What about flickr?

Flickr is a foto-community website (yes, a “web 2.0″ site, if you like), which is quite popular and many photographers buy the “pro” account to upload full-resolution images and get rid of the 200 photo limit. Some applications have nice flickr-integration, so does Aperture 3 from Apple. But I am not willing to pay an annual fee, nor do I know what happens in the future with flickr and my photos there (Who will buy flickr?…).

Therefore, I am working on a setup to get both benefits, the flickr community and hosting pictures on my own wordpress installation. I decided to use the free flickr account to mirror the images of my blog. Then, I sync the comments from flickr back to wordpress. The following two plugins, should do the trick:

• Live Flickr Comments Importer: When I specify the id of an flickr photo, It will import the comments from flickr to this wordpress blog, as you can see for the image below.
• wp2flickr: Exports pictures posted here to flickr :-)

Here is an image located on my server and the comments from the corresponding mirrored image on flickr are shown below the post:

The opium of the people! ... or what remains thereof.

With this setup, I can post and host my pictures here and still use the comments from flickr. I am still testing the setup but for now it looks quite promising. The comments below this post were originally done at flickr and are shown here, too.

Update: Oh, well, now I have a Flickr pro account, because I was missing a fast way to directly from my photo management software (Aperture).