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.
It seems like everyone has an application directory these days, and now Flickr is no exception. While not offering up paid third-party services (yet), Flickr on Tuesday unveiled a reworked services section dubbed the "App Garden" that better showcases photo tools, and the people who have created them.
The new apps directory page manages to squeeze just about as many applications into a smaller space than the old one did. It also gives each app its own page where users can add descriptive tags and leave feedback in the form of comments. In fact, these new pages act just like Flickr photo pages, including giving registered users a way to favorite certain apps, which goes towards promoting up-and-coming apps higher up in the showcase. They also double as a shortcut to viewing other apps made by that same developer.
Flickr's new "App Garden" as the company calls it, is much more compact than the services directory that came before it. It also adds user interaction to the mix with comments and favoriting.
(Credit: CNET)One area where the new app system has not permeated just yet is in letting users see what apps their friends and contacts are using. For instance, Flickr's activity feed--which gives Flickr users a bird's eye view of what their friends are up to, does not show when a user has favorited one of these tools. Users will only be able to see what apps they themselves have favorited from within the App Garden, and not alongside their photo favorites. There is also no way to create collections of apps you like to share with others, as you can do with the recently-released gallery feature.
These things may come in time, but for now it's already a much better system than the previous API services page. Developers have more of a chance to try to convince users to give their app a spin before they ever leave the site, and other Flickr users are now able to chime in and recommend it, either through the new favoriting system, or in the comments. Whether Flickr decides to make some of this user activity a little more public is unclear.
After the jump: The before and after of the API services menu, and what's now the App Garden.
... Read more
Google on Tuesday announced that its similar-images feature is now a standard part of the company's image search technology.
The feature was originally launched in late April, alongside the visual-news timeline, as a way for users to find images that share certain visual similarities with those in Google Images search results. This means that you could do a search for "ice cube" and very quickly fork out Google's results between images of the frozen chunks of water and the popular West Coast rapper, all without having to change your original search term.
Which 'ice cube' did you mean? Google's image search can now offer suggestions for images that may be similar.
(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)Google continues to host a dedicated Similar Images search page that provides identical results to what's now found in the standard version of Google Images search. This is likely to remain, as has been the case for sites of other Google Labs graduates, such as Google Transit (now a part of Maps) and Google Suggest.
Google has also created a standalone Google Product Ideas page to grab user feedback for other features or changes to the image search service. This operates the same way as other product idea pages by letting users suggest new ideas to Google's engineers, as well as giving others the chance to vote ideas up or down.
As a frequent Twitter user, there's nothing more appealing to me than checking out the photos and videos that the people I'm following publish in their Twitter timelines. It makes the experience a little more rich.
That's precisely why I wanted to write this roundup. Why only write text in Twitter? Why not share multimedia content? If you're like me, you'll want to do just that. So take a look at some of these services and let's work together at making Twitter just a little more fun to use.
Be entertained
Ffwd Video-sharing site Ffwd allows people to share their favorite videos with Twitter followers.
When you get to Ffwd, you can view a host of videos on several topics. When you find something you like, Ffwd provides a "Share to Twitter" option. When you click that, your update box will be populated with a standard tweet and a link to the video. You can change it before you send it out. It's a nice service, but given the fact that there are many more videos on YouTube (which also lets you share content on Twitter), it might not be your first option.
Ffwd populates your update box with a link and message.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Flickr If you're a Flickr user, the Yahoo-owned site allows you to show off your images on Twitter with the help of a unique Flickr URL.
In order to syndicate your content to Flickr, you first need to authorize it on your account through the "blog this" pane. Once Twitter is authorized, you can share any of your Twitter images with Flickr. I tried out the service, and it worked relatively well. The site provides users with a unique shortened Flickr URL for an image. That said, Flickr hides the "tweet" button under the "blog this" option. It's a little annoying. I would have liked to have more convenient access to it. Either way, it might be worth trying out if you're a frequent Flickr user.
Flickr makes it somewhat difficult to add photos to Twitter.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Social photo-sharing site Flickr is adding a long overdue feature this week that lets users assign a name tag to people in photos. While the service is overflowing with photos of sweeping landscapes and close-ups of bug eyeballs, the Yahoo-owned company has noticed that many of its users are simply using it to share shots of friends and family, and that the existing tag tools were not made with people in mind.
The new system has been designed as a hybrid of the original tagging tools and Flickr's notes feature, all wrapped up into one. Users can tag a Flickr friend or contact in the shot, as well as draw a box around them, which looks and acts just like it does when creating a note so that when users mouse over a photo, they can see who a person is by what box they're in.
An identical system was introduced by rival photo service Photobucket back in late 2007, but there's a big difference between the two: Flickr's system is designed for the Flickr community alone whereas Photobucket's would let users link a people tag to any social-networking profile of their choosing. Flickr's implementation might be a little more limiting, but it makes a better case to join the service and fill out one's profile.
People tags look just the notes feature, except they double as normal tags too.
(Credit: Yahoo / CNET)Privacy and notifications
Each time a user is added, they get a notification through Flickr's inter-service messaging and via e-mail. Their friends get notified too, although this happens in Flickr's user activity stream which each user sees whenever they go to Flickr's home screen. Users can also see all the photos of themselves on Flickr in one central location, including on their profile--just like on Facebook and MySpace.
