Where the hell have I been?  It looks like Flickr released a feature that I really wanted them to have – collections.  Whenever I developed my own photo galleries, I have always had a hierarchical organization of the photo albums (sets, in Flickr parlance).  I know it isn’t very Web 2.0 like since tagging folksonomy is supposed to allow easy access to the content, but a more hierarchical approach makes sense in my mind.  That allows the casual browser to go to a specific category (trips, for example), and drill down to a specific vacation he or she may want to see.  The good news with Flickr is that the addition of collections does not take away any of the existing features.  A user can still see all pictures tagged with "family" in the old way.  Collections just are another way to organize the photos.  I think the hierarchical approach worked well when I wrote my own photo gallery software, and I hope it works well on Flickr.  I just accidentally found out about collections today from random clicking around, according to this post the feature has been around about 2 weeks!  I haven’t organized my sets into collections yet, but it looks easy enough to do.  It looks like collections can contain sets or even other collections (up to 5 levels deep), so that should work quite well for me.  I just have to figure out what my top-level collections are going to be.  I’m toying with making it years (2007, 2006, 2005, etc), but I may also revert to the old categories I had long ago (trips, family, etc).  I should subscribe to the Flickr blog, since I am a somewhat active user and a fan of the site, I may as well keep up to date on the happenings.