I was approached over Easter in Toronto by an old fan of the Lithchat photo section, who asked if the site, as a whole, was defunct now. No, obviously, it's not. But he was asking about the lack of activity regarding what made the site popular—unlimited photo uploading from pretty much anyone who wanted to upload photos. Yes, I explained, there aren't new photos on lithchat since providing that kind of service is available all around now, on sites that have easier interfaces, better servers, and faster connections. It's ridiculous to run your own image server in 2007 when you're just a punk with a P5 sitting in the basement.

After researching a few online photo options, then, I've thrown in with flickr.com (feature tour). This is mostly since they allow me (for a ludicrously low annual fee) to upload as many photos as I want. The interface is fantastic (very AJAXy), and I can do all sorts of things on the fly that were a series of clumsy POSTs in the old gallery interface on the old lithchat. Furthermore, many of the main lithchat photo contributors have already made the jump to flickr, and I encourage you all to do the same.

What this means:

1. No new photos are being posted to Lithchat. In fact, eventually even the photos here will be moved to flickr and then removed from here.
2. All new photos should go to the "lithchat" group on flickr (over 600 photos already there).

It's pretty cool that we can have a somewhat regulated group on flickr; the lithchat group there is currently by invitation only, so that we won't have the problems this Lithchat had—namely of being open to the whole world (employers, students, parents, significant others, etc.). Of course, if a flickr user keeps her own photos publicly visible, then the security structures built into the flickr group won't matter a lick.

But in order to ask to be a member of the lithchat flickr group, one must first be a member of flickr:

To join flickr and request to join the lithchat flickr group: 

1. Obviously, go to http://www.flickr.com and follow the directions to join.
2. (If you have a yahoo! login, you can just use that... ah, monopolistic synergy!)
3. Then, once you're logged in, go to http://www.flickr.com/groups/lithchat/ and follow the directions there to join.
   

Remember, because the lithchat flickr group is open only to invited members, you must be a member just to see the photos there. And though my own photos, currently, are publicly available, that will probably change, too, in the near future.

But what about facebook?

It's pretty clear that a huge bulk of the photos that would've, six years ago, been going up on lithchat are now going on facebook. (I have friends with more photos of just themselves on facebook than I have photos, total, uploaded.) The problem with just throwing in with facebook is that, though their model of person tagging is great, there exist a lot of serious limitations to the facebook photo interface, most notably in the way the photos are shared among huge groups at once in ways that don't rely being on facebook nearly constantly.

As anyone who knows me knows, I'm pretty much addicted to facebook. I'll continue uploading my own photos (in smaller sample sizes) to fb as well as to the flickr group. But I also know that facebook is working on a way of interacting with flickr APIs, so it may not be so long from now when the two work together to provide you with more information about what your friends are up to, which was, always, one of the basic points of lithchat. I know that now it seems like there is competition for your online photo viewing time, but I ask for patience while these two corporations figure themselves out.

So in conclusion, I'm going to leave this post up for a while. I'm also changing the links on the front page around so that the photo aspect of the site gets down-pedaled. For now, however, you can still use this link to get to the old photos: http://www.lithchat.com/component/option,com_gallery2/Itemid,28/