Yahoo's Flickr site has deepened its relationship with photo-licensing power Getty Images so photographers can nominate their own photos for inclusion in Getty's Flickr Collection.
Previously, Getty decided which images it believed were commercially viable, and since the program launched in July 2008, it has put together a collection of more than 60,000 commercial images. Now photographers, instead of just being able to indicate that they're willing to be contacted by Getty, can actively submit a portfolio of images.
"A submission should include exactly 10 images that represent what you consider to be the best of your work. The Getty Images creative team will evaluate submissions based on style, subject matter, and technical skill," Andy Saunders, Getty's vice president of creative imagery, said in a statement. "If some or all of the photos--or other images from your photostream--are selected for the Flickr Collection on Getty Images, you will receive an invitation via FlickrMail. This invitation will clearly show Getty Images' initial selection of images and introduce the enrollment process."
The partnership is an interesting confluence between the old-school world of stock photography and the nouveau era of digital photography and the Internet. With digital SLRs and the Internet, high-quality photos are easier to come by, leading to the arrival of several "microstock" companies that sell photos on a royalty-free and relatively inexpensive basis. It's hurt professional stock photographers, but it's provided extra income to any number of enthusiasts and amateurs.
Flickr never launched its own microstock site, despite an abundance of enthusiasts contributing photos, but the Getty partnership does mix a commercial ingredient into the Yahoo photo-sharing site's operations.
The easy availability of photos at Flickr and other sites can lead to copyright infringement troubles. On Tuesday, Toyota USA apologized for using Flickr photos without permission:
Toyota apologizes for pulling images from Flickr without photographer permission. Images from a handful of photographers appeared on a Toyota site for five days. We're working quickly to reach out to the individual photographers involved. Until then, the images have been removed, and corrections have been made to the process of pulling images from Flickr.
So it's clear that some Flickr photos have business value, whether for their professional quality or their everyman snapshot flavor.
Getty and Flickr won't disclose any details about their business relationship, but here's what Flickr has to say about how the finances work for photographers:
Flickr has a business relationship with Getty Images, though we've never publicly discussed the specifics of the deal. Regarding the photographers, Getty Images will be the exclusive distributor of select Flickr members' content, and in turn, Getty Images will facilitate the license of such photography and will pay the royalties directly to the members. This will be a direct relationship between Getty Images and each Flickr contributor.
Flickr photographers will be asked to sign a Getty Images contributor contract, if they agree to have their images licensed for commercial use, that will specify rates for rights-managed and royalty-free royalties, as applicable. Rates for royalty-free imagery are 20 percent; rates for rights-managed (images) are 30 percent. These are directly in line with royalty rates that (Getty's) existing contributors receive.
Scion xB RS 6.0, shown in Detroit this week.
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CBS Interactive)Wondering who that mysterious new Flickr contact is with all the slick product photos? Maybe it's a viral marketer.
That's what happened to Illuminata analyst and CNET blogger Gordon Haff earlier this week when Scion xB RS 6.0 added him as a Flickr contact. I thought it might be a marketing move, given that the Detroit auto show was under way, and indeed a little digging showed that to be the case.
"We are promoting the new Scion xB Release Series 6.0 vehicle online through a variety of social media avenues," said Kat Kirsch of Formula PR, which was involved with the campaign. Because the car has a lot of visual features, trying to reach "tech/online aficionados" on Flickr was one element of the campaign.
Of course, Yahoo's photo-sharing site wasn't the only part of the process. "We uploaded the first photos of the new car on Flickr and linked those to our micro site. We also Twittered about the car and photos and reached out to some of the key online Scion influencers. From there it expanded to the Scion Facebook fan page and Scion message boards like ScionLife as people started to spread the news."
Her firm isn't the first to try to use the Internet's social fabric and related viral marketing possibilities for promotion, but it does provide a glimpse into how it works. As the Internet grows ever more ubiquitous, companies get more alternatives to traditional media outlets for disseminating information and reaching customers.
Word of mouth and its online equivalent can be a powerful communication mechanism, because people listen to their friends in a way they don't listen to traditional media.
