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Tag Archive for 'Photos'
Vienna now and then: a Flickr stream showing photos of Vienna, taken at the same spots with up to a hundred years time difference.
After having tried several backup strategies I’ve decided to finally get a Mozy account: $5 a month for encrypted unlimited online storage.
I changed my opinion mainly because a friend told me last week about a terrible burglary. They stole the laptop, among a lot other things, but luckily didn’t take the external backup hard disk. It stood right next to the laptop and contained all digital photos (of a photographer). I’ve a similar setting right now, which would let me recover photos, music and other important private data in case of a hard disk crash. But in case of burglary or fire I’d be totally screwed. No insurance can bring back all my digital photographs.
Now Mozy runs in the background and takes care of my data. Good.
Until 31th December 2007 you can save 10% off the annual fee by entering the promo code DECEMBER (at least it worked for me).
New Mozy promo codes:
APRIL – 10% off an annual subscription to MozyUnlimited
APRIL2 – 10% off a biannual subscription to MozyUnlimited
What was wrong with the old Flickr map?
Maybe it’s just me, but I think the continent spanning words (tags) on the new Flickr map are a step backwards regarding usability, compared to the really nicely done photo-dots-generalization the previous version of the map had. The only interactivity on the new map is clicking tags, right? Or did I miss something? I really preferred the old version where I could zoom down to photo-dots and browse through photos directly on the location.
Well, it must be my dot-fetish, but on the new user maps the generalized dots are gone too. Now you see the most recent (or interesting) photographs placed on the map, which is just another exploring approach. If you scroll through the pictures on the bar, the map changes too, unfortunately not vice versa. When you pan the map, the photos aren’t updated in the bar. Would be something nice to have too.
Whereas the new Places feature is awesome. One page per place, containing excellently chosen photographs, active groups and people on that location. Very well done. Even though I wish I could navigate to other places more easily. With some interactivity on the small map or links to popular neighboring places for instance. Currently I have to go up and down in regional hierarchy or use the location search.
Even Flickr’s “Safe Search” works in Places. Although there are some properly tagged photos (and a whole lot more!) for an unluckily named Austrian village on Flickr, it remains for some reasons banned in Places…
Tupalo, my favorite socialyellowpagesthing, recently added Flickr integration. Just like as known from Upcoming or a couple of other sites, you can now use Flickr-tags to assign your photos to a particular spot on Tupalo.
It’s pretty simple: copy and paste the tag provided on every Tupalo spot-page to your Flickr photo tags. I guess Tupalo will crawl Flickr in given intervals to find newly-tagged images. Mine were found and showed up on Tupalo within a few minutes.
Tupalo tags follow the de-facto machine tag standard on Flickr and look like tupalo:spot=316, whereas 316 is the spot id in that case.
I’m a person who loves photos, but generally speaking, I think it’s is a great addition to Tupalo. What’s better than visual impressions of a spot you’re reading reviews about?
Even though there are now more images on the site, the new feature doesn’t interfere with the clean – white space forever! – user interface at all. In fact, Tupalo is one of the few sites my boss could immediately deal with, and this means something like olympic gold for usability. It seems like every button, link or information is where it should be on this site.
Great work guys!
It took a TechCrunch post to direct my attention to Picnik, an amazing online photo editor. Among other photo services, it already integrates very well with Flickr using the Flickr authentication API. You can retrieve from Flickr, edit in Picnik and save back to Flickr seamlessly. Apparently the Flickr user interface will get another button soon to make the editing process with Picnik even more easier.
My first thought was that I won’t need iPhoto anymore. Ever since I bought the DSLR I only use iPhoto to manage the snapshots I take with my smaller camera. If I’m going to upload directly from my smaller camera to Flickr and do rudimentary editing like cropping and basic color adjustments there in Picnik, which does an excellent job as I found out last weekend, I could skip iPhoto entirely. The Flickr-Picnik workflow should work at least as good as the workflow in iPhoto.
Technically no problem but there would still be this unpleasant feeling in my stomach region of giving the control over my images totally out of my hands. Stomach says no, so I rather stay some more time with the local iPhoto library as primary library and the Flickr account as secondary “fun” library.
However, Picnik will be a great addition to Flickr and I’m pretty looking forward to it!
Never heard of that term before. Apparently it’s the agreement between photographer (or publisher) and human subject about picture rights and further picture use [Wikipedia explains it better].
How come?
I was reading a post about the issue were Virgin Mobile took a photo from Flickr and used it in an ad campaign. The photo was licensed under Creative Commons (CC). As you can see on the picture of the ad, Virgin Mobile fulfilled the attribution condition by properly indicating the author. What happened was that the girl showing up on the picture felt insulted (and well, her family smelt the money I suppose) and filed a lawsuit against Virgin Mobile and others.
As far as I understood, and I’m no lawyer, the one violating the girl’s rights was the Flickr user and not Virgin Mobile. It was the Flickr user who published the taken picture online under a CC license without holding the model release in his hands. Virgin Mobile made use of the picture by respecting the underlying license. But that’s just my theory.
