Flickr have finally (after what appears to be a couple of years of asking in the forums) released their sets of sets feature, calling it Collections. It enables you to pull together sets, nesting them up to 5 deeps, arranging as you may organise your photos into nested directories on you hard drive. So for those so inclined, there are going to be hours of fun ahead re-arranging the photos, moving them around until they are just how you want them. So far, after having created only one collection, it looks fun and useful. In summary, here’s how you organise:
- a photo can be added to a set
- a photos can be added to more than one set, say if you have a set for a specific holiday and then a set for images of flowers, one image can be in both
- sets can now be grouped into collections. I’ve created a SXSW collection for photos from this and last year.
- collections can be grouped into further collections. One shortcoming appears to be that a collection can contain sets or collections, but not both. Only the lowest levels of any branch can be sets. Now, you can get round this by creating a collection with only one set, but this is a hack.
I thought I’d try and do a diagram about how to arrange collections (pink) and sets (Purple) together, demonstrating that you need to a single set to a collection in order to group things together in. This is just one way I may end up organising my images.
What may be of more interest to some people is the way you can now change the layout on your home page, moving between two columns of small pictures to one column of medium pictures and being able to display either will sets or collections. A nice set of features being released a couple of days before Flickr/Yahoo account merge is mandatory.
