Flickr @ MindSay

I love SmugMug! I am almost Flickr free!

As mentioned before, I am leaving Flickr due to my distaste for Yahoo, Flickr’s parent company. I’ve been searching for the right image host for my photos. For a while I thought I was going to have to host all the photos myself. Finally, I found SmugMug.

SmugMug is an image host, similar to Flickr in many ways, but better, in my opinion. For one thing, the background pages are all black, which works better with the photos. Secondly, and most important, SmugMug is a small family-run company. And they have amazing customer service. Last week I signed up for a free 14 day trial. (It is not a free image host.) Yesterday, customer service sent me an email to inquire how the trial was going. One of the reasons that I considered SmugMug is that they offer a handy import tool called SmuggLr, to move Flickr photos (with tags, descriptions, etc.) over to their service. I was having some problems getting it to work, however, so I replied to their email saying I would like some help. Within 10 minutes I received a reply, telling me that the import tool developer would be happy to help me. Within 20 minutes, all of my photos and details were transferred over. No stress. I immediately paid for a year of service.

Now comes the hard work of changing all the photo URLs for the last two years worth of posts! I hope that within the next month I can terminate my Flickr account! You can now view my photo albums at Global Gal’s SmugMug.

Flickr, the place where I upload all my photos, continues to be blocked within China. I wrote before about how I am looking for a flickr alternative, but in the meantime, I have found a way to access Flickr, and I want to share it with others who may also be having problems.

There is an add-on for Mozilla Firefox users that will allow you to once again see Flickr without using Tor. (An awesome resource for anonymous blogging! Go here if you want to know more.) And if you are not using Firefox, may I ask why not? Go here and download it now!! It is a million times better and safer than Internet Explorer!

BTW, I have been uploading as many photos as I can to Flickr and organizing them there so they can be viewed by all. Please visit my Flickr page and choose any of the collections down the right side of the screen. I will be adding more photos as time allows, including more photos of China and Canada.