One of my very few pet peeves about the Flickr system is that there is no way of organising contacts other than by degree of photo permissions. The system allows me to segregate all those who have been labelled “friends” or “family” (a level or two above “contact” and therefore having increasing permission to see more private photos), but doesn’t accommodate my need to group contacts by theme, priority or location.

Personally, I have almost one hundred contacts. There is no way that I have the time or inclination to look at all of them every day. What I wanted was to be able to set certain folks as “high priority” and to be able to quickly haul them out of the melée. I also have a second group of people who photograph places of interest to me, but whose photos I would be likely to check in on every week or two. Ideally, these should form a secondary group, distinct from the first.

I was grousing about this problem to SIL Heather, who shot me back an email mentioning a Flickr post about a Greasemonkey script, Flickr Contact Organiser, that does exactly what I need and then some. (First you’ll need Greasemonkey, which is handy to have and use with other scripts, too.)

So I’ve tried it out and WOW! Does it ever make my life easier. Not only can I classify my contacts (without their knowledge, too, which is nice – wouldn’t want people to feel badly about my classifying them as “secondary”), but I can set it to show the most recently uploaded shots of each individual (allowing me to quickly scan what’s new), their recent favourites, their most or least interesting, a random selection and a few other possibilities as well. Very, very handy tool. A simple right-click and “open in new tab” and I can comment on what’s in front of me.

Now I have no excuse for falling behind. Sigh.