Underexposed

I use and enjoy Flickr. But with each passing month it worries me more that when I visit a photo page on the Yahoo photo-sharing site, it looks essentially identical to when I first started using it four years ago.

Flickr has typical online photo site abilities to upload, share, and print photos. What sets it apart, though, are features that make Flickr a community: discussions in comments below photos, groups for like-minded photographers to share their work, and social networking attributes that let people stay on top of their contacts' doings.

Flickr revamped members' home pages starting last September, drawing more attention to recent activity such as people who added you as a contact or who commented on your photos. The change was smart: Flickr was a socially wired site before social networking became all the rage, and photography is a great way for people to stay engaged with their friends and relations.

But now it's time for the rest of the upgrade. Here's what pains me most:

• The photo page. With Flickr, you can have large photos or you can have comments and navigation, but you can't have both. Photos are best viewed larger than Flickr's default 500-pixels width. Clicking "all sizes" to see lavishly large views sends you down browser dead end: you'll have to click the back button when it's time to add comments or navigate to the next photo.

• The photostream page. Flickr organizes your photos as one giant filmstrip called the photostream. But viewing somebody's most recent shots on the photostream page again forces you back into the small-monitor past. The default view for me shows 18 small photos, 10 sets, and an ocean of white space even on my laptop.

• The profile page. I rarely look at people's profile pages unless I'm trying to contact them or figure out who's behind a cryptic username. But there should be a way to make the profile page the anchor of a Flickr user's online identity, the public face presented to Flickr users. People judge others by their photostreams, which in my case these days is more about family photos than works of art or moving photojournalism, so I'd like to show them an automatically updated page of my top picks instead.

Fortunately, Flickr is working on several improvements detailed below by product strategy chief Matthew Rothenberg. But he kept mum about timing: "We're planning to be progressively rolling out enhancements over time," he said.

Show 'em how it's done
"Innovation happens elsewhere" is a worn-out Silicon Valley business cliche, but there's some truth to it. It's especially appropriate for Flickr, because the site lets others built atop it using Flickr's API, or application programming interface. Tasks such as flipping through a person's photos, adding comments, looking up interesting shots, and uploading photos all can be done without having to touch Flickr directly.

The Flickroom beta software presents a new face on Yahoo's photo-sharing site.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The power of the Flickr API was shown most clearly to me a year and a half ago, when I tried Photophlow, a site that makes Flickr into a photo-centric chat room. Photophlow lets people collectively breeze through photos, marking photos as favorites and leaving comments as they go

Now there's a new kid in town with some other ideas, a beta application called Flickroom. It's built atop Adobe Systems' AIR foundation and presents a fashionably dark background for viewing pictures. There are plenty of icons and control panels to traverse photos, search photos, join a chat room, and see what your contacts are up to.

Flickroom has some bugs and idiosyncrasies, and fundamentally it's not shifting any Flickr paradigms beyond the user interface. But it does manage to illustrate what can be done with Flickr's raw material. I especially liked the flip through the large sizes of a user's photos.

Another good example of what can be done with Flickr's API is Darckr, which shows what Flickr (not entirely badly) believes to be your most interesting shots set off against a black background. I'm not going to be showing my photostream as my portfolio, but my interesting shots on Darckr aren't so mundane.

There are plenty more. Photoshop.com from Adobe, for example, not only gives a new interface to Flickr but lets you edit your photos, too.

Google's Picasa Web Albums is set up more for showing family pictures than for spawning a community of macro or Holga photography, but it can teach Flickr a thing or two. Google boasted in June of a revamp that makes photos load much faster, even at full-screen size, and it wasn't idle boasting. And even if Picasa photos are framed by more clutter than Flickr's photos, at least the photos can be viewed larger.

Photoshop.com offers online image editing and sharing.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The good news
Flickr may not be moving fast enough for me, but happily, it's not standing still, either.

"The core photo-sharing experience on Flickr is the area we want to spend most of our time on now," Rothenberg said. He pointed toward "the photo page in particular, the photostream, photos from your contacts--all aspects of site core to the photo-sharing mission of Flickr but that haven't really been brought in line."

Also, probably not just to throw me a bone because I'm a fan of location tags in photos, he added, "Even geotagging, (we'd like) to bring it more into the core experience."

He couldn't comment on my specific gripes about wasted screen real estate, though he did mount a bit defense of white space. However, it's clear Flickr understands the issue, because he did take pains to mention Flickr's new search tool launched Tuesday. It can take advantage of available screen size.

