The Joys of Flickr

I don't know about anyone else, but I am a terrible photographer. Even when people are holding still, I have a hard time capturing a pose. It's really a crime because I live in the heart of Hocking Hills, which is gorgeous in the spring time, and summer time, and fall and winter too.

So my aim with the Flickr project was to find some great pictures of the Hocking Hills area, especially the caves and trails - pictures I am not talented enough to take myself.

I began with a simple search of "Hocking Hills" and got pages upon pages of results. Some of the results weren't exactly what I was after, but were things from the Hocking Hills region (like a shot of an owl). I collected quite a few pictures from that search regardless, and then went for specific cave regions, or variants on the terms. Here were some of my search terms:

• Hocking Hills State Park
• Ash Cave
• Old Man's Cave
• Conkle's Hollow
• Rock House
• Rock House stone stairs
• Hocking Hills waterfalls
• Hocking Hills trails
• Ash Cave Waterfalls

The Good:

Once I figure out how to create a gallery (I'm stubborn and pig-headed and therefor did not read the tutorial after I signed up, okay?) it was smooth sailing. No matter what terms I put in, I seemed to get relevant results. Of course this led to me searching for other places I love, like Sienna, Italy or Edinburgh, Scotland, and the searches all returned great results as well. I even got specific with a few (looking up the bell tower in Sienna, for example), and it was quite easy to manage.

The Bad:

To be honest, I felt like Flickr in general was twice the work it had to be, and let me preface the rest of this by saying that I could feel that way because I don't know better ways to do things on Flickr. (As I said, I'm stubborn. I'm also a child of the first internet generation. If these aren't easy right away, it's the internet's fault, not mine.) The site itself was a bit cluttered. There wasn't a way to move from one picture to the next, and you couldn't add pictures to your gallery from the thumbnails. You had to expand all the pictures. Also, the task of editing picture tags or descriptions or even the gallery name seemed to have more steps than necessary. Really, the whole thing could be fixed with a few more buttons and a whole lot less clutter.

Overall, Flickr is a convenient way of keeping track of your pictures, and letting you network and find pictures you'd like outside of your own. With a few more careful touches, it could be extremely user friendly and intuitive.

Here's my gallery of the Hocking Hills. Enjoy!