The outcome of this lawsuit will be interesting though. Especially the piont what’s a Creative Commons license worth in a court. Supposedly the same as any other license agreement, but you never can tell.
I have a Flickr account too, meaning I publish pictures online. All of my photos are licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA and on some of them you can identify random persons, and I do not own a single model release.
Should I be concerned?
I’m not quite sure. According to the rather simple CC license text, anybody who wants to use my pictures commercially must ask for my permission first. So Virgin Mobile couldn’t just use my picture in a campaign without letting me know. On the other hand my license does allow non-commercial sharing, under certain conditions, but basically it gives me no control where my photos are going to show up.
Actually the discussion about Flickr’s filtering system brought up some interesting details about user generated content and website owners in Germany.
No doubt that recent German court decisions regarding content of internet forums are going to turn out as a major problem especially for sites based on any kind of user generated content. Flickr is facing that issue right now.
This post in the Flickr forum elaborates the issue very well:
Without going into too much detail, despite having a sort of a right to free speech guaranteed in the Basic Law [note: Germany has no constitution, but instead this "Basic Law" official translation here.], this freedom of speech has some important limitations in practice.
Article 5 simultaneously grants this right:
(1) Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing, and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.And allows for it to be limited in common law:
(2) These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal
honor.So, one common practice is: insulting someone is potentially grounds for prosecution. If the person you insult is an official of any kind, you are definitely in trouble here – flipping the bird at a speed radar camera will get you a big “finger fine” on top of your speeding fine because your intention is to insult the poor schmuck in the traffic department who has to verify the license numbers in the photos. This kind of speech (as well as denying the Holocaust, glorifying the Nazi regime and some other kinds) are criminal acts. Fineable insults can include such seemingly harmless words as calling the wrong person a “stupid cow.” Watch your mouth!
Given that certain kinds of speech are not actually allowed a series of recent court decisions determined that people who run internet forums are legally liable for all entries in their pages. They are obliged to remove illegal speech (in the common law interpretations thereof) in every case whether the “troll” who placed the speech in the forum was anonymous or not. The common forum administration practice has been, until recently, to remove anonymous posts of an illegal nature but to pass on the legal responsibility (via disclaimers, end user agreements and the like) to non-anonymous posters.
One of the cases: Someone participating in a heated forum discussion last year (about child pornography, but this is irrelevant to this discussion) felt insulted by the non-anonymous posting of another user and demanded that it be removed. The administrator, sighting that the poster’s identity was known to all, declined to remove the speech, saying that it wasn’t their responsibility and that the non-anonymity of the poster allowed for sufficient recourse on the part of the insulted party. Well … in the end the person who felt insulted sued and won.
There have been a couple of similar instances and one made it all the way to the German Constitutional Court (the equivalent of the US Supreme Court here).
BGH zur Haftung für rechtswidrige Inhalte das Ende von kleinen Foren
Forenbetreiber bleibt mitverantwortlich
Domaininhaber/ Webhoster verantwortlich für Foreninhalte?
Abwesenheit schützt vor Haftung nicht!
Wann haften Forenbetreiber für Gast-Einträge?
Supernature-Forum geht beim LG Hamburg badenDespite the fact that this kind of decision makes it dangerous for anyone to run any website of any size in Germany with any kind of Web 2.0 features at all (comments, community, photo galleries, etc.), this is the current state of play.
Of course all this could have been communicated to users *before* the filtering system was turned on and Flickr wouldn’t have become almost a synonym for censorship…
Read/WriteWeb offers an interesting review – as most of their articles – about Yahoo! Travel, referring to the Web 3.0 framework.
What I’m missing in that framework is the user’s share in the big C standing for the commerce.
Let’s take Yahoo! Travel and Flickr as example:
Most Flickr users pay Yahoo! for a Flickr pro account ($25/year), get a great platform in return and have fun participating and sharing photos. In the meantime, as result of millions excited users, Flickr has grown to one of the largest and best documented photo databases ever. Of course Yahoo! seeks for ways to leverage that database in other parts of its business. Like Yahoo! Travel for instance, where Flickr user photos can be viewed to illustrate travel destinations.
Now the problem I see is that especially pro users wont be happy about the fact that their pictures show up on Yahoo! Travel right next to tourism ads and the entire revenue goes exclusively to Yahoo!. Even if Yahoo! has, according to Flickr user agreements, the right to do so and doesn’t care if a “© All rights reserved” stands next to the user photo. It’s just bad karma.
I think in the long term a solution about that issue – commercializing user generated content – must be found. Otherwise why should a paying Flickr pro user provide Yahoo! with free photos for other Yahoo! divisions than Flickr?
Anyone remember the discussions about user content when YouTube was acquired by Google? Some users got slightly upset seeing Google paying billions of dollars for basically user content…
Nothing of great importance, but being published in an excellent small travel magazine is balm for a hobby photographers soul.
It’s a picture of Ricardo Bofill’s Les Espaces d’Abraxas in Marne-la-Vallée near Paris, quite a scary building.