Piwigo flop

I was super happy to find Piwigo among the available applications to install on my self hosted site managed at Infomaniak. Having already set up my blog through the same process and migrated everything from wordpress.com, I was finally going to have text and pictures in one place!

But that proved to be too complex for me or not designed well enough or perhaps bugged to the core. Sigh.

I found a workflow that although wonky did more or less work. I activated a plugin to place pictures on a map based on gps metadata. Except that Piwigo ignores or can’t read them and having to drop each picture on a map is tedious at best, or inaccurate. Grrr.

I lack the expertise to follow my geek friends’s ways and even those who documented thoroughly how they did their setup proved too complicated for me.

For a while I thought of hiring a freelance web developer to set me up but I don’t think I would understand or like the workflow. I may still ask one day!

Mostly I feel bad twice. Once because the state of the web leaves a lot to be desired, and then because it makes me realize I am dumb and I don’t like that feeling of course 🤷🏻

Flickr is really neat. I’m keeping my subscription and never mind for now that my pictures can’t be at the koalie.net domain.

Flickr stats: me wins, my photos lose, meh

Screenshot of the Flickr app showing the all-time views, the 1st photo has had over 124K, 2nd 45K, 3rd 36K, 4th 30K, 5th 28K. All but the 4th are photos picturing me.

What my top-five most viewed photos tell me is that I should have been a model in my early thirties rather than a wannabe photographer.

I have been using Flickr since 2005.

Well, I have not used it for several years now, and I think I just understood why:

The most viewed photos are almost entirely pictures I posted that picture me. They are part of the story I told about me on this platform, but they are not photos I took. (Although I did a series of self portraits in a dusty mirror which are of me, by me.)

But I don’t use the platform to show myself (that’s what Instagram is about, right? And I left that one already), as much as to showcase my photography at the same time as I photo-document bits of my life.

The only photo where I am not, among the top five, is a byproduct of its title being the same as swingers club (a coincidence, which I blogged about in 2006 when I figured out why it was my most popular photo.)

I think I will find out how much longer the pro membership I paid is, and find an exit strategy for all of my photos on this platform. There is appetite for how I was about 10 years ago more than there is appetite for the stuff I want to show, much to my dismay.

flickr krma

[This post originally appeared in Dullicious, where I blogged as Barbie-dull for several years.]

The most viewed photo from my flickr photostream is:

canal 96: http://www.flickr.com/photos/koalie/81160242/
5573 views
Nobody counts it as a favorite, it has 1 comment, it has 4 tags: 200601-Paris, "Canal 96", paintings, wall.

I was thinking some website had linked to it. Tonight, I googled “Canal 96″. (NOT safe for work).

So my tip, if you’d like good flickr karma on a photo, is to name it according to a pron website.