order prints
I didn’t realize that Flickr users can send photo printing jobs to their local Target photo center. I just spent about ten minutes uploading images to Yahoo! Photos, since I clicked through the Target.com website. (It didn’t occur to me that Yahoo! owns Flickr.) Perhaps if I read the Flickr blog, I would know about the integration with Target’s photo services. This would have saved me some time, since I had all of the photos I wanted to print uploaded to my Flickr account.
Well, maybe. When I upload images to Flickr, I almost always downsample them to 1024×768 for a few reasons. I don’t have a Flickr Pro account, so I’m limited to 20MB of transfer each month. I never hit that threshold, but images are about 2MB fresh of my camera, so I would hit it pretty fast if I didn’t downsample and optimize my images. In addition, the largest size Flickr will display for us Flickr Amateurs is 1024×768, so I don’t see much point in uploading larger images. Obviously, while I want to downsample and compress for the Web, I want the highest quality for printing, so, if I print directly from Flickr, I’ll be printing with images with a lower quality than I would ordinarily use for printing. Target is offering ten free 4×6 prints for new users right now, so I’ll see how these Web-optimized images look.
I’m starting to hit the threshold where I may need a Flickr pro account. In addition to spending a bit too much time adjusting photos in Photoshop, I may hit Flickr’s 200-image rule. I can upload more than 200 images, but only the 200 most recent images will display. I’m not sure that $24.95 a year is worth it. (Perhaps one of my kind readers will buy me a subscription.) I’ve got more to say about my mixed feelings about Flickr, but I think I’ll stop here with an image I uploaded yesterday. Be sure to click through and see the notes my friend Eric added.
