Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

A group of scientists at Cornell have analyzed Flickr to come up with a list of the top 25 photographed cities on Flickr using something called “mean-shift clustering.”

As they explain it (GEEK ALERT!):

“Mean shift is a non-parametric technique for estimating the modes of an underlying probability distribution from a set of samples, given just an estimate of the scale of the data. In our setting, conceptually there is an underlying unobservable probability distribution of where people take photographs, with modes corresponding to interesting or important places to photograph. We are only able to observe the locations at which people take photos, from which mean shift allows us to estimate the modes of the underlying distribution. The mean shift approach is well-suited to highly multimodal probability density functions with very different mode sizes and no known functional form, such as we have here.

Mean shift operates by directly estimating the gradient of the probability density from the samples, in contrast with estimating the density itself as is done with kernel density methods such as Parzen windows. From zeroes of the gradient, local maxima of the distribution can readily be determined. In fact the mean shift calculation is an iterative procedure that uses the gradient estimate as an update, so when the gradient vector is (near) zero magnitude the procedure directly yields an estimate of the location of a local maximum of the underlying distribution”

Anyyyyyyways…

Here’s the top 25 most photographed cities on Flickr. Congrats if yours made the list.

1. New York City
2. London
3. San Francisco
4. Paris
5. Los Angeles
6. Chicago
7. Washington DC
8. Seattle
9. Rome
10. Amsterdam
11. Boston
12. Barcelona
13. San Diego
14. Berlin
15. Las Vegas
16. Firenze
17. Toronto
18. Milano
19. Vancouver
20. Madrid
21. Venezia
22. Philadelphia
23. Austin
24. Dublin
25. Portland

Personally I’m surprised that Asia doesn’t show up anywhere on that list. If you really want to dig into their research, you can read their entire study here.

For photographers familiar with TinEye’s reverse image search engine, Google’s announcement today of a new reverse image search engine should be welcome news. For the past few years TinEye has allowed photographers to upload images to their site, which will then search for where else those images have been published to the web. Several photographers that I know have used TinEye to find copyright infringement cases and have been able to generate compensation or settlements out of the infringing use.

TinEye is pretty good, but does miss a lot of the images on the web. With search behemoth Google putting it’s weight behind this sort of tech, I’m interested to see how much better it might be than TinEye.

Apparently the new feature will be rolled out to Google Chrome users this week. You’ll know you have it when you see a camera icon on the Google Image Search page.

Using the new feature looks pretty easy. You can just drag a photo from your desktop to your search bar and go look for it. You can also use an upload or a url from another image already on the web.

Personally I think it’s exciting to see Google get into this type of innovation. But really this is just the beginning of what could theoretically be possible with a service like this.

I’d love to see Google/Flickr/Yahoo/TinEye take this tech even further. It would be great if you could, for instance, use the Flickr API to attach your Flickrstream to this search engine and have it analyze your entire stream and look for infringing use automatically. It would also be nice if there was a way that you could then filter these search results by certain criteria (say U.S. websites) in order to better identify copyright infringement and potential targets worthwhile to potentially pursue.

It would also be cool to see an RSS sort of option to monitor all of your images that could report back to you when new appearances on the web show up for the first time in image search engines.

Earlier today I caught myself unfollowing someone on 500px because I clicked through on their photo and found this garish looking signature on their photograph. I know I’ll probably take a lot of heat for this, but I HATE watermarks and signatures on photos and many of the particularly bad borders and frames as well — so much so that more and more these days I’m not faving them or commenting on photos that I find them on and have actually started unfollowing some people who use them.

Some people will say that they put signatures on their photos to stop the “photo thieves.” But I think that’s just an excuse. It’s so easy to remove almost any signature on a photo using content aware fill or other super easy tool in most image editing software. To me the real reason why people do it is that they think that it gives them some means of promotion for their work — that and just pure ego. It’s like an advertisement for their work – except that if I’m a contact and I’m looking at your work already, it feels dumb to me that you want to continuously hammer me with this same advert on your photos over and over and over again.

To me signatures are also a pure sign of an amateur (not that there is anything wrong with amateurs). William Eggleston doesn’t use them. He has a copyright notice on his site, but on his photos on display on his site, none of them are overlayed with something that says “William Eggleston Copyright 2009, Fully Party Promotion Production BABY! Richard Avedon doesn’t use them (RIP). The Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite run by Ansel’s son Michael Adams doesn’t use them. Mary Ellen Mark doesn’t use them.

Is your work so much better than these masters that it must be protected with your watermark?

Some of the best photosharing accounts that I know don’t use them. Bernie DeChant doesn’t use them. Ivan Makarov doesn’t use them. Kelly Castro doesn’t use them. WatermelonSugar doesn’t use them. Bill Storage has some remarkable work up — no signatures here either.