Photophlow, though its development is dormant for now, can make it fun for groups to browse and comment on Flickr pictures.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Flickr's absolute priority is a page on which the photo looks good, but the site must also balance that with social and navigational features. "There's a large amount of information we store and display and allow people to interact with--sizes, licensing, location information, comments, favoriting," he said. "We want to make all those options as easy and efficient as possible."

Flickr also wants to improve navigation and organization, two areas that I believe the computer industry always will face. Rothenberg

Lowered expectations
Rothenberg lowered my hopes regarding a handful of other areas I could see improved.

• Threaded comments: I find it hard to traverse longer discussions, in which people sometimes try to address each other with the @username convention, but Rothenberg pointed out fairly that most photos don't have such complicated discussions. "For most people it's question of whether getting any comments on the photo," he said. "We want to make that social aspect of photos matter to members more than it does today."

• Beefed-up Flickrmail: Flickr isn't designed to replace Yahoo Mail or Gmail, he said, but that doesn't mean e-mail and photos don't go together (as Yahoo's acquisition of Xoopit indicates). Rothenberg hinted at future integration: "For a large percentage of people on the Internet, the way they share photos is through e-mail. For Flickr to be the most useful site for our members, it needs to work well with all the ways they share photos."

• Face recognition: A Google-like approach to face recognition doesn't look likely, either. Facebook's social approach to getting people identified in photos is more in keeping with Flickr's style than Google's computer-based method. "We try to optimize toward social interactions rather than algorithms," he said.

• Longer video: Flickr is happy with its 90-second video limit, which was set not because of any hardware limits at Yahoo but because of an aesthetic liking for what Rothenberg terms "moving photos."

• Tags drawn from metadata: I'd love to sift images by camera, lens, shutter speed, and the like, which is information Flickr extracts from data cameras automatically embed in most photos. That's a technical matter Flickr has pondered, but "we don't have any immediate plans," Rothenberg said. "In general we want to make it easier to find the photos most important to you on Flickr. There are other areas we can improve on more immediately."

None of these are really grating issues for me, though, and I can see Rothenberg's point of view. So I'll willingly cut Flickr slack here.

As for the other fixes, I'll console myself that Rothenberg and I see eye to eye when it comes to the site's vision and priority: "Flickr needs to be the best place to be a photo if you're a photo."

Flickr lets you post image links to Twitter.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Yahoo has released a feature that lets people post Flickr photos to their Twitter accounts.

The Twitter2Flickr feature requires that you enable Flickr as an approved application that can tweet under your username.

Then, when you click the "blog this" link above a photo at Flickr, you're presented with the option to twitter it. The tweet will come with a "flic.kr" shortened URL.

Flickr has a large number of users, and its use is amplified by the fact that other sites can make use of Flickr data through an API (application programming interface). The Twitter integration is a modest example of Yahoo's attempt to make its sites less of a walled garden by working better with other Web properties.

A Twitter search for Flickr photographs indicates that a lot of people are making use of the integration, which had been in beta testing since earlier in June.

What do you do when you can use the Internet to data-mine a collection of billions of photos?

Find out whether cats are more popular than dogs, of course. Or whether good outdoes evil. Or the Yankees beat the Mets.

The FlickrTrends application takes advantage first of the API (application programming interface) at Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr, which can show how many photos have been tagged with a particular word over a period of time. Second, it uses Google App Engine to present the relative popularity of two tags in chart form to show what's waxing and waning.

Getty Images' Flickr collection is now live.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Getty Images, one of the stock photography powerhouses, has switched on a program by which selected Flickr photographers can license their images to paying customers.

In earlier days of the microstock business, in which photographers license images over the Internet for relatively low prices through sites including Getty's iStockphoto, there was speculation Flickr might jump into the market. After all, there's plenty of good material, and it's often already tagged for easier categorization.

Instead, though, Flickr and Getty announced a partnership in which Getty taps Flickr photographers it believes have potential to sell their photos through Getty. Invitations started going out in January, and now the Getty's Flickr collection is live, Yahoo announced on its blog Tuesday.

One complication, though: many photographers at Flickr offer their images under Creative Commons licenses that permit copying and redistribution of the photos.

According to the Flickr help section on the Getty program, Yahoo switches Creative Commons-licensed photos to all rights reserved if they're submitted to Getty:

Can I sell my Creative Commons-licensed content?

