Flickr – Page 18 – Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

August 12, 2009August 12, 2009

Someone’s Started a Flickr is Fascist Blog, Accuses Flickr of Anti-Gay Censorship Policies

Update: I just got banned from the Flickr help forum for posting a link about the new blog there.

Update #2: the Flickr is Fascist blog has moved to http://saynotoflickr.blogspot.com/

Well it looks like someone’s finally gotten sick and tired enough of Flickr account deletions that they’ve launched a “Flickr is Fascist” blog. And before you ask, no, it wasn’t me.

The blog seems to focus especially on the recent rash of censorship on Flickr dealing with male non-porn gay related photostreams. The new site specifically calls out the fact that flickr censors closed their thread in the help forum entitled “Flickr’s new anti-gay policy” among others.

In addition to the help forum post above being locked by Flickr staff, there have been several recent cases on Flickr where photos showing either non-nude male self portraits, non-nude male models, or photos of men in public have been either recharacterized as “restricted” NIPSA accounts or have been deleted entirely. In one case, a professional photographer who focused on non nude beefcake type male models, Edelson Flores, had his entire photostream deleted with Flickr citing the fact that he was posting other people’s work as their reasoning. Flores has denied that his stream contained photos that were not his and in fact had his own copyright watermark over every photo in his stream.

In a post on the new “Flickr is Fascist” blog they point out specifically what they feel is a double standard when it comes to Flickr’s deletion of candid photos of males in public in the post “Flickr has Issues With the Male Body:”

“A community of �candid� photographers of men in public situations (all of whom have paid for their accounts in good faith) has been displaced and silenced on photo-sharing site Flickr in less than a fortnight. Four prominent photostreams as well as countless photos vanished from July 6th 2009 to July 13th 2009 without warning or right to appeal. At least one site had over a million hits in less than a year. Flickr has stubbornly refused to give a reason for its recent axe-grinding mission against these sites, but one user was given the reason �voyeur content� after more than 8 days of asking for a reason yet that particular site contained pictures of men in public which is legal. Flickr has refused to expand on the reason it gave, but cited its ambiguous and open-ended �Don�t be creepy� clause in its Terms of Service asjustification for terminating at least one photostream. Flickr has also silenced debate about the issue on its Help Forum. When confronted with whether or nor the famous Robert Doisineau candid image of the kissing couple in Paris was voyeur content or simply a candid street photo, Flickr immediately closed the thread and banned the user from challenging Flickr�s inability to define �voyeur content� as opposed to candid content. Disturbingly Flickr has refused to reopen the debate. Another thread � Flickr�s new anti-gay policy� was also closed in a mater of hours. Is it a a coincidence that the many candid men sites were closed within a week? Flickr silent wall of automated e-mails will never let you know.”

It will be interesting to see if this new blog or other public criticism of Flickr’s censorship policies will in fact have any impact on the account deletions that seem to be taking place almost daily on the site.

August 11, 2009August 11, 2009

DMU Launches DMU Magazine

One of the places that I’ve spent a lot of time online over the past few years is in the Flickr Group DeleteMe Uncensored. DeleteMe Uncensored is a group on Flickr where users submit photos to a voting pool and group members then offer brief critiques of these photos along with a vote to either save or delete the photo. If a photo gets 10 “saves” before 10 “deletes” it is put into a portfolio of images called “The Lightbox.”

There are probably two things to me that set DMU apart from other groups on Flickr.

First, it is one of the few (and was the first) “uncensored” group on Flickr. This means that admins don’t ban members, censor forum threads, lock threads, lock the entire group, etc. Along with the voting game there is a vibrant community of photographers who generally engage in all kinds of discussion from the super important to the super inane. Thoughtful threads about politics, photography, art, music and life are mixed in with immature threads about bad music videos, bad craigslist adverts, threads devoted to animated gifs, and well, you get the idea.

Second, the photo critiques in DMU are meant to be constructive, but no-holds-barred. Sometimes on Flickr you’ll post a photo and end up with a litany of “great shot” “wonderful” “beautiful” “nice” etc. type comments. And while those are pleasant and there is certainly nothing wrong with those, sometimes it’s also interesting to get more constructive criticism — even if negative, even if brutally honest. Having members point out your dust spots on your photo, or your bad crop, or your wrong angle, aren’t simply meant to talk down your photography, they’re meant to provide you criticism as a mechanism to improve.

What really makes DMU work more than anything else though is that it is a tight knit group of community photographers on the web. I’ve found that more than anyplace else I’ve seen on the web, people really get to know each other in this group. Many have met each other in real life. Many spend many hours a day hanging out in the group and chatting.

DMU Magazine Cover, by Ivan Makarov.