And yet some brand new account with some underexposed photo of a flower (not that there is anything wrong with flowers) somehow thinks that unless they have their name emblazoned across the bottom of their photo in 24pt Helvetica, that someone is going to “steal” their photograph.

For me looking at photos online is a new way of consuming art — and online photosharing sites are sort of virtual museums for me in a way. If I went to see the Richard Avedon show at the SF MOMA and every print was stamped with a garish “COPYRIGHT RICHARD AVEDON” I’d be just as put off I think. But they aren’t.

I don’t use signatures or watermarks on my own work because I care about the art. I care about how it’s presented to others. I want it to be beautiful. I want it to stand on it’s own. I trust you. I respect you. I want you to see my work the best that it can possibly be and come back and see it again and again and again in the future.

As an artist my biggest ambition is to have my work seen and appreciated, at all costs. To get it out there and distributed as broadly as possible and to make it as welcome and inviting to those who might come and visit it.

I might blame the software makers for adding this functionality into their products — but they only do this due to consumer demand and some people want this, I suppose.

The thing is that I have friends and photographers that I admire that use signatures. And some people feel super strong about them and so I’m sure some people will react badly to me saying how much I hate them. I certainly don’t mean to upset people who do use them and feel this way. It’s just an opinion. Really, don’t hate on me for hating your watermark. If you want to use it, you just go right on using it. The important thing is that YOU like it. It’s your art after all. This is just my blog and my opinion.

Important keyboard shortcuts for flickr. (Note: for a PC cmd=ctl)

cmd-click (to load a page in a tab in the background)
cmd-w (to close a window)
f (to fave a photo)
c (to comment on a photo)
cmd-option-arrow key (to move between open tabbed windows)

One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that how you browse photosharing sites matters quite a bit. Not just where you go to find great photos to see and interact with, but specifically *how* you navigate the site with maximum efficiency.

My two favorite photosharing sites at present are 500px and Flickr. In this post I’ll try to explain how I browse photos on on Flickr to find and uncover great photographs and also how to navigate the site. You can see the companion article How to Browse 500px Like a Pro here.

The first place I go to browse photos on Flickr is in my contacts/friends most recent photos. Here you can toggle between friends/contacts (I keep people I actually know or whose work I super admire in my closer circle of friends and I pretty much add anybody who adds me as a contact back in the contacts grouping).

This should probably be your starting page on Flickr for looking for new flickr photos.

One of the most important ways to increase efficiency when browsing photosharing sites is to avoid wasting time while pages load. So typically what I do first after loading this page is cmd-click on each of the paging icons at the bottom of the page — this loads me the most recent 7 pages of my friends/contacts photos in new background tabs.

Next I go through each of these thumbnail pages and cmd click every thumbnail that I want to see larger. What this does is opens up many, many tabs in my browser of choice Chrome (doing the page loading while I’m doing something else). Once I finish with a page I cmd-w the page to close the page and it automatically starts taking me to the photo pages that I’ve opened.

On a photo page I can see the photo larger and have more choices of things I can do. If I want to fave a photo, rather than use the mouse, I’ll simply press the F key. This is much faster. If I want to comment on the photo, I’ll simply press the C key. This will automatically jump my browser right into the comment field where I can start typing a comment.

Because I have Dan Pupius FittrFlickr installed, I can also easily see (very unobtrusively) the major EXIF data for a photo right beneath the photo. I also have links to different sizes (including large and original if available) that I can cmd click to load an even larger version of the photo in the background if I need a closer look.

After going to my contacts photo uploads page, next I’ll go to my recent activity page. This is where reciprocation on flickr takes place. Looking at the most recent activity on my photos I see who has been interacting with them – who has been active on the site recently with my work. From here I start cmd clicking on their names. This loads up their photostreams where I can see their first page of photos. From here I’ll cmd-click the photos that I want to see larger and possibly interact with.

The next place I go to find great photos is to The Hot Box. The Hot Box is a group that I’m active on in Flickr where great photos are voted into a pool of winners. Here, again, I’ll cmd-click the photos that i might be interested in and then interact with them.

After this I might go favorite diving. Here I will look for some of the people on Flickr whose taste I admire the most, and go through their favorites and cmd-click anything that looks interesting. This is such a superior way to find new contacts and photographs vs. Flickr’s crappy Explore section which not only blacklists photographers but is full of mediocre photos by strangers with the worst signatures, watermarks and borders humanly possible.

By using the techniques described above, I can find some really amazing photos by some really amazing photographers on Flickr. By relying heavily on the cmd-click function, I can more rapidly and efficiently navigate the site, allowing load time to take place in background tabs, leaving as much time as possible for me to actually spend appreciating and interacting with a photograph.