There is a chance one of your Creative Commons-licensed photos may catch the eye of a perceptive Getty Images editor. You are welcome to upload these photos into the Flickr collection on Getty Images, but you are contractually obliged to reserve all rights to sale for your work sold via Getty Images. If you proceed with your submission, switching your license to All Rights Reserved (on Flickr) will happen automatically.

If you're not cool with that, that's totally cool. It just means that particular photo will need to stay out of the Flickr collection on Getty Images.

Ben Metcalfe launched a discussion of the Creative Commons issue, pointing out that Creative Commons licenses are perpetual.

In response, a Getty Images representative said, "We would never expect anyone to revoke a license. We know that your image is being used with your permission by those who licensed it through CC (Creative Commons), which is why we are placing CC images we choose in RF (royalty-free licensing) only. We couldn't place it in RM (rights-managed) because rights management would not be possible. We came to this so as not to exclude inviting CC images."

The iPhone has risen to prominence on Flickr, rivaling most SLRs in popularity. These statistics from Yahoo cover the last 12 months.

(Credit: Yahoo)

The iPhone is the mobile device of choice these days for doing most things that need a network. So it shouldn't be a surprise that the phone has carved out a prominent place on Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr.

The Flickr Camera Finder, Yahoo's statistical counter of camera use among its members, shows that since the arrival of the iPhone 3G model earlier this year, the phone has vaulted not only over all other camera phones, trouncing the Nokia N95 in second place, but also almost all ordinary cameras.

That's a notable accomplishment. I've been watching the Flickr Camera Finder for two years, and that's the first time I recall a camera phone placing so highly. The top ranks have been dominated by SLRs, the camera of choice for many of Flickr's heaviest users.

With the debut of the 3G model, Apple's iPhone surged to a commanding lead among camera phones used at Flickr. These statistics from Yahoo cover the last 12 months.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Right now the iPhone is in a virtual tie with Canon's Rebel XT and Nikon's D80, two SLRs whose popularity is waning with the arrival of newer models from the dominant makers of such cameras. Only Canon's newer Rebel XTi outranks the iPhone.

Though the trajectory is clear, there are caveats. First, Flickr measures popularity on the basis of the number of users who've uploaded a photo on a given day. In other words, the camera used by a person who uploads one photo a day will fare better than one who uploads 100 pictures one day a month. Second, many camera phones don't identify themselves to Flickr, so their use isn't logged. Last, these statistics fluctuate daily, and who knows what kind of anomalous behavior is going on during the holidays.

The total number of photos uploaded from the Rebel XTi is about 51 million, compared with 5.8 million for the iPhone. However, there are nearly 3,000 people uploading daily from their iPhone compared with about 6,500 for the XTi.

My guess is the iPhone's better-than-average network abilities are responsible for the prominence. For the same reason, iPhone users also use Google Maps and other online services more than most mobile device users. The BlackBerry is good at e-mail, but the Internet has other attractions.

What's more interesting is extrapolating from the trend. Certainly the iPhone's image quality doesn't hold a candle to even old point-and-shoots, much less new SLRs, but the phone taps straight into the social features of Flickr--the ability to photographically share with friends and family what's going on in your life, for example. There are innumerable expert photographers at Flickr, but it looks like the yet larger herd of ordinary snapshooters are going to leave them in the dust once liberated with the ability to post pictures at will.

I sent my iPhone photos to Flickr using the site's upload-by-e-mail service (see Yahoo's instructions), but there are several iPhone applications that will do it for you if you prefer. Apple's photo e-mailing software scales photos to 640x480, but I don't mind, given feeble image quality and the unlikelihood that these shots will ever make their way beyond a computer screen.

Those who subscribed for DSL from AT&T or Verizon were entitled to free Flickr Pro accounts from Yahoo, but that deal is coming to an end.

I just got this message from Flickr: "Due to changes in your AT&T Internet service, your Flickr Pro account will expire on 29th March, 2010. That's in 479 days! You can renew Flickr Pro for just $24.95 for a one-year account. And to thank you for staying with us, we'll give you another two months at no cost."

I don't have to pay until 2010 because I had already paid for one year of a Pro account, a payment that hadn't been used because of the AT&T deal. But most folks probably will see their free Pro accounts vanish sooner.

According to the Flickr help page on the subject, "AT&T and Verizon Internet Services have reworked their broadband packages and will no longer be offering Flickr Pro to subscribers after January 31, 2009."

