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."
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.
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.)
Picasa for the Mac includes the ability to make collages and other core features.
(Credit: Google)
Google plans to release on Monday a beta version of Picasa for Mac OS X, helping Apple fans catch up to Windows and Linux users already employing the free tool for editing, cataloging, and uploading photos.
The Mac version largely matches the features in Picasa 3 for Windows, said Jason Cook, Picasa's marketing manager. Though the company has been scrambling to include some secondary features such as geotagging and the ability to get photos printed, the core abilities of Picasa are present, he said.
Picasa lets people edit and print photos, create collages and movies, and add labels, star ratings, and tags. More significantly, given Google's cloud-computing focus, it also lets people upload their images to the company's online Picasa Web Albums site where images can be shared. Google acquired Picasa in 2004.
"We have many Mac users," Cook said, though declining to offer any estimates, "and we think they'll be excited about this. It makes the Picasa Web Albums experience better."
... Read moreMike Horowitz, product manager for Google's Picasa software for managing photos and the Web site for sharing them, has left the company for Fetch Technologies.
"Mike was a valued member of the Picasa team and Google, and we wish him well in his new endeavors. We have a talented team working on Picasa, and we're excited about the future," Google said in a statement. The company didn't say who would replace Horowitz.
According to Horowitz's LinkedIn profile, he began his new role in December as chief product officer at Fetch, an El Segundo, Calif.-based company founded in 1999. The company sells an artificial intelligence product called Fetch Agent Platform "for extracting and integrating information from multiple Web sources, and transforming the data into a form that is useful for business applications," according to the company.
Horowitz has held a variety of high-profile positions at Google, including the product manager for Google Apps and for AdSense. He also launched AdSense for Domains and Google's personalized start page.
In September, Google launched Picasa 3 with a variety of photo-editing features, including better retouching and the ability to make slide-show videos and big collages. On the Web end, the new service groups similar-looking people to make them easier to identify. And the software and Web site can stay synchronized so editing changes on a person's computer are mirrored on the Web site.
(Via The Inquisitr.)
Only two and a half months after announcing Picasa 3 beta, Google has done the uncharacteristic and on Thursday has issued Picasa 3.
Here's the clincher:Picasa 3 is the exact same desktop organizer and editor it has been under the beta flag. (This is a good wagon for the Gmail team to climb aboard--Google's e-mail service has been in beta since 2004 and its latest releases have been earthshaking themes and emoticons.)
Although Version 3 beta users won't see changes in this release, those switching from Version 2.7 will enjoy the substantial boost in features. Version 3 stacks on over a dozen more tricks to refine the editing, creative, and sharing options in what has for years been a solid consumer app. Highlights below.
With a little creativity, you can make gorgeous collages like this in Picasa 3.
(Credit: Tara Morrison/Google)Syncing and sharing
Instead of manually uploading new photos to Picasa Web Albums from Picasa 3, you'll be able to click "Sync to Web" to keep the folder automatically updated. You can exclude photos by right-clicking and choosing "block from uploading" from the context menu.
Sharing has also gotten much easier. In previous versions, you would upload the photos from Picasa and then click within the Web album to e-mail the link to friends. The 'Share' button next to Picasa's syncing button helpfully auto-uploads the album and sends the Web link without compelling you to go online.
No more leaving Picasa for the Web to update or share photos.
(Credit: CNET)Movie Maker
A terrific but light addition, Picasa 3's new movie maker can take videos from your digital camera and other clips and intersperse them with any other file Picasa supports. You can then upload your video to YouTube or to Picasa Web, or share via e-mail.
Bare-bones editing tools will trim the clips and add a song for background. However, they don't do fading and there's no template to carry your caption style from frame to frame. Video output is currently only the WMV format, and encoding takes a little time--be patient while it renders.
Drop Box
Drop Box is the new default storage locker for newly uploaded photos, for pictures you don't want to assign to an album, and for multitaskers who tell Picasa to take it easy on the bandwidth so they can simultaneously surf and upload. The Drop Box also holds photos uploaded via Orkut, ShoZu, and other third-party photo uploading services that integrate with Picasa Web Albums. This is one of those features that some users will love and many will ignore.
Screenshots
Picasa 3 hooks into your keyboard's PrintScreen key to index captures of your screen, Webcam input, or a video. For casual users, this feature may replace independent screen-capturing software like Gadwin PrintScreen, Capture.NET, and SnagIt. Those who continue to use those apps may find the cataloging amusing or mildly annoying.
