A few months ago I started an experiment to publish photos from my iPhone into a separate photostream, Ben Ward’s Eyes. The intent was simple: I wanting to visually document more of my day-to-day life, but without polluting my Flickr account with poor-quality, fuzzy phone-camera pictures.

The value of such a stream would be quantity, not quality. That is, the value comes of viewing the stream as a whole, not from any particular individual photograph. A grid would show days or weeks at a time, cropped to squares, or something like that. That summary would be the primary view, not each individual photograph.

In practice, I’ve not found the sweet spot I was looking for. Firstly, even with the outlet available, I don’t take as many daily photos as I thought. More than I used to, but not as many as I imagined or intended. Partly that’s a limitation of technology: The iPhone camera through AirMe initialises slowly, so it’s not as spontaneous as I’d like. Partly it’s just that I’m engaged elsewhere that stopping to take a picture isn’t always appropriate.

Secondly, some of the pictures taken for the life stream are good. That interferes with the ‘disposable’ nature of these images. Now there are pictures that do have standalone value. What to do? Duplicate them to my primary Flickr stream? I hate duplication. I hate fragmenting items of content. Fragmentation of content is bad, but fragmentation of identity through publishing the same type of content in different places is OK; that’s how that web part of world wide web should work.

Add to this that it’s tedious to swap between Flickr accounts, I’m really not getting the publishing experience from the separate account that I wanted.

The next stage of this life-imaging experiment is this: I’m going to swap it right around. The compromises and conflicts that arise from running two accounts don’t satisfy me, so I’m going to try compromising a different requirement; namely my perception of ‘quality’ in my Flickr stream. Flickr has sets. I already maintain a Favourites and Abridged set. So long as I maintain them more actively, other people still have the facility to just follow my photos that I think are ‘good’. I can use another set to maintain just the life-stream photos too, and one day maybe pull them into my own user interface.

So ends one phase of this experiment, and my eyes are reunited with the rest of me.