So I was super excited when one of the DMU Members, Ivan Makarov, proposed launching a DMU Magazine. There is something about seeing photos in print that makes them even so much more vibrant than what you see on the web. And after several months of planning and hard work, issue number one of DMU Magazine is launching today. I personally contributed a lot of photography to issue number 1. It’s probably the first time so much of my own work has ever been printed in one place. That was super exciting to me. In addition to a profile on my work as one of the top Lightbox contributers, I also contributed some other photos and the editors also included a feature section on my $2 portrait project.

The magazine itself is 72 pages long and is printed on full color paper in large format magazine quality. 26 different photographers from DMU contributed to it and it also features profile pieces on the top four contributors to the group’s “Lightbox.” The magazine is chock full of interesting photos by many outstanding emerging photographers. It’s exciting to me that in today’s DYI world that something like this is possible. Issue one of the magazine costs $13.99. It’s published by HP’s MagCloud and can be shipped anywhere in the U.S., Cananda or the U.K. The quality of the MagCloud magazines are very high. HP is really one of the top names in color printing today and they’ve put together a really top notch offering with this magazine service. The $13.99 price involves no profit for anyone involved in the publication of this effort. This is simply a labor of love by a bunch of talented photographers to publish our work. If you like photography I’d encourage you to purchase a copy and take a look at what we’ve produced. I’ve already purchased my copy and if you’d like to purchase one as well you can do that here.

A lot of credit goes to those who helped put this magazine together. In addition to all 26 photographic contributors (along with many people not featured in this issue, but who provided valuable advice and feedback during the development process) Ivan Makarov deserves a lot of recognition as the one who really drove this project from the beginning. In addition to Ivan, Charlotte Reynolds worked as the magazine’s designer, and Ingo Meckmann, Mo Tabesh, Wendy Martyn and Pierre Honeyman all worked as co-editors and publishers.

If you’d like to learn more about DMU Magazine, also be sure to check out its website dmumag.com.

Flickr “Not Currently Working” on Account Restore Feature After Users Suffer Losses of Thousands of Photos

With respect to your posting of the TV screengrab, I don�t think it was a mistake to delete it, but I do think it was (and is) a mistake to not have a mechanism to restore that kind of deletion.
— Stewart Butterfield, Flickr Founder and Former Flickr Chief, May 19, 2007

"I’m afraid this isn’t the result of some work we’re doing on a restore feature… I’m sorry to disappoint that it’s not the result of a feature. We have heard your feedback about that here, and in the past, and we know it is on some people’s wish list, but it’s not something that we are working on currently."
— Zack Shephard, Flickr Staffer, August 7, 2009

Over two years ago Flickr Founder and former Chief Stewart Butterfield publicly posted that it was a "mistake" for Flickr not to have a mechanism to restore photos that had been deleted on Flickr. He made the comment in response to a photograph of mine that Flickr had censored that he said was not a mistake, adding though that not having a restore photo capability more broadly was in fact a "mistake" at Flickr.

Last week there were several stories having to do with account deletions at Flickr. In one case a hacker had gotten a hold of a Flickr users credentials and deleted over 3,000 photos in a user’s photostream. Another case involved a professional photographer who had his entire stream nuked after being informed by Flickr that the reason for this was that he was posting other people’s photos (something the photographer, who had all of his images watermarked with his own copyright info, denies). Yet another case involved a Flickr user who apparently had some of his Flickr photos posted in an internet forum without containing links back to Flickr. In this last case Flickr agreed that it looked like "maybe the deletion wasn’t the right course of action," adding that the user was "lucky" that they were able to catch the account deletion due to a backlog of account deletion processings and then restoring his account and giving him four free years of Pro account status.

There have been other even higher profile cases of Flickr account deletion as well. Earlier this year, Flickr nuked user Shephard Johnson’s entire photostream and account after he posted comments critical of President Obama on the official White House photostream. In that case Johnson lost about 1,200 photos of his, many of them which were not backed up. Johnson was offered a free Flickr Pro account after the fiasco but like previous users was told that Flickr could not restore his account.

As it stands now when a user’s photostream is deleted at Flickr it is gone. Erased. Permanently and irrevocably. Many Flickr users are appreciably nervous about this fact, especially after reading stories about hackers infiltrating flickr accounts or when overzealous underlings in the Flickr Censorship Division seem to overreact to minor Flickr Community Guidelines violations by nuking users’ photostreams.

When Flickr nukes a user’s photostream, it’s not just the users’ photos that are gone. It’s all of the rich, important and vibrant social metadata around the photos that are gone with it. I’ve had many very long engaging conversations around my and others photos on the site. When Flickr nukes your stream those all get erased from existence.