You can upload photos to the drop box and start making a movie from Picasa 3's toolbar.
(Credit: CNET)Other notables
Picasa 3's red-eye reduction tool detects and auto-corrects all the red-eyes in a photo. This substantially cuts out the hassle of clicking and dragging over individual eyes to wipe out the redness, and it works well most of the time. For blotchy faces and other minor blemishes, the retouch tool will awkwardly but fairly effectively let you blot out problem areas.
Finally, the collage tool has gotten more customizable. Before Picasa 3, you couldn't delete, drag, angle, or print in full resolution. Now you can. These substantial additions make the tool an easy way to get really creative (see photo).
There's always room for improvement, especially with the movie maker and red-eye tool, which could use some more precision controls, but this Version 3 release is an excellent effort that will give people much greater control over their photos and Web albums without sacrificing simplicity. All without clinging to beta.
>>Want more detail? See the full list of additions and changes in Picasa 3.
Google has brought to Linux the beta version of its new Picasa 3 software for image editing, cataloging, and uploading.
The new release catches the open-source operating system up with Windows, which got the Picasa 3 beta one month earlier. There's still no word about a Mac OS X version, although Mike Horowitz, Google's Picasa product manager, told me earlier that "Macs are important to us...We're always looking for new ways of making sure our users are happy, so it's something we're looking at."
A collage mode in Picasa lets people create poster-size collections, sizing and placing each snapshot. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Google)The new version adds a retouching tool, automatic synchronization of photos on the PC with those stored at Google's Picasa Web site, and a collage mode that lets people combine numerous snapshots into a poster-size collection, Google programmer Lei Zhang said in a blog post announcing the new version. The new version also is faster, he added.
However, it does lack the Windows version's movie maker feature that can turn photos into a slideshow with a soundtrack that can then be uploaded to YouTube.
The software runs using Wine and an open-source software layer that translates a program's Windows instructions into commands for Linux instead. Google has contributed about 850 patches to the Wine project so far this year, Google said. Better video support in Wine is still a work in progress, though, which is why the movie maker feature is disabled.
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.
I was in a pinch a few weeks ago, and Google's Picasa software saved my skin. But now my warm glow of gratitude has begun wearing off, replaced by a simmering annoyance with camera makers for their profusion of proprietary raw formats.
Let me explain. I was covering the Photo Marketing Association trade show in Las Vegas, toting my Canon EOS Rebel XT camera to photograph products and people. For my personal photography I usually shoot in raw format to maximize the detail and flexibility, but for work purposes I use JPEG because it's faster to process and CNET News.com graphics are too small to require top resolution.
This screenshot shows a raw image from an Olympus E-3 SLR in Google's Picasa software. At right is the low-resolution JPEG preview, at left the garbled view after an incorrect decoding Google's support for the E-3 is on the way.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)But I had a brief moment of panic when I discovered, on a tight deadline, that I'd photographed a Sony full-frame SLR press conference and accompanying photo gallery in raw only. I wasn't happy, because I hadn't installed any software for processing raw images on my laptop. I briefly considered downloading a trial version of Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom, which I use at home, but dreaded the time it would take to get myself to a network connection and install the software.
Then I remembered that Picasa supports some raw formats. Sure enough, it did the trick--after I made my usual end run around Canon, which annoyingly doesn't include a mass storage driver on its cameras, requiring me to retrieve raw files using a separate flash card reader.
Picasa lacked some editing tools I like in Lightroom (and now Apple's Aperture 2.0, too), but I wasn't about to complain.
Until Wednesday.
That's when I received an Olympus E-3 that I'll be testing on an upcoming vacation. The camera has been out since November, but Picasa still doesn't support its raw images.
Raw-support challenges
Picasa showed the low-resolution JPEG preview fine, but as soon as I clicked on the thumbnail, the photo became a speckly mess of pixel gibberish.
For its part, Google said Thursday that E-3 raw support is coming. "We're in the process of testing it and plan to support it soon," the company said in a statement. Picasa uses Dave Coffin's freely available dcraw software, which supports the E-3, but Google said it makes its own modifications "to make it run faster."
