It’s nice to have services such as Flickr where I can upload an image, then click a button to create an entry on my blog displaying and linking to the image. Unfortunately, there may come a time with I close my Flickr account or Flickr closes up shop. In that case my blog archives will have a bunch of broken images.

I’d like to have a Wordpress plugin that, nightly, copies all linked images to my server, and updates the blog entry so it displays the local image. That would ensure that even if I switched services my previous blog entries would remain intact. Perhaps the plugin should allow you to specify a whitelist of domains from which images should be copied, and it should probably write the original image URL in a comment.

Unfortunately I probably don’t have time to create this plugin, so here’s hoping someone will take up the gauntlet.

Update
Thanks to Garrett for pointing me toward this plugin: Post Filter, which is close to what I want.

Liz Gannes writes:

Webshots Beautifies… Who Next?
Photo-printing may be a big business, but there is too much competition to make much money off it. You can see lots of evidence of this issue in the Shutterfly IPO paperwork. Additionally, younger generations seem increasingly disinterested in printing their photos; Flickr, Zooomr, MySpace, and Facebook are the places to share your pictures.

From my experience, this seems to be a problem with digital camera users in general, not just “younger generations”. I would love to have archival prints of my photos (just in case, FSM forbid, I lose a hard drive and my backups don’t work) — but it’s just too much of a hassle.

Here’s what I would like to see in a photo service:

• A desktop application that monitors a folder, and every night uploads new files to my photo service. There would be an option to have a confirmation appear before the photos are uploaded, and allow me to choose which photos are sent, but chances are I would want this to be completely automated.
• A periodic email reminder from my photo service that tells me it’s time to make some prints. After clicking over, it automatically has an order set up with all the photos that have been uploaded since my last print job, so I choose my options (individual prints or a photo book) remove any photos for which I don’t want prints, and click okay.

With a system like this, I would order a lot more prints.

ONE OF THE THINGS THAT EXPERIENCED INTERNET USERS HATE IS WHEN SOMEONE TYPES IN ALL CAPS… IT FEELS LIKE THE PERSON IS YELLING!

I noticed on Flickr that they have implemented anti-yelling technology – so if you enter a comment in all caps it automatically changes to lower-case and even attempts to capitalize words based on sentence position.

BEFORE:

TESTING COMMENT. WOW! IT WORKS!

AFTER:

Testing comment. Wow! It works!

This is cool, although if you really want to type in all caps it won’t let you. In my mind it’s a good tradeoff.

Update: it would have been even better if they had provided a notification that this was being done, and perhaps a way to override it if you really wanted all caps.