flickr

The prominent foto and video sharing website flickr.com hosts billions of photos. For me, it is a fascinating and simple way of getting inspiration in a very visual way. I thereby use tags for searching, e.g. „holiday austria“, scan through the individual search results and mark those pictures as favorites which I really like. This way, I selected over 2200 fotos as beeing favorites to me. The process of marking those favorites consists of a single action, a click on the little star icon, located over the top left of each foto in the individual foto view. Being best practive with web services, flickr provides nice URLs for its users (e.g. http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefanl/) and it also provides nice URLs for a users favorites (e.g. http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefanl/favorites/) but since flickr is an online service, photos marked as favorites remain at the accounts of their respective owners and are only „embedded“ to the selecting user. There are quite a few use cases where you want to export (in my case, exporting is equivalent to downloading, without special treatment of eventually available metadata) several or all of those favorites. You may want to create a beautiful screensaver, make prints of those fotos, etc. To my knowledge, flickr doesn‘t provide an easy way to achieve this on their website. I put a lot of effort into my collection of favorites, regularly use them for brainstorming and inspiration and I simply want an offline backup.