Flickr user Saint Seminole summed up the problem fairly succiently:

"So personally, I wouldn’t be worried about losing the photos themselves. I’d be worried about losing all the work I’d put in the site over the past few years. All those cross-photo links, all the links from my blogs and others back to my flickr photos, all the website links I have directing people to my Flickr sets, my collections, my tag groupings, my archive date links, and on and on.

All the meticulous placing of photos on the Flickr map, in hundreds of cities and several countries…

This is why I personally would be worried about an accidental deletion, not the losing of photo files. This certainly seems like it should be a *MUCH* higher priority than redesigning "post now" buttons, etc. For Flickr, this should be a number one priority to protect its reputation…"

The answer to all of these concerns is rather simple really. Rather than permanently deleting accounts when Flickr feels that a user has crossed them, they could instead simply convert the account to a private account on Flickr making the stream invisible to everyone in the Flickrverse except the individual user. By locking the account down this way Flickr would be able to remove whatever it is that they find offensive while still allowing the user the ability to download photos of theirs that are not backed up or allowing Flickr to restore accounts where their censors make mistakes or overreact to minor guidelines.

Many Flickr users put tens, hundreds, in some cases even thousands of hours into building their flickr photostreams. More than just their time and energy though, what so many are offering up through Flickr is their art. Something that carries a far greater emotional cost than simply time or money. And all of these people have to live with the knowledge that their entire creative endeavors on Flickr could be blotted away with the 2 second push of a button. So it was very disappointing yesterday reading more than two years after Flickr Chief Stewart Butterfield called the inability to restore photos on Flickr a "mistake," that Flickr still today is not working on a mechanism to restore deleted photos. What bothers me as much if not more than the fact that Flickr won’t develop this important feature is that they refuse to even provide their reasoning for why they will not.

I have a hard time believing that the reasons why Flickr will not offer this sort of safety net have anything to do with engineering resources. Recently Flickr changed all the delete buttons on the site red. They also went to the trouble to personally code the "about Flickr" staff page so that it shows me, Thomas Hawk a single user, a different staff than it shows every other user. How is it that Flickr seems to have the staff resources to do these relatively insignificant coding projects, and yet they don’t have the resources to code a sane and reasonable restore feature for bad account deletions?

I’m not quite sure what the answer is to getting Flickr to agree to this important safety net. They basically have a monopoly on the community photo sharing space at present and can pretty much get away with doing anything that they feel like with impunity no matter how much it upsets their users. And that’s too bad.

Update: After refusing to address the issue of why Flickr won’t commit to a reasonable, responsible and sane approach to account deletion recovery, as is typical, Flickr staff has returned with a non-answer and locked the thread to avoid future criticism against them.

From Flickr Staffer Zack Shephard: “Since the OPs issue has been resolved I’m going to close this down. We have left it open because there was obviously some concern about this and we wanted to let discussion keep going. There is a lot of food for thought here and thank you all for letting us know about your concerns. This is still the help forum though and because the OPs issue is resolved I think it’s time to move on to the next.” And just like that another conversation critical of Flickr is killed.

August 6, 2009August 13, 2009

Flickr = Censorship (Updated)

An update on Edelson Flores’ account deletion case here.

Well unfortunately another week is upon us and that means we have to deal with yet another case of Flickr/Yahoo censorship. The victim this time is professional photographer Edelson C. Flores. Flores first aired his concern about his account deletion in the Flickr Help Forum after trying to contact Flickr staff privately with no success. That thread subsequently was locked by Flickr staff. Flores tried to again air his concern in another thread in the help forum that also was promptly locked as well.

From Flores’ original complaint:

“I have written several times asking why my account “adoniel” was deleted several days ago without any previous notice or warning but I have yet to receive a formal reply from Flickr with an explanation. I am a professional photographer and all the content in my photostream was my own work, creation and intellectual property. I also don’t believe I had posted any content that would have been deemed inappropriate or violated your guidelines. I am very disappointed as I had spent a great deal of time uploading my photos, tagging and adding descriptions. Your actions are extremely inconsiderate and highly questionable. I was about to upgrade my account to a Pro 2-year account, but I am very glad I did not upgraded. I would prefer to spend my money elsewhere if this is how you treat your customers. You have certainly lost my trust, business and support. I am writing to Yahoo Inc, your parent company to let them know exactly how you run this web site and treat customers. I am very disappointed with your actions and lack of communication.
Sincerely,

Edelson C. Flores
Flickr: “adoniel” “

In addition to locking the threads above where Flores was protesting his account deletion, Flickr also redacted the name of the Flickr staffer in question who had provided Flores the reasoning for his account deletion, Terrence.