The Guardian is reporting that George Oates, along with two others on the Flickr team have been let go as a part of this week's Yahoo layoffs. Oates was one of the first employees at Flickr before its acquisition by Yahoo in 2005, and more notably its former chief designer.
Flickr, along with its Yahoo sister site Delicious, are well known for having a minimal, and angular user interface. Oates was a big part of that. After her stint as Flickr's chief designer, Oates moved on to become a senior program manager where she headed up Flickr's Commons project.
Oates has made no confirmation of the move on her personal blog or Flickr profile page, however former Yahoo Personals product manager Susan Mernit is confirming the news.
(Credit:
Flickr)
Flickr's mobile Web site hasn't traditionally been in step with its popular Web app. A fresh lick of paint and some API work under the hood brings the two experiences much closer in line.
On Thursday, Yahoo-owned Flickr pushed out a very worthwhile upgrade to its mobile-optimized site, m.flickr.com.
Video streaming is the big draw. As on Flickr.com since last April, anyone accessing Flickr from an iPhone or iPod Touch can play videos hosted on Flickr's servers. In a few weeks, Flickr will unlock this capability for anyone using a Webkit, Opera Mobile (but not Mini), for Firefox Mobile browser.
Of course, only pro subscriber members can upload videos at this point, each capped at 90 seconds in length and treated as a "long photo" rather than as a video per se.
In addition to getting video on board, Flickr has also reorganized the mobile home screen. Its freshly buffed layout now grants quick access to the activity feed, friends' recent uploads, and to the daily crop of hand-picked photos.
You'll also now be able to do maintenance work, like add contacts, mark images as favorites, adjust privacy settings, and browse interesting photos, all basic stuff that Flickr's mobile site should have already allowed. Nevertheless, we're happy to see it now.
Flickr's new mobile site worked great during testing, though its performance is limited by the strength of your data connection and video playback may as well be useless in Edge territory. There are also a few features that Flickr is leaving to third-party developers of native apps, like a quick way to take and update photos and video (where supported) within the app interface itself.
The changes, big and small, will better serve the 50 percent more visitors browsing Flickr photos from their phones, and will go a long way to making Flickr a more unified service from any outlet. The upgrade may also give Yahoo a boost of consumer confidence in the face of its recently sagging fortunes.
The redesigned Flickr shows more photos and, through a 'recent activity' tab, more social interactions. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Yahoo on Wednesday started offering Flickr users a new home page for the photo-sharing site that's designed to show off more images and make it easier for people to use the site's social features.
Many people just use Flickr to store and share their own photos, but the site also has social features including groups where like-minded people can share photos, a contacts list to share with particular friends, and comments that can lead to a discussion thread. Much of the redesign aims to spotlight these social features, making them more visible and easier to use, said Kakul Srivastava, Flickr's new general manager.
"What we wanted to be able to do is make the home page more engaging, useful, and efficient for advanced users who have hundreds and sometimes thousands of contacts and who upload and log into Flickr several times a day (and for) our newest members who are trying to figure out how to engage with Flickr," Srivastava said. The change also is part of the Yahoo Open Strategy, which is geared in part to "light up" Yahoo users' online social activity.
The redesigned page displays more photos, both from the Flickr member and from his or her contacts. And it adds photos from Flickr groups to which the member belongs, said Matthew Rothenberg, director of product management.
Flickr's home page now features a 'recent activity' tab that lets people interact more quickly with others on the photo-sharing site.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Another big change is a "recent activity" tab that displays new comments on a member's photos, notices that others have made the member a contact, and other social events.
The change is available now to people who opt for it, but it will become standard for all users in coming weeks, Srivastava said.
Yahoo described the change on its Flickr blog--which, by the way, is now featured on the new home page to spotlight news regarding the site.
Update 4:30 p.m. PDT: Yahoo has gradually added various features to Flickr, including video. But this change is about improving basic parts of Flickr that haven't been changed in a much longer time, Srivastava said.
"This is not about adding new features, it's about reducing the number of clicks of many of our most important core features," she said. As long as a user has a fast network, the new pages load faster, though those with a slow dial-up connection might be constrained since more photos show on the home page, she added.
