The server may be torpid for a few days

It’s not often you get to use a word like torpid, so I thought I’d seize the opportunity.

I had hoped that WordPress 2.3 would allow me to open up blog entries to public tagging. This was so that I could import CC licenced photos from Flickr and enable people to tag them in whichever language they chose. For instance I love a lot of the photos at Chiron, but searching through their tags is sometimes difficult because a lot of them are tagged in Spanish, and my Spanish is limited. Even English tagged photos can be lost if the photographer doesn’t think of a photo using the same words that you do. And vice-versa, because I haven’t tagged my photos in Spanish they’re not as helpful as they could be.

I had hoped I’d be able to get round this by importing photos, which is what the server at images.clioaudio.com has been doing for a couple of months. If I could open tagging then there’d be hundreds of photos which could be helpfully tagged by everyone. This isn’t the case so the best I could offer would be to open comments, but the comments aren’t searchable so it all seems a bit pointless.

I was mulling writing my own software to do this instead. That wouldn’t happen till the New Year. Now I’ve found a script which does the job, and will import back catalogue photos, so the image bank could potentially be very large and very useful very quickly. The issues I have now are making sure the correct licences are displayed with the photos, improving the crediting and then integrating it with WordPress. There’s also the issue of creating 1000s of images and thumbnails, which is why I use the word torpid. I want to try and do it slowly to avoid annoying my webhost, but even so there could be problems.

If anyone’s interested I plan to use Gallery2, with a modified Gallery2Flickr module.