Below is the original email informing Flores of his account deletion provided by Edelson to me:

[Flickr Case 1278697] Re: Report Abuse: Other Concerns
Thursday, August 6, 2009 4:06 PM
From:
This sender is DomainKeys verified
“Flickr Support”
Add sender to Contacts
To:
adoniel@yahoo.com
Hello,

Flickr account “adoniel” was deleted by Flickr staff for
violating our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.

http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne

# Do upload content that you have created.
Respect the copyright of others. This means don’t steal
photos or videos that other people have shared and pass
them
off as your own. (That�s what favorites are for.)

# Don�t upload anything that isn’t yours.
This includes other people’s photographs and/or stuff that
you’ve collected from around the Internet. Accounts that
consist primarily of such collections may be terminated.

Flickr reserves the right to deactivate your account
without warning at any time.

-Terrence

Based on the above email it would seem that Flores’ account was terminated because Flickr alleged that he was hosting photographs that were not his. But Flores tells a different story. When I contacted Flores about this issue he said, “I have been a professional freelance photographer for the last 10 years. All the content/images that were posted in my Flickr photostream were all my work, creation and intellectual property.” Furthermore all photos in Flores’ stream were watermarked with his own personal copyright information. It is hard for me to see how Flickr could make a mistake of deciding that these photos did not belong to Flores.

When I asked Flores if he’d received further emails or warning emails from Flickr regarding his account, he said he had not. He said that the email above was the only email that he’d received from Flickr.

I’ve contacted Yahoo to try and get their side of the story on this although I have not heard back from them yet. I suspect, as is the case in other situations that they will refuse to comment on Flores’ case and refuse to reinstate his account. This is not right.

Flickr owes their customers better than this. When we spend our time and energy investing in the work to upload, tag, store, etc. our photos on Flickr, Yahoo owes us at a minimum a warning before they delete accounts, as well as an appeals process to reinstate deleted accounts. Flickr’s policy of shoot first, ask questions later is short-sighted. Because Flickr largely has a monopoly on the online photographic community, however, they seem to feel that they can abuse their customers and get by with impunity. And that also is too bad.

Personally I think that Flickr owes Flores an apology and also owes him his account back. Rather than trying to push yet another of their censorship mistakes under the rug by locking threads complaining about it, they ought to own up to their error and offer us a roadmap on how they will prevent this sort of error from happening again next week. Unfortunately though it seems that to Flickr/Yahoo, it’s just one more disgruntled censored customer and who the hell cares about that.

Update: It seems after yesterday’s account deletion without warning, Flickr is back at it again today. Read the latest complaint below taken from the Flickr Help Forum by user Riann Flynn:

“Hey there!

I think my account was deleted and i’m not sure why! I had hundreds of thousands of views, i was on the front page of explore a few times and I was an active member of many groups! My account just disappeared

I’m ok just starting over, but can i have my old url back? This way i dont have to redo all the links in my website and what not.

Please get back to me quickly. I have tried emailing CS, but i haven’t gotten a response!

Thanks!
Rian Flynn
http://www.RianFlynn.com

flickr.com/photos/rianflynn”

More here.

August 4, 2009August 4, 2009

Flickr Refreshes Search Page: Looks Good!

Today Flickr announced a refresh and redesign of their main search page and I have to say I’m liking what I’m seeing so far. The new page layout flows a lot better than the old one. You can now choose between small, medium, detail and slideshow in terms of views and they have a cool little letter i that is on thumbnails that you can click on to get additional photo details without having to leave a search results page. (You can see an example of this on the image above searching for graffiti by “most interesting”).

In addition to offering you more choices for viewing, flickr’s also made use of a right sidebar space to provide you possible related interesting content by highlighting “groups” that feature what your searching for, “photographers” who shoot what you’re looking for (based on number of tags I believe), “tag clusters” showing similar sort of search terms or related criteria and finally “places” tying geotag information in with your search terms. All of this content in the right column is done in typical flickrish ajaxyish style and flows easy and well.

Flickr still gives you three ways to view content in basic search — by recentcy, by interestingness and by relevancy. Personally I think Flickr could scrap their relevancy category altogether and just give us interestingness and recentcy. I’ve found that relevancy tends to be a somewhat stale category and have never really found it’s results especially compelling or interesting. I probably use interestingness or recentcy for 95% of my Flickr image searches.

Although the new search page is a big improvement aesthetically speaking and functionally over the last one it still doesn’t beat my current favorite way to browse flickr search results.

My favorite way to browse flickr search results these days is with CoolIris. Basically I do a search on Flickr and then hover over one of the results and click on the CoolIris icon (you have to have CoolIris installed and you can get that here). Then a beautiful wave of photos from my search result are pulled up that I can have far more control over the size as I use my mouse scroll wheel to expand or shrink all photos on page. I can also more quickly navigate through my search by rolling my mouse down the wave of photos. If I find a photo that I want to interact with I simply select it using CoolIris and then cmd/ctl click on the link to the actual image and CoolIris opens it in a page in the background. Best of all CoolIris auto pages the photos as I move my mouse down the wave so I never have to page.