It's no surprise Google employs outside software for the complicated task. Olympus told me it leaves programmers on their own to reverse-engineer raw formats: "When asked, we will provide sample raw files to companies, but it is up to them to figure out what to do with them. Our raw format is not difficult, and anyone with any experience with graphic file formats will figure it out in a matter of seconds."
For photographers, there are unpleasant consequences of camera makers' opacity and non-standardization. Programmers from Adobe Systems, Apple, and other companies must toil constantly to support new cameras, and camera makers must develop and support their own software. And the obstreperous nature of raw can curtail the innovation of other programmers, too.
For example, software that can embed location data known as geotags in raw files is much rarer than software that supports JPEGs. Adding metadata such as titles, captions, ratings, and tags is another risky operation; Microsoft Vista can do this, but relies on camera makers to supply software to support their various raw formats.
A programmer's plight
Sachin Garg, a programmer in India, is another example. He's been working on software that can compress raw files more efficiently--about 20 percent to 60 percent more than those already compressed by the camera.
Programmer Sachin Garg
(Credit: Sachin Garg)That's work that conceivably could be useful for those of us with vast archives of raw images, but Garg said the difficulties of working with raw files makes it tough.
"I have started with Nikon's NEF (raw format), and it's a mess. What makes it worse is that even for this single format, there are variations based on each camera, and camera's firmware version," Garg said. "I have managed to read and compress the file, but re-creating the original file again is giving me nightmares."
And that's just one popular format. There are also cameras from Canon, Olympus, Fujifilm, Pentax, Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Hasselblad, and others to contend with.
"It's a much different ball game to write an algorithm (than just) trying to put it in a practically usable application," Garg said. He understands the camera makers' situation, though. "Looking at each format, one can see the technical reasons why different camera makers are doing things differently and that adopting a common standard can possibly limit the innovations they introduce in newer cameras."
One possible alternative to the raw plight could be HD Photo, which Microsoft is trying to standardize as JPEG XR, a higher-end alternative to conventional JPEG. My guess is that this file format stands a reasonable chance of catching on--especially given the warm response from Adobe and more recently Canon--but even then it's more likely only to intercept photographers just moving beyond JPEG rather than replacing raw.
That's because HD Photo/JPEG XR requires the camera to process the image for de-mosaicking, noise reduction, sharpening, and white balance, all of which are "baked" into the image. For the folks who want total flexibility, they'll stick with raw.
DNG to the rescue?
A more likely alternative is Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) format, a raw format whose specifications are openly shared if not a neutral industry standard. Adobe explicitly created DNG to deal with the raw format "tower of Babel."
But larger camera makers have been reluctant to embrace DNG. It's hard to get firm answers on exactly why not; I'd imagine a variety of factors are involved, ranging from not wanting to be reliant on Adobe or a fixed format to inadequacies of DNG to fully represent raw images. And Pentax, whose SLRs support both DNG and its own PEF raw format, told me that most customers shooting raw use PEF, so users apparently need more convincing, too.
Maybe Adobe just needs to do a little more marketing, standardize DNG, or come up with an improved version 2.0. But for now, the raw format mess shows no signs of being tidied up.
Readers of this blog will have inferred I'm a fan of geotagging--in fact, I'm trying to label all my photos with the tags that show where the picture was taken, even though the geotagging process is complicated.
I'm betting that much of the value of geotagging lies in the future, for example, when I might have a harder time remembering which hike a particular picture came from. But can anything useful be done with those geotagged photos today?
Based on my scrutiny of a handful of sites--Google's Picasa, Yahoo's Flickr, SmugMug (the only fee-required site), Locr, and Everytrail--the answer is yes.
Google's Picasa site can show a map sprinkled with thumbnails of a photo album's pictures.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)But as with other aspects of geotagging, today's cartographically clever Web sites are likely to appeal chiefly to enthusiasts who have some patience and technical abilities. Just like we're not at the stage where most cameras can add a location stamp as easily as they can add a timestamp, we're not yet at the stage where most folks are going to start with an online map when they want to share their photos or reminisce.
Collectively, the sites I checked show the potential of geotagging--but also the rough spots. My top pick is Flickr, with Picasa and SmugMug tied for second place. But each site has different strengths and weaknesses, so look carefully before you make any commitments.
One of the main reasons I picked Flickr as tops is because the Flickr maps interface can sift data better. For example, you can see a high-level view of all your geotagged photos, and you can filter that view with parameters such as your photos, your friends' or contacts' photos, anyone's photos, and most important in my opinion, specific tags. That's a handy interface when trying to find photos of, say, Yosemite National Park, but you can't remember which of several trips a particular photo is associated with.
