friend Will’s wedding last weekend, I caught one photographer taking a picture of another photographer shooting the party, and a third person videotaping her. I took a picture of the three of them, maybe. Clearly, humans are interested with each other, but why is it that we are even more fascinated by seeing each other on screen - any kind of screen? There is something about a screen, or even a photograph, that transforms the real, the actual, the moment, into an event, a thing, something somehow different from what passes before our eyes unmitigated, even if of course it’s exactly the same thing.

Most of us take digital photos and post them online, but we don’t all use the same services to host our photos. So while I may be able to remember how to find Marc’s photos from Tomales Bay on Kodak’s service, or navigate from my Flickr photoset to Saida’s Flickr pics, it’s impossible to get to Marc’s other photo albums on Kodak without logging in (which means you need an account there).

But what I’d really like is to be able to throw those three URL’s into some sort of picture masher that shows them all together, and which knows enough about how each service works to let me navigate to other albums, so I don’t have to remember who uses what service, or save those “view my photos” emails forever. Basically, a meta photo-sharing service. Is this already out there somewhere?

One simple hack would be for (e.g.) Flickr to let you add URL bookmarks alongside photosets - that way I could point to other (both internal and external) related photos from any set of my own. For that matter, I should be able to add “friends” or “contacts” from _outside_ of Flickr as well as inside. That would really make the network grow.

Picasa 2 sure is neat. The interface is so slick, and it seems to do just about everything the right way. With one big exception — I want to be able to integrate Picasa with WordPress, as I did with iMatch. I want my captions, etc to be preserved, and I want to be able to create a blog entry for each photo, so I can reference them in other posts.

If I ever have time, I’ll have to have a look at the XML output from Picasa; some others are thinking the same thing. The thing about this XML is that I’d have to write some code on the PC to parse the XML, upload the images, and create entries in the WordPress database. Granted, that’s what I did with iMatch, but if one was to do that, it would be nice to have access to Picasa’s database, instead of having to word off of a static export file.

Now that I have a growing number of image “asset” posts in WordPress, some basic gallery functions are useful. I added a new rewrite rule, and created gallery.php to display groups of images for a given category:

E.g. http://www.dwelle.org/archives/gallery/michigan/

Since each image is a blog post, viewers can leave comments, just like on Flickr.

I wrote a while back about my thinking about storing images as “assets” (posts) in WordPress. I manage my photo collection with a desktop app (Photools’ iMatch). How to link the two? Luckily iMatch has a scripting environment (actually, that was one of the reasons that I chose to use this software), and so I wrote a script that uploads photos from my PC to my web server, and uses the category, title, caption, and other information from the iMatch database to create image asset posts in WordPress. Now I can just go into iMatch, select a bunch of photos, and hit “Post to WordPress”, and they appear online in the right category! Here’s the imatch_to_wordpress script (it’s VBA/Sax Basic), in case you’re interested.