Anyways. Congrats to the Flickr team on a nice improvement/enhancement to Flickr. I really like the way this one turned out. If you want to see how the Flickr Community is reacting to the new search page, probably the best place to follow that is in Flickr’s Official Feedback thread on the new page in their help forum here.

July 10, 2009July 10, 2009

7 Ways FriendFeed Could Better Engage the Flickr Community

My friend Robert Scoble has a blog post out talking about the reasons why FriendFeed is not seeing the sort of growth that Twitter and Facebook are. Personally I consider FriendFeed to be a vastly superior platform to both Facebook and Twitter, but it is interesting noting that it does not seem to be getting the traction of these other services. That said, I think that there is a huge opportunity for FriendFeed to better engage a very large existing community that is Flickr and to offer power user sort of tools for Flickr’s most active users.

I’ve already written in the past about how I think the existing version of FriendFeed represents a superior way for people to browse Flickr than Flickr itself, but I think that FriendFeed could go a lot further and could definitely attract more (and super active) Flickr users if they improved things even more. So this list represents seven ways that I think FriendFeed could build a better way to engage with the Flickr Community. It should be noted that FriendFeed certainly is not, nor I’m sure wants to be, a replacement for the Flickr community. Rather I see FriendFeed as a way for power users to get even more out of Flickr than they already get today.

I should also note that I’m not 100% sure exactly how many of these features could be implemented via the Flickr API but know that the Flickr API is somewhat robust and would think that some of the items below might be possible.

1. Exponentially more important than anything else FriendFeed could do in relation to Flickr (and my current number one FriendFeed feature request), I think FriendFeed should allow an option to import all of your Flickr contacts into FriendFeed like they currently do with your Twitter and Facebook contacts. I know that there are people on FriendFeed who are my Flickr contacts that I’m not presently following. I know that they are out there and would follow them if I could. FriendFeed needs to allow you to scan your Flickr account and auto-add any existing Flickr contact as a FriendFeed contact. This seems like very basic FriendFeed/Flickr integration missing today.

2. Allow you to automatically set up imaginary friends in a “Flickr Contacts” specific list for Flickr contacts who are not on FriendFeed yet. This option would ensure that you could get all of your Flickr contacts photos over to FriendFeed which represents a superior way to browse your contact’s photos as it includes more than just the last 1 or 5 of their photos and it also includes their faves. Combined with matching up with your existing joint FriendFeed/Flickr contacts this would represent a complete way to better recreate one of Flickr’s most popular pages the “photos from my contacts” page. Auto subscribing to these RSS should be possible. FriendFeed should take this one step further though by automatically replacing an imaginary friend contact with an actual contact when this person joins FriendFeed.

3. Allow an option on FriendFeed to see when a Flickr contact creates a group thread. This technology is sorely missing at Flickr right now and many times you may have a high value contact start a thread in a Flickr group that you don’t know anything about. You miss an entire conversation. By creating a FriendFeed entry to coincide with every contact’s new group post on Flickr you would be notified when this happens and you could then go to that group thread to participate. The top 10% of Flickr users represent a disproportionate amount of Flickr’s traffic. These users are the ones that are most engaged in the groups on Flickr. Groups are where the truly hardcore Flickr users live. By adding this functionality on FriendFeed you’d be creating a tremendous tool currently lacking at Flickr that would engage many people who are 24/7 type web junkies on Flickr.

4. FriendFeed currently gets the Flickr RSS feed wrong. For a while they were presenting it correctly but not for the past few months. On Flickr, hardcore users that post photos there are very cognizant of the order that they post their photos in. Because Flickr only shows your contacts the last 1 or 5 photos, Flickr users generally make sure that when they do a batch upload that their last one or five photos are the best of that batch upload. FriendFeed conversely reports Flickr RSS streams *backwards* — that is they show the first 7 photos uploaded in a batch on your FriendFeed feed *burying* anything beyond that. This means that the photos that I am showing on Flickr as my best in any batch upload are buried 100% of the time on FriendFeed. That’s discouraging to Flickr users and since they used to do it correctly before, I’m not sure why they can’t fix that.

5. Flickr mashup searching streams. There are certain images on Flickr that I’m interested in and do regular searches for. graffiti AND sanfrancisco, neon AND california, thomashawk, etc. FriendFeed should figure out a way to build RSS feeds with these searches and then let me create a sort of custom search feed that constantly scours for the subjects that I’m most interested in.

