Flickr & Blogger & TooMuchTrouble, OH MY!

I have to say that, in this day and age, I am surprised at the clumsiness of photoblogging solutions.

Ever since I switched to using Flickr to store my photos, my cards have been cut-off at the right. Flickr's "BLOG THIS" ability is nice, but it only offers two templates: 500px, which means my photos are too big and are cut off, or 240px, which means my photos show up too small here on Blogger...you can barely see them. So this explains why many of my previous photos are cut off.

I have found a solution, but it creates yet ANOTHER problem.

A wise soul on the Flickr help pages showed how to change the width of each photo blogged to 400px. That's great! It works for horizontal images. Now they fit nicely, and you can see the detail. But what about VERTICAL images? I was afraid that code would force Blogger to STRETCH the vertical images out to 400px in width. Thankfully, it doesn't do that. But what it does is super ENLARGE the image to retain the correct proportions! So now, what you will see on my blog in the future, are vertical images that are SUPER LARGE but normal-sized horizontal images. The next two blog posts you see as you scroll will show you what I mean.

Does that suck or what???

The lesser of two evils, I suppose....

The more I struggle with photoblogging, the more I want to find some smart programmers who want to go into business with me to create a photoblogging solution that WORKS. When you run into problems with Flickr or Blogger, you're basically at their mercy. And for some reason, they refuse to tackle and/or even acknowledge even basic issues that would make very many people happy. (This is not just me!)

For instance, why does Flickr not allow you to easily show photos AND descriptions in a slide-show format? So many people want this option...it would be easy to integrate, according to the Web heads out there talking about it....yet Flickr people won't even engage in the conversation to tell us that they hear us and WHY they won't do something about it.

Despite my frustration I continue. I know that some day the right solution will come along and then...I'm outta here!

Back to our regularly scheduled postcards.....

Thanks for listening! :)