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."
Photoshop.com offers online image editing and sharing.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Adobe Systems is discontinuing Photoshop Album Starter Edition, the lowest rung on its ladder of image-editing software products, and the company is nudging its users toward the online Photoshop.com site.
Adobe launched Photoshop Album Starter Edition in 2003 as a free, bare-bones image cataloging and editing package. Adobe discontinued the line, though, and support for it ended June 30.
So what's the alternative? In a customer note, Adobe puts its online service front and center.
"As part of our commitment to providing customers with a free photo-editing solution, we have created Photoshop.com, an exciting new online service that lets you upload, organize, edit, store (up to 2GB free), and share your photos," the note said. Afterward is a list of steps for exporting photos from the software to the Web site.
The move reflects the growing importance of Web-based applications even for software powerhouses such as Adobe. Web applications, even when using relatively sophisticated technology such as Adobe's Flash, are typically primitive compared to what can run on a computer, but they offer advantages in sharing, maintenance, and remote access from multiple computers and mobile devices. And of course the Web is gradually growing more sophisticated as a foundation for applications.
It should be noted that Adobe's note also encourages customers to "consider an upgrade to Adobe Photoshop Elements 7," the consumer-oriented software that right now costs about $37 including a $20 rebate on Amazon. Adobe also sells the combination of Photoshop Elements 7 and a one-year Photoshop.com Plus membership for $90. The Plus membership offers subscribers up to 20GB of storage, tutorials, album templates, and "creativity-inspiring ideas."
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.
... Read more
Google's mock Picasa site on April Fools' Day. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Google loves its April Fools' jokes, and this year a prank emerged in the form of CADIE--an artificial-intelligence research project with a cute panda avatar--taking over the search giant.
"We're pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions," according to a CADIE description accompanying the faux announcement.
The site pointed to CADIE's YouTube channel and CADIE's blog.
Among CADIE's abilities:
• Gmail Autopilot, which answers your e-mail for you.
• Chrome updated for use with red-and-blue 3D glasses (predictably but disappointingly, the CADIE Chrome EULA looks unmodified from the original).
• A Picasa Web Albums feature to add red-eye to your photos.
• Brain Search for Mobile (with a graphical tip of the hat to XKCD, I'm guessing).
Google offered a faux version of Chrome to be used with 3D glasses. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Here's Google's description of the bogus feature of Picasa 4.1.
New! Automatic Red-Eye Addition
Approximately 4.1 seconds after achieving sentience, Google's new Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity scanned the corpus of online digital photographs and discovered the exceptionally popular but difficult to achieve photographic technique known as "red-eye."
Having established that "red-eye" is an aesthetically pleasing effect implying superior broad-spectrum lux measurement capability, CADIE has directed the human Picasa Team to introduce Auto-Red-Eye. No more "clicking and hoping" for that telltale glow; now you can simply select any photo(s) and a lovely red-eye effect will appear (unless there are no eyes in the shot whatsoever, in which case the image will be destroyed).
(Note that 4.1, whether seconds or version numbers, can also be read as April 1.)
Google inverted some YouTube videos for April Fools'.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Also, I didn't detect a CADIE reference, but YouTube inverted its videos and text of videos linked from its home page (perhaps with this Unicode font inversion technology).
"Our internal tests have shown that modern computer monitors offer better picture quality when flipped upside-down," the video-sharing site said on its blog. "The page also makes it simpler for you to view content in the southern hemisphere."
Also, note the GPS-enabled gBall from Google's Australian outpost.
Photo Finder finds contacts photos and suggests names for them when it thinks it knows the correct identity.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Start-up Face.com announced a Facebook application on Tuesday called Photo Finder that can identify your contacts' faces--and your own--on the social-networking site.
The software analyzes photos among your contacts, suggesting tags for faces it recognizes and monitoring new uploads for more. The software presents an array of your contacts' photos, letting you accept or reject suggested names for the people the application has identified.
In my not-so-extensive testing, I found that the face recognition technology really does make it easier to discover photos of people you know. It surfaced dozens of untagged pictures among my network of contacts, all with the correct name suggested.
We have 100 invitations for the application, which is in alpha testing. Click here if you want one--first come, first served.
Since those photographed were generally shown in their own photo galleries, it wouldn't have been tough for to find them on my own, but the application was more useful in uncovering unknown images when dealing with people posted on others' photo galleries. I didn't try it long enough to see how well it spotted photos of me showing up in others' photos, which strikes me as one use case in which people would be particularly interested.
Face recognition in photos can be a powerful tool because it means computers can know people's identities. That photo metadata is information that computers can process, for example, when supplying search results. Apple built face recognition into its newest version of iPhoto, and Google has the technology in its Picasa Web Albums site for photo sharing.
Not integrated with Facebook
One key point, though: the identification tags that Photo Finder supplies are visible only through the application. They aren't integrated with Facebook's tag system, so the implications and actions you take through Photo Finder are limited only to that application.
Photo Finder presents photos with suggested tags at the top and known tags at the bottom for each contact.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)"Tags in Photo Finder will not persist in Facebook's main photo application. Tags assigned in Photo Finder can be rejected by the tagee, if they also use Photo Finder," the company said.
Face.com leaves privacy matters of Photo Finder up to Facebook itself. "Photo Finder has nothing to do with privacy. It scans photos that have already been shared with you. We respect the privacy settings set up by Facebook, so you don't have to manage privacy in two different places," the company said.
