I’m currently experimenting with using Flickr to catalogue my fabric stash. As any crafter will tell you, stashes can be hard to manage and organise, and they quickly overflow.

There are several people using Flickr for this purpose -

Fabric stash photoset
Quilt fabrics
Flickr tag - stash
Flickr stash cluster

Already I’ve run into a couple of issues with using Flickr for object management (as opposed to happy snaps, which is what I usually use it for) :

Tags have no categories. This can be great as it makes objects easier to tag, but it also makes it harder to assign meaning, unlike say, XML.

What this means is that I can’t assign a value to tags like colour, fabric type, or shop purchased from. The tags are all there, but only I can be sure what they mean.

What is good of course, is seeing what other people have, seeing what combinations of colours people have put together for various projects, and seeing construction techniques.

The results of this experiment are in my fabric set, and you can see how adding these new pictures has affected my tag cloud.