John Topley’s Weblog

I just noticed something that Flickr got exactly right—you don’t have to give photos a title. My process for using Flickr is usually:

1. Upload a batch of photos to my account, marked as private
2. Use the Organizr (did they drop that name?) to add the photos to a new set, or an existing one
3. Go through the new photos adding any individual tags as appropriate
4. Make the photos that aren’t really bad public and try to come up with a title

It’s that very last step that I find really increases the cognitive load; so much so that I often just give lots of photos the same title. I can’t quite bring myself to have public photos with titles like IMG_0970.JPG. I got to thinking that I never had to give physical photographs a title when I put them in an album, so why should Flickr make me do so? Then I tried it, found out that I don’t have to and smiled. Expect to see lots of anonymous photos in my Flickr photostream in future.