It doesn't change another core part of Flickr, though, the pages that house each photograph. That will be changed in a future update, she added.
"It's definitely on our roadmap to improve that page," she said.
Flickr currently has more than 30 million registered users, 3 billion page views per month, and 60 million unique users per month, she said.
Google's Photostream application is for viewing Flickr photos on Android phones.
(Credit: Google)Google released on Thursday a new sample application called Photostream that will let phones running its Android phone operating system view photos stored at Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site.
Although Photostream is intended to be a tool to illustrate the use of various Android features, it also looks like a potentially useful application for when the phones start shipping later this year. The open-source program lets people browse a particular user's photos, in groups or individually, and create separate shortcuts to different Flickr accounts, according to a description at the Android developers blog.
Google is trying to attract developers to Android so the project has a rich set of applications. Part of the promise of the effort is to build an "open" foundation, not unlike personal computers, where people can install new software.
Users will be able to find new applications at the Android Market, though that online service likely will launch only with free applications, so developers hoping to profit from the site will probably have to wait.
Google is also moving technology from its Chrome browser to Android.
Google wants to help you put a name to that face.
With a face recognition feature set to launch at noon PDT Tuesday, Google's Picasa Web Albums will help users label their photos with the names of subjects. That and other changes to the photo-sharing site are joined by a new beta version of the accompanying Picasa 3.0 photo-editing software.
The "name tag" feature presents users with collections of photos with what it judges to be the same person, then lets them click a button to affix a name. Once photographic subjects are named, users can browse an album of that individual on the fly.
The Picasa Web Albums name tag feature groups like faces together to let users tag them with names a batch at a time (click to enlarge).
(Credit: Google)"Once you've started naming people, we'll start suggesting names for you based on similarity," said Mike Horowitz, Google's Picasa product manager. "The process of naming people is really addictive and tremendously fun."
Having tried the new service on dozens of photos, I wouldn't go that far. But it is a major advance in what I believe is a very important area, photo metadata.
Tagging is a powerful way to sort digital photographs. Photo albums are useful, but with rich tagging, people also can slice and dice their photo collection to show particular people, activities, or locations. Even with face recognition technology or other computer processing, the textual tags in photos are a far more reliable way for computers to understand image content.
And tags become even more powerful as photos are assembled into publicly accessible collections such as those at Yahoo's Flickr, Picasa, or Fox Interactive's Photobucket.
Eat your vegetables, exercise regularly, tag your photos
The problem with tagging is that it's a chore, so most people don't bother. But Picasa's name tag feature automates the process enough--and provides enough reason to use it--that I believe many users will take the tagging plunge.
It took me less than 15 minutes to tag close to 200 faces in a set of more than 100 photos, and that included some start-up time such as figuring out how the system worked, establishing names for various common subjects, and correcting a few errors. The most impressive moments are when Picasa presents a large array of photos with the same face, and you can label them all with a single click.
Picasa editing software now lets users export movies with musical soundtrack to a file or YouTube (click to enlarge).
(Credit: Google)I speak here from experience. I do tag my own photos--for example the 700 I took on a weeklong backpacking trip earlier this month--and something like Google's facial recognition assisting would have dramatically sped the process. It wouldn't help with other tags such as "swimming," "waterfall," or "Sierra tiger lily," but let's face it--people are the central feature in most people's photos.
Overall, Google's Picasa moves show that despite a long period of near-dormancy, Google still evidently is committed to the photography site and software.
However, Picasa overall still feels like a staid place to store photos, share them with friends, and maybe order prints. It doesn't match the vibrant community of Yahoo's Flickr. And though Flickr also has been slow to change, Yahoo has at least been nudging it in the right direction with additions such as online editing.
Picasa Web Albums' most conspicuously erroneous identification of a face, actually the spokes on my bicycle's front wheel.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)
Face recognition blemishes
Picasa's name tags are helpful but imperfect. The feature failed to find faces in several photos where I thought the faces were reasonably obvious. It also thought my bicycle wheel's spokes and wife's ear were faces. One excusable error: it thought a mask in a mural was a face, though for some reason it didn't bother with a couple of real humans in the same mural.