Flickr displays pictures as unevocative pink dots, but the photos themselves are shown on a strip below.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)In contrast, Picasa and SmugMug draw maps that only reflect the contents of a particular group of photos--called galleries at SmugMug, albums at Picasa, and sets at Flickr. (Google Maps can show Picasa images of a particular area to Google account holders who install a Mapplet application, though.)
Flickr also lets you take a set-based view of a map, with a scattering of pink dots representing your pictures. Indeed, it's probably the most likely way somebody might want to use a map to show off pictures of a recent trip, for example.
SmugMug, though, has what I found to be the slickest geotagging feature out there: fly-through slideshows of a gallery. With this ability, the site automatically shows a gallery's sequence of photos, displaying thumbnails along the way on a map and a red line connecting them.
It's a bit rough around the edges--I'm guessing because the technical difficulties of combining external Google Maps data with its own thumbnails--so it can be herky-jerky at times and with missing map elements. And for slideshows, thumbnails are hardly the best way to showcase sweeping vistas. But there's no question in my mind that the feature imparts a sense of traveling through a place, a sensation that regular slideshows completely lack.
Where Picasa has the edge over Flickr and SmugMug is in showing thumbnails of each image on the map, not just a dot or pushpin, which I like better even though thumbnails can get pretty crowded. It also shows larger pop-up versions than Flickr does. And for people who are geotagging their photos through the Web site, I think Picasa's interface is the best.
I also like the way Picasa, on an individual photo's page, includes a map showing where it was taken. But in part that's because there's a big panel of verbiage to the right of the screen on which that kind of real estate is available. A more photo-oriented site might not have that space to spare.
SmugMug lets you tour a gallery of photos on a map--a cool if still rough-around-the-edges feature.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)Another major advantage of Flickr is its handling of location privacy--geoprivacy in Flickr parlance. Naturally you might not want to share with the world the location of your living room, and your pernickety aunt might be even touchier. Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield prohibited geotagging of images of a party at his house.
Happily, Flickr lets you set the geoprivacy of each image, though doing so is awkward. I'm glad the Organizr lets me change this setting, but why isn't there a geoprivacy option in a photo's privacy settings window or in the map that's shown when you click the photo?
There are some other options out there that deserve a look. Google's Panoramio has a reasonable approach to virtual tourism if not necessarily the best interface for storing your photos--it seems like a ripe candidate for some integration with Picasa.
Loc.alize.us likewise is an entertaining way to browse geotagged photos; it's a glitzy interface built on top of Flickr photos and Google Maps.
Like Panoramio, Locr, a German company, lets you upload your own photos. Like SmugMug, it's got a slideshow ability, though its photos are large and its map, a strip on the left edge with pushpin locations, is more an afterthought. That makes for a nicer slideshow than SmugMug's thumbnails, but there's not too much of a sense of place to it. And I can't help thinking when I see sites like Locr, though, that it must be tough building a critical mass of members when there are bigger photo-sharing sites already with major momentum.
For a journey-oriented site Everytrail lets people upload whole GPS track logs and label them with points of interest and photos. It's also got a handy feature that can show others' Panoramio pictures. It's a good way to look at trips people have taken in a particular area.
Locr shows individual photos fine, but doesn't handle groups with much aplomb.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)I found Everytrail's interface a bit difficult and unintuitive at times, but it does have the advantage of being able to piggyback on Flickr: I successfully imported my bike trip Flickr set into an Everytrail map--though the klunkiness of the process was evident by the fact that I have three copies of each photo, and I can't figure out how to get rid of the duplicates. Also, when I inadvertently uploaded the wrong day's track log for a batch of photos, I had a hard time figuring out my error.
In the months that I've been trying this out, though, geotagging has been improving. I'm certain that these sites will improve as geotagging photos in the first place gets easier, more people try it, and programmers hammer away at the computational and user-interface challenges.
Another area with potential is software to deal with geotagging on computers. Mostly that's limited today just to utilities to marry geographic data with image files. But the rudimentary geotagging support in Adobe Systems' Lightroom and Apple's Mac OS X 10.5, which both can show a photo's location on a map, is a harbinger of things to come. Better geotagging abilities on people's computers will fuel improvements on the Web and vice-versa