If you don't pay, Pro accounts revert to regular accounts. Subscribers in that circumstance don't lose any photos, but they do lose the Flickr Pro perks, which include the ability to see more than the last 200 photos that have been uploaded, unlimited uploads, unlimited numbers of photo collections called sets, ad-free browsing, and the ability to view full-size images.

Microsoft's improved photo-hosting site offers slide shows, but images don't fill the screen.

(Credit: Microsoft/CNET News)

For a company that's trying to take on the online might of Yahoo and Google, Microsoft has had a decidedly inferior photo-sharing site. Now that's changing, though.

As part of an overhaul of its online properties, the company announced a number of improvements to its Windows Live Photos site.

Among the new features:

• 25GB of storage space and no more 500-shots-per-month limit on uploads.

• A what's new feed to show what photos your contacts are adding, part of the social side of Windows Live.

• A new slide show view.

• Better permissions for controlling how photos are shared.

I found the new site workable but still imperfect.

The photos.live.com site bears a strong resemblance to Yahoo's Flickr.

(Credit: Microsoft/CNET News)

The most glaring ugliness to me was that the slide show is limited to small versions of the images. That's no problem on an 800x600-pixel screen, but even Flickr, which still hasn't figured out how to dynamically scale images on its regular photo pages, has full-screen slide shows.

Another hitch was that it's apparently impossible to rename your photos. So pick a file name you like before you upload. And you can't change the order of photos shown unless you want to diddle with the photos' "date taken" metadata, which sounds like a bad idea for any number of reasons.

As a fan of keyboard controls, though, I do like the fact that I can use the arrow keys to cycle through photos in an album, though it works only intermittently.

Update 10 a.m. December 5: My bad: it turns out you can change photo titles. Here's Microsoft's description how: "Click on any photo in the browse view of the thumbnails and the page that comes up lists several different options. Listed under More is the ability to move, copy or rename a file."

I still prefer Flickr's method, though: Click on the title, type a new name, then click "save."

The 3 billionth photo at Flickr is this shot of a door on an abandoned house in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward.

(Credit: Garrett Ryan Smith)

I've always been annoyed by the significance we humans attach to numeric milestones just because they happen to involve a lot of zeros.

But 3 billion--the number of photos now housed at Flickr--is undoubtedly a big number, even if its intrinsic excitement diminishes when, for example, translated into octal as 26,264,057,000. It's also more notable when you consider that Flickr's 2 billionth shot arrived less than a year ago.

The 3 billionth photo, with the title camera-supplied name of DSC_2672_1, is a black-and-white shot of a door by Garrett Ryan Smith. (But if it's the 3 billionth, how come the number in the photo's URL is 2,999,245,289?)

Of course, Facebook has more than 10 billion photos. But while that site has a lot of social activity, it's not the haven for photography enthusiasts that Flickr has become. At the Yahoo site, many join groups of like-minded photographers, comment on each other's shots, and share advice on forums.

Flickr noted the milestone on its Flickr blog on Monday.

Update 8:55 p.m. PST: I heard back from Smith, and those of you longtime Flickr loyalists hoping to achieve some sort of immortality through getting the 3 billionth photo may be distressed to hear you were beaten out by a newbie who was looking for a place to share some pictures.

"I have been using Flickr for less than a week now," he said. "My future sister-in law had her first child last week I had my camera with me and took a round of photos...We figured this would be a good way to share the photos with everyone across the United States and also with a family friend serving overseas."

The shot itself is of a door on an abandoned house in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, he said.

"Since Katrina hit I have been back to New Orleans numerous times and still cannot believe what it looks like three years later, especially in the Lower Ninth Ward area," he said.

Editor's note, 3:02 p.m. PST: It appears there are two URLs for the same shot, the one noted above, and this one, with the appropriate 3,000,000,000 at the end.

Yahoo has finished a redesign of its Flickr home page that emphasizes the photo-sharing site's social aspects.

The new home page shows off more of a user's own photos and more from the user's contacts, and it surfaces social activity such as comments on the user's photos, replies to comments the user made on others' photos, and new photos posted to the user's Flickr groups. (See a screenshot below.)

The move is part of Yahoo Open Strategy, which aims to expose Yahoo users' social activity across different Yahoo properties, let others build applications on Yahoo properties, and let outside sites use Yahoo data. Next up for Flickr is a redesign of the photo pages that house each image, the company said earlier.

Yahoo offers a screencast describing the new look on its Flickr blog.

The redesigned Flickr shows more photos and, through a 'recent activity' tab, more social interactions. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)