Of course users won't necessarily be able to add themselves, or others to every shot, and that's by design. In a call with CNET News on Wednesday Matthew Rothenberg, who is Flickr's head of product strategy and management, said that the privacy controls protect all three parties: the person who shot the photo, the person in the photo, and the person who added the photo to Flickr. And for anyone to tag another user in a shot, their permissions have to line up with the wishes of the two others.
Feel like de-tagging yourself from every photo you've ever been tagged in on Flickr? There's a big red button for that.
(Credit: CNET)On top of this three-way permission control system, there's also a way to globally set whether people can add you to shots, and what kind of relationship they need to have with you to do it. This includes an ejector seat-like button that can de-tag you from every photo you've been tagged in all at once, as well as a security measure that won't let anyone tag you in a photo once you've already de-tagged yourself.
Workflow and facial recognition potential
When adding someone to a shot, Flickr's people-tagging tool offers up suggestions from your contact list as you type.
(Credit: Yahoo / CNET)A major difference between Flickr's people-tagging system compared to Facebook's is that there isn't an engine built in that can remember and suggest the last few people you were tagging in any given photo set. Rothenberg says this could be added later on, but that Flickr's auto-complete is fast enough for it not to be an issue when users are looking up a friend's add to name it. In most cases you simply need to type just two letters to narrow it down to a shortlist of the person you're looking for.
The system has also been set up so that you don't need to enter any special people-tagging mode to start tagging friends--you can just double click on someone in the shot for it to come up with the people-tagging option.
Power users are not left out either. If you don't want to go through photos one at a time, you can just skip to Flickr's batch organization tool. This isn't automated like some of the facial recognition software tools we've recently looked at, which can give you suggestions of people it thinks might be in your photos. But it makes it a whole lot easier to go back and people tag (or de-tag) hundreds of your old photos all at once. This can be useful if you're trying to convert a photo set with one person into a batch of name tags.
Speaking of facial recognition, to be clear, it's not a part of Flickr's people-tagging system (yet). But just because it's not, doesn't mean third-party programs won't be able to tap into Flickr to do it. Rothenberg said that like any Flickr feature, people tags are being added into the API, and should be deployed for application makers to use in just a few weeks. That could be good news for sites like Face.com and Polar Rose, which will be able to do some of the people-tagging magic they've done for Facebook using Flickr's community instead.
The new people-tagging feature could be arriving for some as soon as Wednesday, but like with other new Flickr features it may take up to a day or two to migrate through Flickr's servers.
Yahoo-owned social photo site Flickr went dark Tuesday at around 8:50 a.m. PDT. The outage, which remains ongoing at time of this initial post, is keeping users from accessing all parts of the site, however photos that had been embedded on third-party sites are still able to be viewed.
An update on Flickr's official blog, timestamped at 9:51 a.m. PDT, says "all hands are on deck," and the problem will soon be resolved. That was followed shortly thereafter by a post at 10:05 a.m. PDT saying that that outage "shouldn't be too much longer!"
Flickr's last major outage, which took place back in February 2007, resulted in the company revealing some details about the immensity of the photo sharing site, which at that time was serving close to a billion photos a day.
More details as they come...
Updated 10:55 a.m. PDT: A Yahoo representative had no details on the nature of the outage, but it appears to be a problem with the Web servers rather than a data issue. Yahoo updated the Flickr blog to inform users that photos embedded into a Web site should still be appeared on those sites.
Updated 11:35 a.m. PDT: Flickr is back up and running.
Updated 12:01 p.m. PDT: Flickr released a statement on the outage.
"Flickr regularly makes routine updates to the site - and once in a blue moon we hit a snag in the road. Flickr is now back to normal and no data was lost during this morning's outage. Members who might have been uploading at the time should have received an error message, but should be able to share photos and videos now. We continued to serve photos to 3rd party sites throughout the service interruption. Thanks for bearing with us and feel free to let the team know if you continue to experience any issues."
Correction 11:35 a.m. PDT: This story initially misstated that embedded images could not be viewed during the outage.
Those of you who hate the recent arrival of Yahoo's logo on Flickr now have an easy way to erase it--and get a number of useful features--as long as you're using an edgy version of Chrome.
Fittr Flickr lets you click 'EXIF' to expand a box below the image to show photo details.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Chrome extensions let people customize the browser's behavior, and the Fittr Flickr extension from Gmail programmer Dan Pupius whips Yahoo's photo-sharing site into shape. Some people use extensions for using Delicious bookmarks, banishing ads, and filling out forms, but this is my favorite Chrome extension so far. You can also download Fittr from Download.com.
The Yahoo logo is ugly but not too bothersome in my eyes. Instead, what I like best about Fittr Flickr is its keyboard navigation options. Once the extension is installed, you can type "?" to see the options, but the two I now use a lot are "." and "," to navigate forward and backward through a person's photostream. Typing "s" will star a photo as a favorite, and in a nice Google touch harkening to the vi text editor, "/" will put your cursor in the search field.
