After some careful deliberation, I've finally started a Flickr account of my own.

In case any of you aren't familiar with it, Flickr is a photo sharing site.  They're probably the biggest one out there.  They were recently purchased by Yahoo, as well.

I've set up a "pro" account, mostly because I want people to be able to download the originals.  I intentionally went with Flickr because of their strong ties with Creative Commons.  As you may have noticed, I release all my photos under a Creative Commons License.  I want people to be able to freely share my stuff, if they find it to be useful.  This is the same reason that I explicitly encourage downloading in my gallery.  I want to make content accessible.

Flickr will help serve my purpose.  Although I personally prefer my photo gallery to that of Flickr; they do bring something big to the table... They have a huge audience and they are directly integrated into the search facility of Creative Commons.  This should let a lot more people find my stuff, and hopefully pass it along.

Here's a link to my photos. 

Don't worry, I'm not stopping with the BarnyardBBS photo gallery, nor am I stopping development of the ASP.Net GalleryControl.  BarnyardBBS will always get the updates first, and the Flickr account only contains a subset of the total.  Flickr is for sharing the "broad appeal" photos with as many people as possible.  BarnyardBBS will always be home.

If you're anything like me, you're probably thinking that cross-posting so many photos will be very tedious.  That's why I'm not planning on doing it.  I've written a program that uses the Flickr API to automatically post updates from my regular photo gallery.  It scans the database that runs the photo gallery, and posts updates when necessary.  It's even smart enough to update my photosets with recent photos, to keep it fresh.

Don't worry, I'm going to share.  It's going to be a new feature of my open source ASP.Net GalleryControl in the next release.  Thus far, it's worked pretty well (as I've already posted over 500 photos to Flickr).  At the moment, it's running in the background on the webserver, waiting for updates.  As soon as it's stable, I'll make it available to everybody else using the GalleryControl.

Update: I've published an update to the ASP.Net Gallery Control that includes the Flickr Synchronization support.  It's available in the usual place, http://testdrive.barnyardbbs.com.  Unrelatedly, this update also contains improvements to the Blog Control for linking to Digg and Del.icio.us, as well.