Month: April 2008

Adobe launches Lightroom 2.0 beta | Fotohacker Although I’ve personally only played around with Lightroom, many photographers that I admire swear by it.

In my own workflow I use a combo of Adobe’s Bridge (about 90% of my processing) and Photoshop (about 10% of my processing). The central power for me of the Adobe suite is Adobe’s RAW plug in which I believe is the same plug in in both Bridge/Photoshop and Lightroom.

Anyways. It looks like the latest beta version of Lightroon is out now and like the last beta version can be downloaded for free during the beta time frame.

According to Adobe’s site, enhancements in Lightroom 2.0 include:

* Localized corrections — Enhance specific areas of an image for unsurpassed nondestructive flexibility and control reminiscent of the traditional darkroom dodge and burn experience.
* Improved organizational tools — Find the images you need quickly and easily.
* Multiple monitor support — Add an additional monitor to efficiently manage photographic workflow and presentation.
* Flexible print package functionality — Create custom layouts containing multiple sizes of a photograph on a single page.
* 64-bit support — Lightroom 2.0 now takes advantage of the latest hardware architectures with improved memory handling and performance.

You can download the free beta software here.

Flickr's New Friend Finder: Data Portability or Privacy Violation? – ReadWriteWeb

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a blog post out on Flickr’s new “Friend Finder” feature where he asks the question whether or not the new feature represents data portability or privacy violation.

The feature basically allows you to give Flickr access to your Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail account and identifies people based on their email address on Flickr that you might want to add as contacts. The idea is that if you have someone’s email address in your address book, you may also want to follow their photographs on Flickr.

Personally I don’t see this as much of a privacy violation at all. Flickr has had an email search tool for a long time. Many other sites do as well. But finding someone on Flickr really isn’t that hard even without an email address. All you really need to do most of the time is just put someone’s name in quotes with the term flickr next to it and most search engines pretty quickly find the person’s flickrstream.

For instance, a search for “Thomas Hawk” flickr on Google turns up this. You can search for “Marshall Kirkpatrick” and flickr and get back this. Not terribly hard to find whether you have my email address or not.

This type of functionality while being new to Flickr officially perhaps is not really new at all. Back in 2006 I blogged about an application using the Flickr API called Stalkr. Basically Stalkr pretty much provided the same sort of functionality. With Stalkr you entered in your friend’s email addresses (or you could also upload a csv file of addressses) and Stalkr returned the Flickr accounts.

Stalkr later changed their name to “Flickr Friends” after Flickr balked at their name and cut off their API access. You can try out Flickr Friends here.

Some people still might cringe at this type of functionality though worrying that they don’t want just anyone with their email address to see their Flickr photos. My advice to these people *don’t put your public photos up on Flickr.*. Seriously, if you are that concerned about who might see your photos why in the heck are you putting public photos on Flickr in the first place? At a minimum you might want to consider making your photos private for view by friends/family only.

Davis Freeberg’s Digital Connection

Davis Freeberg has a blog post out about some of TiVo’s upcoming international expansion plans. And not all looks good on the TiVo international front. According to Freeberg, TiVo has started a pilot program with non-US TiVo advertising partners that would effectively block commercial skipping for companies that pay TiVo as ad partners.

To me this is a dangerous precedent to set and I worry that if successful that these ad skipping blocks might be expanded here to the U.S.

Although at first blush I thought that this might be an April Fool’s joke by TiVo, it would appear that their Japanese TiVo site tivo.jp has actually been hacked by a group protesting the move to allow some advertisers to be exempt from ad skipping.

It’s one thing for TiVo to serve ads on their box on an opt in view basis. But the moment that they disable any commercial skipping at all I think that they will very quickly see consumers respond by skipping TiVo all together. There are plenty of other DVR alternatives out there to TiVo.

On Seeking Alpha here.

Update: It looks like the hacked site at tivo.jp has been taken down, the site is now showing a “database error.”

Digg here.

Ummm.. April Fool’s?