6. Filter by faves. FriendFeed should see if there is a way to create feeds from Flickr based on favoriting activity. I’d love to have a feed for instance that showed me all of my flickr contacts’ photos with 1 fave or more, 5 faves or more, 10 faves or more, etc. You get the idea.

7. Best of Day Flickr. FriendFeed needs a page where they show the “Best of Day” amongst FriendFeed members’ Flickr photos. Flickr’s Explore page is crappy. It’s a subjective page full of blah photos generally speaking. FriendFeed should allow you to filter your Flickr Contacts photos by absolute numbers of faves on a daily basis. I’d love to be able to see my Flickr contact’s daily uploads organized this way.

If you want to follow me on FriendFeed you can follow me here. If you want to follow me on Flickr you can follow me here.

June 26, 2009July 7, 2009

w00t! The New York Times Finally Advocates Stealing Intellectual Property

Sonia Zjawinski has an interesting article out over at the NY Times’ Gadgetwise blog entitled “Flickr as an Interior Decorating Tool,” where she basically advocates stealing other people’s photographs off of Flickr.

From Zjawinski:

“And if you�re wondering about copyright issues (after all, these aren�t my photos), the photos are being used by me for my own, private, noncommercial use. I�m not selling these things and not charging admission to my apartment, so I think I�m in the clear.

Obviously, photographers and others may feel quite differently about this, but it�s a thorny issue: If printing out an image on Flickr isn�t ok, what about Wi-Fi picture frames that stream images from Flickr and display them in your living room? What about Tivoing an episode of Lost and watching it later with friends? (I�ll be following up this post with another post, chock full of answers from legal experts, in the coming days.)

Of all the artwork I have in my studio apartment (there isn�t a bare wall in the house), my Flickr finds get the most attention. Best of all, they were practically free! I use a Kodak ESP7 AIO printer to ink my finds on various sizes of photo paper and frame them in inexpensive frames found at Urban Outfitters or Ikea. The only thing I pay for is ink, paper and frames � peanuts, in my opinion.”

Heh heh. It’s nice to see the NY Times *finally* come out advocating a moral position that intellectual property theft is alright as long as you don’t get caught. Zajawinski gets beat up pretty hard in the comments section of her post from a bunch of photographers who think she is stealing their work. Typical cry babies.

Do I personally have a problem with what Zajawinski’s advocating here? No way. I think it’s great. And I guarantee you that most of the photographers crying about “image theft,” in the comments section of the post have all illegally copied music themselves. That’s the hypocrisy with too many photographers these days. I used to have a friend who was constantly pulling down tracks off of Hype Machine and saving them for their own use (and resending them to me) and then bitching all the time about people stealing images. It’s like it’s ok to rip off music, but God forbid someone dare download my precious photograph that I took of a seal last month — even though in both cases the material is being used purely for personal use.

I’m sure I’ll take a lot of heat for sticking up for Zajawinski here. But I say if you want to rip off Thomas Hawk images and print them out for yourself go for it. I put high res photos up on Flickr and feel free to help yourself, just click on the magnifying glass above any of my images and you can get a large high res version. I hope it makes your new kitchen or den a more interesting place.

And to the photographers who are bitching about this sort of personal use. If you don’t like it, take this little bit of advice. Don’t put your photos on the internet. Nobody is forcing you to put your images up on the internet. Maybe the best thing for you to do is to keep them only to yourself. Make prints and lock them in a little safe in your house where only you have the key. Late at night you can pull down the shades so that nobody can see in and take them out and look at them all you want, privately, securely. It’s a beautiful thing.

As for the photographers who don’t like this that *still* put your photos up on the internet, well, my advice to you is to simply get over what the NY Times is advocating here. Seriously. Life is too short. Stressing about internet thieves stealing your work will get you nothing. It will bring you no joy in the end. It only leads to bitterness. Learn to let it go. Forget about it and go take more pictures. Trust me on this one. In the end you’ll be dead and it won’t matter one iota who printed out one of your photos to hang above their kitchen sink.

I’ve said this before and I’ll reprint it here again. I look at my photography like this. When I make an image it belongs to me. It belongs to me while I take the photo. It belongs to me while it sits in my camera. It belongs to me while I process it on my Mac. It belongs to me while I let it sit in an archive folder waiting to be uploaded to the internet. Then I upload it to the internet and it�s like I�m taking a bird and opening my window and letting it go. Off she goes. Her song to be enjoyed by the entire world � certainly no longer mine.

It’s a liberating thing.

Thanks for the heads up, Roger!

June 12, 2009June 13, 2009

Flickr to Overhaul Popular “Explore” Page, Will the Magic Donkey Be Shot in the Head?

