SmartSetr now officially supports automatic updating of SmartSets . . . for the most part anyways.  I can commit to updating everyone's SmartSets at least once per day, however, because of the bandwidth and server consumption required I probably won't bulk update everyone's sets more than once or twice per day.  If you would like to make sure that your sets are all as up to date as they can be then simply visit the SmartSetr site and click "Refresh All SmartSets".  If you haven't visited the SmartSetr site since January 10, 2007 then you will need to visit once more and auto updates will automatically be enabled for your account.

A second feature that has been added since launch is the ability to limit the number of photos that a SmartSet will contain.  This makes it incredibly simple to create SmartSets such as Top 10 Most Interesting, or Top 10 Most Interesting of 2006, etc. that will be automatically updated daily.  The maximum number of photos that SmartSetr currently supports in a SmartSet is 500.  This may increase as I get time to test the Flickr API's limits.

Until now you have always had to manually create sets on Flickr.  You could either go to the Organizer and select photos you wish to add to the set, or you could send photos to sets from the photo's page.  With SmartSetr you can now dynamically add your photos to sets by specifying criteria and SmartSetr will create the set and add the matching photos for you. 

SmartSets are sets on Flickr that are updated for you in an automated way. For example, if you have a SmartSet based on the tag "flower", anytime you add photos to flickr tagged with "flower" they will automatically be added to your flower set for you (after you click refresh on SmartSetr).

To update the photos contained in your SmartSets you must come to the SmartSetr site and click "Refresh All SmartSets". By clicking refresh, SmartSetr will query Flickr for the photos that match the set criteria and add them to the set. I am currently working on a way to automatically update everyone's SmartSets throughout the day, as well as a bookmarklet to let you manually update SmartSets from anywhere.

There are several types of criteria that you may use to create SmartSets including tags, text, date taken, and date uploaded. You may also filter the SmartSets by privacy level, and you may sort the SmartSets by a variety of criteria including interestingness, etc.

For text based SmartSets there are several search operators that may be used including AND, OR, and NOT. For example, to create a SmartSet that contains all of your photos of red flowers you would create a SmartSet based on the text "flower AND red".

Your Flickr sets that are SmartSets should be fully managed by the SmartSetr site, except that you may change the primary photo for the set on Flickr and reorder your sets on Flickr.

Here are some interesting ideas for SmartSets

• All photos taken in 2006 sorted by interestingness
• All photos from any year sorted by interestingness
• All photos tagged with macro (dependent on your tags)
• All photos tagged with certain lenses, i.e. "canon 50mm f/1.8 II" (dependent on your tags)
• All photos tagged with the name of a conference, i.e. CES, Macworld

For more info on SmartSetr see the SmartSetr group on Flickr.  To send me a message directly send me a message on Flickr.