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Comment by brlewis | Hacker News Reader

It's ripe for multiple disruptors. Photos are a communication medium that serves multiple purposes, just as words do. Some photos are your portfolio. Others are your memories. They call for different interactions.

Flickr, Smugmug and 500px are very portfolio-oriented. Snapjoy and my site (OurDoings) are very memory-oriented.

Facebook and Google+ are social-oriented. They're great for sharing what you did yesterday, but awkward for nostalgia. I anticipate both the portfolio- and memory-oriented sites acting as home base, but feeding out to the Facebook and Google+ for social interaction.

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     Flickr, Smugmug and 500px are very portfolio-oriented

Oh, I wish Flickr were portfolio oriented.

Unfortunately they have this bizarre concept of a photostream in which you cannot rearrange the order of photos, and they happen in the order of upload and not the date on which they were taken.

Also, while logged in, you cannot filter your own photostream by public / family-only / private photos only. It can be quite annoying, since I have thousands of family-only photos and only dozens of public photos, so I have to log out to see how my photostream looks to outsiders.

Both of your complaints are mistaken.

You can arbitrarily reorder your photostream (not just sets, your actual photostream), and you can check the organizer to filter your photostream for only public photos.

how do you do that?

One way, for example:

http://flickrstream.webzardry.com/

The key is "upload date" which is editable, and determines the order.

If you don't have a tool for it, go to your set in the organizer, sort the set as you want, go to the first photo, open the edit modal dialog, and start stepping through the photos setting the upload time to 1 second after the last. When you're done, the photo stream itself will reflect the custom order.

Sets already reflect your custom order with no extra work. Some Flickr tools (of which there are hundreds) support reordering the photo stream, using this technique under the hood.

Since everything on Flickr has an API, you can do most anything you can imagine.

wow, that's awesome. I hadn't realized they had made upload date writable! This has some interesting possibilities. It is somewhat too bad that changing it will wipe out the original photo upload date, though - for photos which don't have the date taken in the exif, there will be no time history of the photo left.

Isn't it currently google+ for recent history automagically archived in picasaweb for nostalgia

All the photos you directly post to Google+ are in a "Photos from Posts" album, which will grow quickly out of control for people who take more than a few pictures. There's no chronlogical view of Picasaweb photos, not even anything like Flickr's Archive feature, which is more geared toward photo-a-day projects than toward nostalgia. You certainly don't have anything like Snapjoy or OurDoings to automatically organize a backlog of hundreds of photos.

All this is true of Facebook as well, and I think it's by design. Nostalgia is often a solitary activity. What social networks want is interaction, so they're going to steer you toward whatever's been uploaded/commented on most recently. Interaction is what grows social network usage.

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