Tag Archives: flickr

Shared links for the past week

In a week where the world was suppose to end and dominated by Instagram’s new Terms of Service, my handpicked links:

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My favorite links for the last week

A roundup of my favorite links in the past week, where Yahoo released a totally revamped iOS app (but forgot Android).

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Why big companies are poison to the startups…

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“If you cant beat laser cat, you probably deserve to die.”

via How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet

Great, great article at Gizmodo. It’s the story of Flickr and Yahoo but it could also be the story of Delicious, Upcoming, Jaiku, Dodgeball or many other promising startups being swallowed by Yahoo, Google or Microsoft. Most of the times big companies don’t care about community and innovation, they only care about monetizing the startup contents and integrating them into their big mashup of apps. That’s why Flickr lost the train on almost everything since being bought by Yahoo, infected by the disease of its parent company.

 

 

 

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Links for 2012-04-20

Some of the most interesting links I found for 2012-04-20

  • 500px Android app is here! | 500px
    500px just released their Android app and that's great news!
    Sure there were a few third party apps on Android Market (or Play Store, as now it's called) but I feel an official mobile app should always be made in-house, to be related to the main application(even if it just means to share all the branding and logos).
    I honestly believe that online services should always have a way for programmers to build stuff around it (a public API), but for me that has two main purposes: create clients for smaller platforms or, the most important, create mashups and alternative ways to browse and use the information of those services. A fine example of that is Flickr, with hundreds of original apps but when iOS and Android started to gain traction official apps were releases.


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Links for 2012-02-22

Some of the most interesting links I found for 2012-02-22


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Who steals your photos?!

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“Steal This Photo”

Photo by Decrepit Telephone

Having your photos exposed on online galleries is a great way to improve yourself as a photographer, for having your work visible and available to other people’s critique, for refining your aesthetics by analyzing and criticizing other people’s work and also for expanding the reach of your work for being visible by peers and potential clients. But there’s a big downside: having your work exposed makes it a potential candidate to photo theft. There’s no easy way to tackle this, even if you set a clear license for your photos (and you should) people will just ignore it and use them. Another option is watermarks, but there’s a delicate balance  between a small and discrete watermark that doesn’t distract from the main subject of the photo and a big enough that invalidates anyone one from using the photo, personally I haven’t found such balance.

But photographers have a great tool at their disposal: reverse image search, like Google Image Search or Tineye. An reverse image search engine works in a ridiculous simple way: working with a real image as its input to search where it’s being used throughout the internet, just like a normal search engine searches text in the internet, showing not only non-authorized commercial usage of your photos or if your free stuff is being used the proper way (I publish most of my work under a Creative Commons license for non-commercial usage) but also how your stock photos are being used by your clients.

And to make things even simpler you can find tools for your browser of choice, like Who stole my pictures for Firefox or Image Search Options for Chrome, where you just have to right click on your desired image and search it throughout the the web using several reverse image search engines available.

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4 reasons why I renewed my Flickr Pro subscription over moving to Google+

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Google Plus logo

Image by Bruce Clay, Inc via Flickr

 

Image representing Flickr as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Recently my Flickr Pro account was about to expire and I faced myself with a quite simple question: Should I renew it or not? Google gave a new life to Picasa (possibly renamed to Google Photos one of these days) by launching Google+, has been growing steadily and has gained lots of popularity among photographers which have embraced it quickly as its social network, actually most of my Google+ followers and activity is related to photography.

The truth is nowadays I don’t use Flickr as regularly as I did, Google+ became much more interesting these days, and when my Flickr Pro account was about to expire I considered not to to renew it and move to Picasa. The option wasn’t abandoning Flickr, still is the largest photography community around, but changing the center of my photographic online presence to Picasa. I truly was tempted, but in the end it wasn’t enough to move.

The Lazy factor

Probably the less significant but a still valid reason , I would move a large amount of photos around, that would be painful and time consuming.

Google+ still has some annoyances

The Google+ has evolved a lot since its launch, all Google products are or will be tightly integrated, but still are some rough edges: user experience between Picasa and Google Photos isn’t coherent, although the contents are the same. Flickr feels more fine tuned and mature.

Flickr has a great integration

Flickr was one of the first services to make API‘s popular and the result is that currently you have thousands of apps or mashups and you don’t have to go to the website to actually being using it, you can easily take your data and integrate it in many ways: the archives section of my website is built over Flickr API.

Traffic

Flickr is huge and even on a slow week I can easily get a few hundred hits a day, and some of it ends up in my site, Google+/Picasa still can’t match this.

 

For now I’ll stay at Flikr, at least for another year, but I’ll still can be found at my Google+ profile.

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Fetch Flickr feeds with photos linking to a Lightbox

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Flickr’s RSS feed photos link to the regular photo page, with too many links, buttons and banners distracting from the photo (specially if one of your photos gets “invaded” by award groups). The Lightbox view, with its dark background, is a much more suitable landing page for the photos published via the RSS feed.

With this simple Yahoo Pipe you can retrieve your photostream RSS with photos pointing directly to the Lightbox view! Just insert your Flickr User Id and export it any way you like.

52 Photographic Projects

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Kevin Meredith (a.k.a. lomokev), one of the most original photographers of the flickr universe and a favorite of mine, has a new book about to hit the shelves. It’s called 52 Photographic Projects and it contains, you guessed, 52 techniques to try out with lots of good photos to look at, judging by Kevin’s gallery I bet the book is full of cool ideas (it’s already on my wishlist).

And the best thing is you can browse it below, almost all of it! Although you may not have time to read the small print.

52 Photographic Projects [Kevin Meredith]

Discover your favorite Flickr photographer

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Found out, through Thomas Hawk’s blog, a neat little tool to help you discover your favorite Flickr photographer. And how is this done? Like all cool tools in a simple way: analyzing your Flickr favorites to check which Flickr users you favorite the most. Run it yourself and you may have a few surprises, mine was finding out _rebekka wasn’t among my most “favorited” Flickr users in my list shown bellow:

Curiously Thomas Hawk ended up being present in the list, although it isn’t a surprise it’s still funny.

Tafoni’s Flickr Favorite’s Explorer

[via Thomas Hawk Digital Connection]