In a move sure to upset many long-standing flickr veterans as well as to possibly please many newer users, Flickr is currently in the process of a major overhaul to their popular Explore page where they showcase and feature 500 photos each day. The Explore page was started back in 2005 by Flickr as a place to showcase some of what Flickr considers, “the most awesome content on Flickr.” Flickr has continuously referred to a “magic donkey” at Flickr that selects the images that are included each day.

In actuality, an algorithm is used by Flickr to scour popular photos by their members each day and promote these photos on the site. The algorithm largely measures activity on individual photos including faves, comments, notes, tags, etc.

The Explore page on Flickr is a frequent topic of conversation among Flickr users as they’ve tried over the years to figure out the specifics of the algorithm due to the large amount of traffic that the page generally sends to individual Flickr image pages. Many users have complained recently that a small group of users have been exploiting the algorithm to gain a larger share of the traffic generated by this section of Flickr.

Flickr Community Manager Heather Champ announced this coming change on Flickr in a Flickr forum earlier this week. From Champ:

“I can see that we’re a community divided about the Top 500. Change is coming. Big change. I don’t have a firm date, but we need something that’s far more inclusive. Is there any way that 500 photos a day could capture the breadth and depth of this wonderful community? I think not.

So, for those who are fed up with Explore, please be patient. Don’t let the tired old broken down Donkey change you into something that you’re not. And for those who currently feel blessed by the golden light the donkey sends your way. Well, I’m sorry if the changes that come upset you in that you’re going to have to share your spotlight with many more people.”

I’m not going to close this topic, but I will if I come back and find out that you’re still slapping away at one another (a la Monty Python) with big fish.

One of the first major changes made to the Explore algorithm involved adding both averaging and randomizing components into the algorithm which upset many of Flickr’s most popular users at the time the change was implemented. Killing off the magic donkey may in fact significantly reduce the traffic on Flickr to many of their most popular users currently. I suspect that when whatever overhaul is rolled out it will potentially find many vocal critics depending on how this traffic is affected.

If you’d like to see if any of your own photos are currently featured on Flickr’s Explore page you can check that out at this link at Big Huge Labs here. If you’d like to see if any of your contacts or friends photos are featured there you can use this handy little script by Drew Meyers here.

June 12, 2009

Getty Images Revamps Flickr Collection Front Door and Builds Facebook and Blog Widgets

Getty Images announced today that they have created a new front door for their Flickr Collection and that they have also added a “cloud” type imagery widget for Facebook pages and blogs. The new Flickr Collection front page features balls of rotating photos as built by contributors on the site. You can use the Getty Images site to build interesting clouds of 5 – 30 rotating images from the Flickr/Getty Collection and then Getty will make a cloud of these images. When you mouse over the cloud it rotates and speeds up and you can select any image to pull up a larger version of that image and get to the page where that photo is able to be licensed.

If you want to build a cloud of just your images, you need to search by the photo number of each of your photos that Getty has assigned and can add them one by one (up to the 30 photo max). To see what this looks like and feels like you can click through to a cloud of my images here.

Today the Facebook and blog widgets allow you to link to Getty clouds of the most recent clouds on their page, but in the next roll out of this widget they are going to allow you to just link the widget specifically to a single cloud of your choice. This would seem to me to be a smart way for Getty to extend their marketing reach through blogs, facebook and social media to bring more potential buyers to their site and a smart way for photographers to show off some of the work that they have for sell through Getty on their own pages.

To get to the widgets you can go to the main Flickr Getty front door homepage here and click on Explore. In the lower left hand part of the page is a menu item called “Inspiring Downloads,” where you can get these widgets. Here is also a direct link to the widget on Facebook.

There is also a new screensaver app that you can install that will use the most recent Getty clouds to your desktop.

June 9, 2009June 12, 2009

Flickr User Posts Comments Critical of Obama on the Official White House Photostream and Has His Comments Along With His Entire Flickrstream Deleted Without Warning

If you don’t think that Flickr should delete accounts without warning and censor political speech digg this here.

I was dismayed today to read about the latest alleged case of Flickr Censorship. Censorship (or as they like to call it “moderation”) continues to be a problem on Flickr.

The most recent case is that of Flickr User Shepherd Johnson. According to Johnson on the evening of Wednesday June 3rd, he posted comments critical of President Obama on “8 or so” photos on the White House’s official Flickrstream. He said that he posted these comments because he was upset with the language that Obama chose to use in his recent Cairo speech regarding terrorism. Johnson said that two days later his comments had been scrubbed and deleted from the Flickr photos. Johnson shared with me the type of comment that he made and what he shared with me seemed appropriate and polite.

On Friday, June 5th, once again Johnson posted more comments on photos in the official White House Flickrstream. This time comments that were critical of the President’s recent decision to try and withhold photographs of detainee prison abuse.

