Photo descriptions are an easy sell: the photos I post are often of my travels, so my house-bound grandfather and my travel-reluctant mother can travel with me. But photos without a caption and description are mute and rarely useful (sure, a picture’s worth a thousand words … but without a caption, they words might as well be in Greek). How would I see this work? Well, the caption and description should never obscure the slideshow. Rather, I’d like to press a button while a photo is being viewed and have the caption and description animate into view. Release the button or push it again and they disappear and the slide show resumes.
As for other services, it’s really dead simple: I have 3,000 photos in my Flickr account. Why on earth would I want to duplicate all that effort? Why should I have to? The major players have APIs, and Ceiva, apparently, has talented programmers. Grab my photos, their descriptions, their captions — hell, grab their geodata too! — and then make use of them.

It’s so frustrating. Every year I renew my subscription but don’t see any real improvements being made in the service. Sure, the website is shinier. But for my mum and grandpa, it’s the same old thing — and after almost a decade, I’m growing tired of it.