I often, as most people do, think up things that products/services that I use “should” do. Sometimes I even send these ideas in, if the company has made it easy to do so. I think from now on I will still send them in, but will also post them here, because ideas beget ideas and maybe someone will see mine and come up with an even better one.
So, as any reasonably regular reader can tell, I’m a fan of Flickr. I don’t really use the social features much, I find them a bit unweildy, but I do like it’s organization tools, overall UI, storage of full-size images, unlimited upload quota, and many other features. I don’t derive any direct value from the general public having access to my photos, but maybe the public does, or will someday, get some value. There are two features that I’d like to see added:
1. Virtual Cropping – I lack the time, patience, and/or skill to go through every photo and adjust levels and crop it properly before I upload. Flickr resizes photos to fit the various templates. I’d like to be able to draw a box (like they do with notes) that will be what people see, with the sole exception of the “original” size. This way I can keep the original intact but crop things on the fly as I’m organizing online.
2. Cross-User Sets – I recently went on a couple of trips and took alot of photos. A friend of mine, also a Flickr user, also took alot of photos. Some of his photos are ones I didn’t take, or better than ones I took. When I send someone a link to my collection/set of the trip, I’d like to include some of his photos inline, rather than telling people to look in multiple places. Technically this could be accomplished with groups, but these are typically one-off things and more geared towards collaboration than curation. Basically “Add to set” should be enabled for anyone’s (public) photos, especially those by contacts/friends.