From Johnson:

“Well, Friday it so happens is the day the Senate voted and passed the Graham/Lieberman bill called The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009. Which allows the Obama administration to withhold from the public photos of horrible acts used by the Bush administration in it’s so called War on Terror. This to me was unacceptable. There are so few venues where the public can air grievances with our leaders and our government. This forum being the Official Whitehouse Photostream is an acceptable (I thought) place for me to make my comments known.”

Unfortunately for Johnson at about 11:00pm on June 05, 2009 when he tried to log on to his flickr account, he found that it was terminated without warning.

Again from Johnson:

“No explanation or anything. One second I was on and then I could not access my account. When I got back onto flickr using another account I went back to the Whitehouse site and all of my postings had been scrubbed. They were gone. I had about a years worth of work on that account and they just terminated my account with no warning. Some of the photos I had on the account had no back ups so they are now gone forever.”

You can see a cache of Johnson’s deleted Flickr account here. It was a paid Pro Flickr account with over 1,000 photographs in it.

It is interesting that Johnson was also using his Flickrstream to post additional photos that he had taken of government officials. Here is a flickr photo of his of his still intact from wikimedia of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke leaving Bilderberg last year. In fact, if you look through the cached copy of his former Flickrstream you will see that a great deal of the photographs in his flickrstream were of political events, protests and politicians.

It is very unfortunate that Flickr would choose to take this course of action with one of their members. Freedom of Speech is an important thing and something that ought to be encouraged at Yahoo, not punished. Political speech especially ought to be give a very wide berth with regards to tolerance. It is even more eggregious given that this user was never even warned over the comments that he made, his account was simply irreversibly and permanently deleted. It is wrong for Flickr to do this. I’ve long argued that at a minimum Flickr ought to suspend offensive accounts temporarily (they could easily do this by simply making every photo in a user’s stream private) and allow an appeals process for grievances rather than simply acting with dictatorial power as a censor.

I contacted Yahoo regarding this latest censorship on their part and received back the following official response from their PR firm:

“Flickr Statement:

In accordance with Flickr’s policy, we cannot disclose information to third parties concerning a member’s account. However, in joining Flickr, all of our members agree to abide by our Community Guidelines. These guidelines require that all of our members be respectful of the community and flag content that may not be suitable for �safe� viewing. Our members have always done a great job of identifying inappropriate and offensive content on Flickr and bringing it to our attention. We encourage all members to continue to make Flickr a safe place to share photos and videos.

Flickr is a very large community made up of many types of members from all over the world, and we respect the viewpoints and expressions of all of our members. In crafting the Community Guidelines, Flickr weighed the rights of the individual vs. the rights of the overall community, and built a system that would enable members to choose what they want to view. As with any community, online or off, there are members who may disregard the Community Guidelines. When this happens, Flickr may have to take action accordingly towards building a respectful community. For more information: http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne”

Update: In another forum here, Johnson has stated that he left a voicemail on Carol Bartz’s personal cell phone on the matter. He said after leaving this message that he had a returned phone call from Flickr Community Manager Heather Champ who told him that this account was deleted because he posted a photo of a prison detainee and because they accused him of “spamming” flickr. You can read the relevant forum thread here. Apparently another flickrstream where Johnson got the detainee photo was also deleted. Johnson is also stating that Heather told him that she did not know anything about the other deleted comments which may mean that they were actually deleted by the White House itself.

From Johnson: “She said that [edit: posting a detainee abuse photo] was part of the reason and the other part was that she claimed that I was spamming the forum, to which I asked her if she also gave warnings to the people who posted on twenty photographs the same “That’s my President Go bama!” type drivel over and over and over again. I also had her define the word “spam”, to which she could not. She seemed very careful to place her words correctly. We talked for about two hours. I think Carol really got under her skin. Carol apparently didn’t speak with her directly, she got the trickle down effect. Oh yeah, she offered me a $24.99 gift card for a new pro account but told me my precious photos and the hard work that I put in over the past year were irretrievable. I had over 53,000 views on that account. Some consolation.”

Update #2: More from Johnson: “Heather only mentioned that she deleted the comments concerning the Abu Ghraib photo, when I asked her about the original comment on the Obama Cairo Speech she had no idea what I was talking about. I crafted my dialogue with her to find out exactly what she knew and when she knew it. That means that somebody connected with the Whitehouse, one of Peter Souza’s staff or an intern, deleted my comments originally.

Update #3: See more on this story from the San Francisco Chronicle here and Gawker here, and the Silicon Valley Insider here, and Techmeme here, CNN here, BusinessWeek here, and the NY Post here, if you prefer Italian here.