But in practice, Photo Finder does reveal just how publicly you're sharing your photos, and widespread use of the technology will make it easier for others to find images of specific people among their network of contacts.
When I told one contact of mine I'd just tagged her in a bunch of photos a computer just found, she wrote back to me, "I'll admit it freaks me out a bit. There has always been something about Facebook or social networking that sits on the hairy edge of a bad idea. This doesn't seem to help the cause. (It) does cause me to think again about what I post. I am probably not a poster child of best judgment."
Promising but clunky
Overall, I found the technology promising but a bit clunky. It might have worked better, if I only used Facebook to keep track of a handful of close friends and family members, but instead, Photo Finder presented me with 38 pages of friends for me to sift through to identify. It spotlighted one facet of the conundrum of personal vs. professional use of social-networking sites: I have a lot of professional contacts whose smiling-with-friends in-the-restaurant and holding-the-cute-baby photos I don't really care about.
Because you can set up watch lists for friends you care about, notifying you of future uploads of photos of people you do care about, keeping on top of new additions likely would be easier to manage. And, of course, you can cut to the chase by typing in the names of specific people you care about. They have to have their permissions set to allow you to tag their photos, though, for the application to work.
What about making money out of the technology? The Israeli-based start-up is cagey for now.
"At the moment, the focus is on launching the technology and making sure that it scales well at (the) Web level," the company said in a statement. But Face.com does have aspirations beyond a Facebook application.
"Face.com is the company behind this technology. That's a pretty premium domain, and likely, it will be the host for other uses of their facial-recognition software," the company said. Face.com is "starting with Photo Finder, a facial-recognition and discovery app for Facebook. This facial recognition is highly accurate, efficient, and built for the Web; it's able to scan through millions of photos and correctly identify faces at high speed, with a high level of accuracy."
Bruce Livingstone, founder and leader of microstock pioneer iStockphoto, is leaving the company he sold to Getty Images three years ago.
iStockphoto founder and former CEO Bruce Livingstone
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Livingstone, who launched the low-cost photo-licensing company nine years ago, said he's leaving of his own volition, according to a forum posting from iStock COO Kelly Thompson, who is taking over Livingstone's duties.
"This is my last communication as CEO of iStockphoto and SVP Consumer at Getty Images. It's been a difficult decision, but it's the right moment to move on," Livingstone said. "I need more time with my family, and time to figure out what I'm going to do next. Anybody who knows me, knows I'm a bit of a workaholic. So I'm finally going to make some time for myself and the people in my life."
Thompson will lead iStockphoto and report directly to Getty CEO Jonathan Klein, the company said. iStockphoto got its start licensing royalty-free images for relatively low prices, and over the years expanded into video, Flash animations, illustrations, and, most recently, audio.
Livingstone's departure was unrelated to 110 layoffs at Getty Images reported last week by Photo District News, the company said.
"Bruce's departure was a personal decision and has been planned for some time, with a potential April 1 announcement date, which is within the wry character of Bruce," Thompson said in a statement to CNET News. "But due to the inherent difficulty in keeping something like this contained, we felt it prudent to move the announcement up."
Livingstone said he'll continue with some involvement at iStockphoto. "Don't think for a minute that I'm going away, though. I'm still a photographer after all, and I'll finally have time to take pictures now," he said in the forum posting.
Google has begun showing ads on search results at its Picasa site for sharing photos, part of its gradual expansion of advertising across its numerous Web properties.
Pages for photos and galleries doesn't show ads, but search results do for some people. The ads are located in a yellow-tinted "sponsored links" section above the photo results for some in the United States. (See screenshot below.)
"As part of our ongoing commitment to innovation, and to help users find new and better ways of getting the information they're looking for, we are currently showing text ads on the search results pages for Picasa Web Albums. This experiment is only visible to a small number of U.S.-based users," the company said in a statement. The ad experiment has been running for "a few weeks," Google said.
Google, trying to increase profitability, has been spreading ads to sites that previously lacked them. Among them: Google Finance, Google News, image search, Google Maps, and Google Earth.
Google is showing ads on search results at its Picasa photo-sharing site. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)(Via the unofficial Google Operating System blog.)
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."
Google's Street View now is augmented by photos supplied by contributors to the company's Panoramio service. This shot of the St. Louis courthouse is more scenic than the official Street View version. Note also the advertisement below the photo. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Google Maps' Street View feature uses imagery collected by cameras mounted to Google cars, but now the company is blending in photos taken by the public as well.
Panoramio, which Google acquired in 2007, lets people share photos that have been geotagged with location data so they can be shown on a map. Those Panoramio photos already were available in Google Earth and Google Maps, but now they can show on the more personal Street View as well, Google programmer Frederik Schaffalitzky said in a blog post Wednesday.
Potential advantages of checking the photos on Street View include views at a higher resolution view or during a different time of day, which could be handy for the occasions when Google's Street View camera was shooting into the sun and didn't produce much of an image.
And of course a disadvantage is that the Street View intrusiveness to which some people object is amplified.
When a view can be shown with Panoramio images, a "user photos" icon shows in the upper-right corner of Street View. Clicking it shows an array of local photo thumbnails, and clicking one of those thumbnails loads that image. Above it is a link to the Panoramio page of the person who added the photo.
Not every Panoramio image is included. Once you've contributed geotagged photos to Panoramio, "Google's image-matching algorithms will analyze them at some point to see if they are also a good match for a Street View location," Schaffalitzky said.