... Read moreAdobe Systems on Friday introduced a new Photoshop app for iPhone users that lets them edit photos from both their phone and their online library on Photoshop.com.
The app is free of charge and offers tools such as cropping, image rotation, color controls, and simple one-touch filter effects that can change the look and feel of shots all at once. It also features undo and redo controls so that if users make a mistake, or want to revert back to the original, it takes just a few taps.
As soon as users are done editing any photo, they can either save it back to their phone or upload it to their Photoshop.com account. The app also doubles as a photo-taking tool since you can simply take a photo, then have it upload right away.
What makes the app notable (besides from being from Adobe) is that the entire editing control set works off gestures. Instead of using dials or sliders, users just need to swipe their finger across the screen to change things such as brightness or color values. The same goes for its filters, which can be whisked from one end of the screen to the other instead of taking up more screen real estate or using a drop-down menu. It's one of the more intuitive control methods I've seen on a mobile photo-editing app, and can be quite precise once you get the hang of it.
The app is available now and is free of charge, although Adobe's free Photoshop.com service has a 2GB limit, which can be expanded with an annual paid storage plan.
Photoshop for iPhone lets you do all sorts of things to your photos, including beaming them back to Photoshop.com when you're done.
(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)More pics after the break.
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(Credit:
CNET / Josh Lowensohn)
The iPhone has many applications that let you view Web cams from around the world, but what about turning your phone into a remote camera of its own? A new app called IP Camera (warning: iTunes link) does just that. This $1.99 tool takes a photo from your iPhone's camera every 12 to 15 seconds, then posts it to a local Web page that can be accessed from other computers on the same network.
All that's needed for setup is to make sure your phone is on Wi-Fi, then to jot down the special local HTTP address it gives you. It will keep running until you quit the application manually or get a phone call; although like any good iPhone app it starts right back up when you're done with a call.
While there are very few bells and whistles, this app worked really well in my testing with an iPhone 3G. Although one big thing that's missing is a way to archive the photos it takes. You can temporarily stop its stream of photos, then save whichever one it's on, but it does not keep a "recents" on its Web page, or on your phone's camera roll.
I'd also like to see a way to change the frequency in which it takes photos, which could keep it from zapping too much juice if you're using it while disconnected from a power plug. And a way to run it with the display off would be nice too, since hitting the sleep button freezes the app into re-sending the same shot over and over again.
Tip: the iPod universal dock and iPhone 3G dock are both angled in such a way that makes it incredibly easy to perch your phone on a bookshelf or on top of a coworker's cube and get a great view. They'll never suspect you're watching their every move.
Related: DIY home surveillance with a Webcam
The IP Camera app turns your iPhone into a mini server, taking photos every 15 seconds and posting them almost-live to a Web page.
(Credit: CNET)
Last week's Picasa software update from Google brought with it a neat trick--facial recognition. But it wasn't the first free consumer photo-editing software to find faces. In January, Apple unveiled the latest version of iLife, which included an updated version of iPhoto that could detect and recognize faces in your photos. And this time last year, Microsoft released an updated version of its Windows Live Photo Gallery desktop software that could find faces inside of photos, though it couldn't (and still can't) recognize who's in them.
So, how do these three stack up? To figure that out, we put them to the test. Using 500 sample photos on fresh installs of each program, we tracked around how long each of the tools took to process all the photos, as well as some notable hits and misses from each.
To be fair, our results may not scale, or match the experience you will have. For one, we're using a test bed of photos that's almost entirely 12-megapixel JPEG files, whereas some people may be shooting smaller or larger files that may be in different formats and contain large groups of people--something that can slow these programs down. You're also likely to have a whole lot more than 500 photos sitting around on your computer; we certainly do.
Note: Adobe's PhotoShop Elements software (for Windows | Mac), which also includes a facial recognition feature was not included in this roundup since it's a paid application. Technically iPhoto is as well, but we included it since it comes free on all Macs.
The apps and workflows
iPhoto
iPhoto is the only product of the bunch that's Mac-only. It comes bundled with all new Macs, but the latest version (which includes face detection) must be purchased as a software upgrade if you've got iPhoto '08 or lower. We've included it in this roundup as a free product since it comes bundled with all new Macs.
Face scanning in iPhoto happens automatically, but it's largely a manual process, requiring users to "train" the system to recognize certain faces. The program took around nine minutes to scan through our 500 test photos and when it was done it didn't offer up any suggestions of photos with faces in them.
Instead, users are required to click on a photo with a face in it and hope the program picked it up. If it has, users can simply type the name in--which will auto complete if the person is in your Mac address book. If someone's face was not found, but you can see it in the photo, you can manually contain the face inside of a box, then tag it with their name.
iPhoto's system offers up suggestions of faces it thinks belong to certain people.
(Credit: CNET)After you add names to just few photos, iPhoto's system begins to piece together others that look the same--although it doesn't learn as fast as it does for photos where it already found the faces. In my testing, it only took two photos to get it to offer up some more suggestions. If those suggestions are correct, continuing to add them was just a matter of a few clicks.
iPhoto's system for doing this isn't perfect though.... Read more
