Flickr is a great tool for organizing a collection. You can upload your photos and apply titles, tags and descriptions, which is a sneaky way of cramming a lot of indexed data into an invisible database. (You probably do that already, so why not reap the benefits?) The great thing about it is that you can use the indexing metadata to easily search and sort your collection by a variety of criteria. Naturally, because it’s flickr, you can also share information about your collection as well as visually share the collection itself.
An example is my super ball collection, twenty years in the making, containing 325 items (not including jacks) which I photographed and organized using flickr.
Below is an 18 x 18 mosaic of 324 pictures of the items in my collection of super balls (and closely related objects), ranging from the size of a kumquat to the size of a pomelo. Read on to learn about some of the tricks and tools (such as making mosaics) that you can use for your collections.
