Ive updated both my Flickr Contacts Organiser and Flickr Groups Organiser greasemonkey scripts. They can now both save their data (tags) to and restore from the users flickr mail account. These features are available from the Firefox Tools/Greasemonkey/User Commands menu.
Ive also fixed a few bugs in both of them, for instance the bug where the datastore got corrupted for no apparent reason. BTW if you suffered this problem, the new version of the script will detect certain problems and try and fix them. Ive also disallowed the use of quote marks in tags, as this was causing a problem for some people. If you put quotes in a tag, the script will just simply strip them out.
One interesting thing that the backup and restore feature opens up is the ability to transfer your tag datastore to another computer or even another user via flickrmail. At present when you import a tags datastore, it completely wipes out the old one, but in future versions you may be able to merge datastores. Transferring contact tags datastores to another user isnt so problematic as transferring a group tags datastore, as with contacts organiser you dont need to be a have a user as a contact to be able to tag them, but with groups organiser you do need to be a member of a group before you can tag it. So if the users sharing their tags datastore arent members of the same groups, there will be problems. Of course one solution would be to automatically ask the user if they want to join the groups that are tagged and they arent members of. Anyway maybe thats a feature for another day.
You can get the updated versions of the scripts as usual from here: http://steeev.freehostia.com/flickr
Theres a new way to tag your Flickr photos to indicate flickr users are appearing in them.
Quite a few users have already started doing it. The way it works is to use the following "machine tag" notation, for each flickr user in the photo
"flickr:user=[flickr-username]"
(replacing [flickr-username] with the username of the person in the photo)
e.g. if there were 2 flickr users in my photo, lets say their flickr usernames were fred11 and joe44 you would add the following 2 tags to the photo: flickr:user=fred11 and flickr:user=joe44
I made an rss feed of the flickr:user=* tags, which you can access here: feeds.feedburner.com/FlickrUsersInPhotos
to list the photos with flickr users in them. The feed is GeoRSS enabled, which means it adds the latitude and longitude values to the item, if the photo has been geotagged. And lets you do things like viewing the feed on google maps. I also just found a GeoRSS to KML converter, so heres a KML version of the feed, for the Google Earth fans.
if you wish to be notified when you are added to anyones photos, you can simply subscribe the flickr provided RSS feed for the flickr:user=yourusername tag in your news reader application.
theres also a greasemonkey script written by jacobd with some additional code from me, that detects these tags, when you are viewing photos on flickr, and adds user icons, usernames and links for each tagged user in the photo, next to the photo. It also activates the buddy menus for the icons and adds a simple way of adding the user tags, via a select box populated by your contacts list.
You can get the script here: flickr.users.in.this.photo.user.js
Theres more discussion on this topic in flickr central.
Technorati Tags: flickr, greasemonkey, tagging, machine tags, GeoRSS, Google Earth