As a bonus tip, one other thing that I’m starting to do on both Flickr and 500px is curate photographs with Pinterest. I’ve just started doing this, but if I especially like a photograph on flickr or 500px (or anywhere on the web really) I’ll pin it to a gallery on Pinterest. Here is a gallery I’ve started called “So This is America” which includes interesting and compelling photographs of America and here is another gallery that I’ve started of some of my favorite photographs by one of my greatest inspirations, American photographer William Eggleston. Pinterest is really what Flickr’s own galleries should have looked like if they hadn’t of done it so half-ass and with so many restrictions and limitations.

Important keyboard shortcuts for 500px (Note: for a PC cmd=ctl)

cmd-click (to load a page in a tab in the background)
cmd-w (to close a window)
f (to fave a photo)
L (to like a photo)
cmd-option-arrow key (to move between open tabbed windows)

One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that how you browse photosharing sites matters quite a bit. Not just where you go to find great photos to see and interact with, but specifically *how* you navigate the site with maximum efficiency.

My two favorite photosharing sites at present are 500px and Flickr. In this post I’ll try to explain how I browse photos on 500px to find and uncover great photographs and also how to navigate the site. You can see the companion article How to Browse Flickr Like a Pro here.

500px is one of the most exciting photosharing sites on the scene today. It’s a stark contrast to Flickr.

Flickr is a slow moving slow innovating behemoth owned by crappy Yahoo. 500px is a scrappy, fast moving, weekly innovating startup that just received over 500k in VC financing.

Flickr’s community managers / staffers are abusive with their users and ban and censor people and ridicule their users. 500px owners are nice and pleasant and actually interact with their users on their site, Twitter, etc.

500px has a fresh new elegant photo page design. Flickr still looks like a tired old website from 2004.

500px seems to actually care about great photography. Flickr could care less (the quality on flickr declined dramatically overall when they turned it into a dumping ground by integrating Yahoo photos into it a few years ago and has gotten worse and worse).

500px is not frightened by the artistic female form. Flickr is scared to death of the female form (they censored this photo of a painting I took of a painting at the Art Institute of Chicago — ridiculous).

It’s exciting to see people that actually care about photography and photographers in charge at 500px. And it’s been great watching so many of the best flickr accounts migrate over there over the past several months.

So where do I go to find great photos on 500px? All over the place.

For starters (like flickr) I go to my friends most recent uploads. Unlike Flickr (who will only show you the last 1 or 5 photos by your contacts) 500px shows you all of your contacts most recent uploads. The first thing I do here is cmd-click all of the paging icons at the bottom. This opens up the photo thumbnail pages in background tabs that I can tab to later without wasting time while they load. As they load in the background I’m cmd-clicking other photos on the page most recently loaded where I want to see larger photos. 500px gives you nice big thumbnails on this page in contrast to flickr’s tired old page.

After browsing my friends most recent uploads to 500px, next I move on to my own recent activity page there. They just started paging this page this week and so now you can see all of your recent activity (like Flickr). Here, similar to flickr, I’ll cmd-click the names of people who have interacted with my photos to load their photo pages in background tabs. From there I cmd-click the photos that I like on their page to open them up bigger and so that I can interact with them. If I like the photo I’ll use the keyboard to quickly press “F” and “L” to both fave and like the photo.

Next I go to 500px’s version of Explore (called Popular Photos). Here you will find some of the best photographs being published on the web today. I’m not kidding. 500px’s Popular Photos page BLOWS flickr’s Explore page out of the water. And 500px doesn’t even need a secret “magic blacklisting donkey” algorithm to produce it.

Along with Popular Photos, 500px also has Fresh Photos, Upcoming Photos, and a staff curated section called Editor’s Choice.

On each of these pages I’ll cmd-click thumbnails to load photos to interact with in background tabs. Further, 500px allows you to filter these sections by subject, landscapes, people, nature, fine art NUDES! (did he just say nudes? don’t worry folks, you have to check a NSFW tab in order to see these — can you imagine FLICKR actually giving people an option to see the most popular nudes?)

By using the techniques described above, I can find some really amazing photos by some really amazing photographers on 500px. By relying heavily on the cmd-click function, I can more rapidly and efficiently navigate the site, allowing load time to take place in background tabs, leaving as much time as possible for me to actually spend appreciating and interacting with a photograph.

As a bonus tip, one other thing that I’m starting to do on both Flickr and 500px is curate photographs with Pinterest. I’ve just started doing this, but if I especially like a photograph on flickr or 500px (or anywhere on the web really) I’ll pin it to a gallery on Pinterest. Here is a gallery I’ve started called “So This is America” which includes interesting and compelling photographs of America and here is another gallery that I’ve started of some of my favorite photographs by one of my greatest inspirations, American photographer William Eggleston. Pinterest is really what Flickr’s own galleries should have looked like if they hadn’t of done it so half-ass and with so many restrictions and limitations.