"Our face-matching technology works best when a person is looking at the camera," Horowitz said. "There are a variety of factors that may limit our success in matching faces, including profile views and challenging lighting conditions like shadows."
The most annoying error was that during the initial period when I was adding names to the system, it somehow came up with three separate versions of me and two versions of my son, despite the fact that I entered the same name and e-mail address. I fixed it by telling Picasa my alter egos were erroneously labeled, at which point they re-entered the labeling pool and I assigned them to the remaining identity. Too bad I didn't notice the "merge" option until later.
Picasa Web Albums asked me to identify this face it found--actually a mask in a mural (click to enlarge).
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Knowing the privacy implications of face recognition, Google is proceeding somewhat cautiously. Picasa users must specifically enable the name tag feature, and default name tags aren't shared publicly. Picasa users may only tag photos in their own account.
With the "name tag" feature, which users must specifically enable, Picasa presents groups of images sharing the same face. Users can label them with a person's name. Eventually users can click a tag to find shots of a particular subject in their photo collections,
The face recognition technology came to Google via its 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision, Horowitz said.
There are other changes coming to Picasa Web Albums (though a change to Google Photos isn't one of them, at least right now). One is an "explore" view that lets people browse the total collection of public Picasa photos. It lets people browse by popular tags, location, and peer at recent uploads. Another is the ability to e-mail photos to the service.
Picasa 3 beta
Google also plans to release a beta version of the Picasa 3 image-editing. It works on Windows, though a Google Labs version has been transmogrified to work on Linux via the Wine software layer. Horowitz wouldn't confirm whether a Mac OS X version is anything more than an idea: "Macs are important to us," he said. "We're always looking for new ways making sure our users are happy, so it's something we're looking at."
The new Picasa software brings several changes:
• A movie maker mode lets people combine photos with music to export movie versions of galleries to watch on a PC or upload to YouTube.
• A new retouch brush lets people edit out skin blemishes and other trouble spots. And the tool can automatically fix red-eye problems caused by flash photography.
A collage mode in Picasa lets users create poster-size collections, sizing and placing each snapshot. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Google)• A new collage mode lets users compile many photos into one composite image. This time, users get precise control over image placement for example by moving, rotating, and resizing photos, and the software can produce a high-resolution composite for poster-size prints.
• A photo viewer for quick slideshows, an option that during installation politely asks to own the file associations for JPEG, TIFF, raw images from higher-end cameras, and some other formats. The slideshow software can view PNG files, which is handy, but the editing software still can't, which is a significant limitation for me.
• Online synchronization. If photos have been uploaded from Picasa to the Web site, they can be edited later and the changes, including tags, are synchronized to the Web site. This is very handy since you might want to get images up quickly to share with friends then edit them later. Unfortunately, changes on the Web site aren't mirrored back to the PC, so all those name tags will stay put in the cloud for now.
Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, who has just left Yahoo, has some less-than-adulatory remarks about his former masters.
Speaking to CNET sister publication ZDnet during an Australian visit, Butterfield said he would have preferred it if Microsoft's attempt to acquire Yahoo had gone ahead.
"It was not so great," Butterfield said of the Microsoft acquisition saga. "Once the ball was rolling I would have rather seen the acquisition happen. I think a lot of damage was done to Yahoo. Not only from a company perspective, but from a leadership and (morale) perspective."
Butterfield left Yahoo July 12, and fellow co-founder Caterina Fake left a few weeks earlier, part of an executive exodus from the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company.
He also criticized Yahoo for being concerned about quarterly results at the expense of longer-term, riskier investments.
"I felt like the biggest problem while I was there (was that) that management was oriented a little bit too much towards the quarterly results...If the entire focus of the company is produce a certain amount of operating free cash flow or a certain amount of capital expenditure...it isn't hard for other people to out-maneuver you, when they're not so concerned about those things," he said. "I am sure the management at Google, despite their outward proclamations, are every bit as concerned about those numbers, but they are taking bigger strategic risks, and other Web start-ups are as well."
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