Flickr Best Practices

So, I use Flickr very casually. I take pictures with my cellphone, and when I have a particularly good picture, I push it to Flickr. If I go to an event like a wedding, I often take a lot of pictures, then put them all up for folks to see. Otherwise, I've just thought of Flickr as a linear blog.

But now, I'm up around 500 pictures over the last few years, and having them unsorted was a disaster of information design. Flickr offers Sets, Collections, Groups and Tags, and that was a bit confusing. Here's what I've come to. It's probably very much overkill, but assuming I'll eventually have a few thousand photos in there, I'd prefer to overkill the system up front instead of having to do lots of work shoehorning this into shape later.

• A set is a bunch of pictures, all owned by you. A picture may be in many sets. A collection is a group of sets or (xor) a group of collections.
• Separate from the collection/set hierarchy, a group is a bunch of pictures, with one or many owners.
• Separate from the collection/set hierarchy, separate from groups, are tags, which are similar to tags on many other web applications; they're searchable labels that anyone can apply to any picture.

So, what I'm calling my personal best practices for this one is as follows:

• Collections represent large themes. "Places", with subcollections of "Pittsburgh, PA", "Washington, DC", "Other Locations", for example.
• Sets represent a time and place. "2008 - Air & Space Museum", "2007 - Ocean City, MD" are examples.
  
• Other sets are ongoing, without necessarily having an associated time. "Family Pictures", "Stuff I'm Selling", "Scanned Pictures" fit here.
• Groups are ways to share with other folks at an event. "2008 - Mark S's Wedding" is a set, but "Mark S's Wedding" is also a group, so that everyone at the wedding can aggregate their photos in one place. It might be nice if Flickr let you add a set to a group, but no such luck. I'm assuming that's not there, because it'd also water the quality of photos in many groups.
• Tags are a way to make searching much, much easier. Years (2005, 2008), camera settings (grayscale, IR), locations (LA, DC), other descriptions (Club, Yellow, Steelers) all fit here. Not so much worried about sorting through these later as searching through these later.

That's about all I've got. Since the topic isn't necessarily that large, it should be enough. Any suggestions from the readers?

Edit: I'm actually pretty horrible with the tags, as searching isn't often a problem for me.

Data Organization

Well, when you don't plan to organize your data before you collect it, eventually you wind up with a bit of a mess. Today, had a few minutes of time I wanted to fill before lunch, and decided "why not clean up my bookmarks?"

I keep half of my bookmarks in Firefox; specifically, links that I'll want to use again and again. I sync that across the different machines I use with Google's Browser Sync Extension. For those who keep, ah, "questionable links" on their home computers, be warned that this syncs *all* of your bookmarks, so you might not want to go this route. The other half of my bookmarks, things that are public and that I won't want to use often, go to del.icio.us. That would be recipes, news articles, art, humor, or anything else neat that might be worth remembering.

I've debated moving all of my links into delicious, but have held off on that, as it seems useful to have a 'core' set of links directly in the browser, without dropping into a web application. Also, much like cleaning my apartment, it's a priority to clean up my links... but a low priority, that only gets bumped up if the current state of affairs is blocking something higher in priority from getting done efficiently.

I'm curious for the few readers out there, how do you organize browser links? I have a few folders that all fit into the toolbar across the top of the browser, and nothing in the bookmarks menu; everything there's been moved to delicious. Trying to figure out how those folders should be laid out - if they need to be changed - is causing me more thought than I figured it would.