Cr-48 & Flickr
Today I came home to a brown box from Google. Inside was another brown box with a cute illustration on it, and inside that was a black slab of internet. And I, an internet addict reporting for duty, proceeded to begin my descent into an evening of poking around with my Cr-48.
There are plenty of sites out there giving accurate enough descriptions of the hardware and damn simple configuration process, so I’ll try to limit myself here to the questions I haven’t yet seen answered.
Firstly, it plays well enough with Flickr, and this is very important to me. There’s a spring-loaded SD card slot on the side that eagerly read the contents of a 16 GB SDHC card I stuck in there. Once the SD card is made familiar with the Cr-48, it sits nearly flush with the body, only a little blue toe sticks out to say, “Hello, I am an avenue for increased local storage!”
The only way to access the contents of the card was to find a website that would ask for a file. The Flickr Upload page got Chrome OS to open a fairly primitive file system screen. From here I could select photos on the card (by name or date only, no thumbnails), and then push them to my photo stream. This works great if your memory card doesn’t have too many shots on it, and you have an idea of when the photo you want was taken. After a long photo safari though, this is no good.
You could perhaps just upload every photo from the card to Flickr, and give them an initial privacy setting that would allow only you to see them. Then you could cull, rename and edit with Picnik if you like, before making the photos public.
I tried to use Dropbox as an intermediary, since it allows you to preview all kinds of files. It easy enough to upload photos to Dropbox from an SD card loaded into the machine.Then you can sort through them, preview, rename, the works. but then uploading them to Flickr from Dropbox is a pair that involves downloading them locally, and hunting through the file system to upload them again. I’m not sure the extra handful of steps are worth being able to sort the files in Dropbox.
Seriously though, I should be able to right click on any file in the file system and view it in the browser, Chrome can handle .jpgs.