Why are we using Flickr?


Why are we using Flickr?

Three main reasons:

Flickr has a far superior breadth of features than any off-the-shelf photo gallery packages that we can use, and we simply don't have the time or resources to build one in-house. After all, why re-invent the wheel?

Safety and Stability
With Flickr your photos are guaranteed against accidental deletion or server failure. We don't have the resources to make those guarantees. 

Even though your photos are hosted overseas, their distributed content network ensures that you never notice any lag or slow access speeds (outside of your own internet connection, of course). 

Cost to Railpage
Frankly, it costed us a lot to store and serve the old image gallery. We're talking about a collection of photos 45gb in size. That might not sound like much, but when that data is accessed by hundreds of thousands of users every month it starts to add up. 
Of course, Railpage veterans will remember the old image gallery. Unfortunately, due to the sheer size of it and the alterations we'd made to incorprate it into our existing site, there was no path to upgrade to a newer version, so we were faced with a choice: re-invent the wheel and write a new image gallery, or utilise our Flickr group - something which the community had set up on our behalf. 

Registered users will notice a new tab named "Flickr" in your account - go there and link your Railpage account with Flickr! As we roll out new features to Railpage, we'll be making use of your linked accounts. 

How can I share my photos?

Simply log into Flickr (or if you're not a member, sign up) and join the Railpage Australia group - we'd love to have your photos!

If you want them to appear on one of our locations (or any other features we implement in the future), you'll have to place them on a map. It doesn't hurt to give them some tags while you're at it!