When Mirco Wilhelm tried to log into his Flickr account yesterday, he was surprised to find that his 5-year-old Pro account with roughly 4,000 photographs had completely vanished. It then dawned on him that only a week earlier he had reported another account for posting stolen photographs.
Read more…
In case you’re wondering whether Yahoo still cares about Flickr (acquired in 2005), the answer appears to be yes. Chief Product Officer Blake Irving recently tweeted a short message affirming the company’s support for the popular photo sharing service, saying,
Q. Is Yahoo! committed to Flickr? A. Hell yes we are! We love this product and team; on strategy and profitable. #
How profitable? No one (except them) knows. Photography blogger Thomas Hawk estimates that it brings in about $50 million annually.
This should give loyal Flickr members some peace of mind knowing that even though they might sometimes feel unloved, Flickr doesn’t appear headed towards the same fate as Delicious, the bookmarking service also acquired in 2005 that Yahoo doesn’t love anymore.
(via Thomas Hawk)
Tag clouds are a neat way of visualizing what content is about, and Tagerator is a simple program that generates them for your Flickr photo tags. Created by Jeremy Brooks (the guy behind SuperSetr), the simple Java app will run on any computer that has Java 1.6 installed. Besides its ability to generate the tag clouds for you, it stores the tag information gleaned from your account to disk, allowing you to use the tag/count information however you’d like.
Tagerator (via Thomas Hawk)
Flickr member Deeepa Praveen 4-year-old pro account was deleted recently without any warning or explanation, and in response she created this graphic showing what she lost in the blink of an eye. While Flickr is undoubtedly one of the best photo-sharing services on the web right now, the fact that pro accounts can be permanently deleted without any warning doesn’t sit too well with many users. Even if the deleted accounts deserved to be removed, it would be much nicer if they followed a notice and were temporarily removed at first.
What are your thoughts on how Flickr handles account deletions?
(via Thomas Hawk)
A couple days ago Flickr published a blog post featuring a handful of member photographs of the December 2010 lunar eclipse. The first image in the post was “The 2010 Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse over Jersey City, NJ” (shown above) by photographer Steve Kelly.
While the blog mention instantly generated tens of thousands of views, many of the visitors began commenting that something about the image was amiss. Apparently Flickr thought so too, and the image was soon wiped from the blog post.
Read more…
SortMyPhotostream is a tool that most Flickr users will have no use for, but one that some might find invaluable. It all depends on whether you would like your Flickr photos’ upload dates to reflect the day they were actually taken. For example, if you’re doing a Project 365 and would like each photo to show up on the day it was taken in your calendar view, then this app can help you make that happen.
All you do is give the app permission to access your Flickr account, and it automatically changes the “Uploaded on” date of each photo to the “Created on” date found in the EXIF data. If this isn’t the kind of thing you need, don’t play around with the app — changes made by it are permanent.
Heather Champ is cofounder of Fertile Medium, an online community consultancy. She was formerly the Director of Community at Flickr and the co-founder of JPG Magazine, which she started with her husband Derek Powazek. Visit her website here.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us about yourself and your background?
Heather Champ: Living in San Francisco, I’m roughly 2,439 miles and worlds away from Ottawa, the city of my birth. There’s very little of my accent left, though there will be a moment when I can see the wheels turning in someone’s brain and that follows with “are you Canadian?” I have a studio fine arts degree and have hopped and skipped my way through a variety of careers that have built upon that creative foundation.
Read more…
The above photo by Aaron Yeo, titled “Woodwards Collage“, has the honor of being the 5 billionth photograph uploaded to Flickr. According to the blog Media Culpa, Flickr receives about a billion photographs per year, while 2.5 billion photos are uploaded per month to Facebook.
There’s a mind-boggling number of photos being created and uploaded to the Interwebs every day.
(via Small Aperture)
Image credit: Woodwards Collage by yeoaaron
Now here’s a “photomantic” story: Andy met Kayla two years ago through Flickr when they were 2,300 miles apart. Andy just popped the question a few days ago, and hid the engagement ring inside his Lensbaby!
In an announcement published on his blog, Andy writes,
Today I proposed to my lovely fiancée Kayla. We met through a flickr related chat room, and our photography is what brought us together. Over the past 2 years, we’ve become friends, best friends, love birds, and finally, fiancés. Thank you Kayla. Thank you for completing me. Thanks for all the memory cards we’ve filled. Thank you for the countless more we’ll fill in our life together. I love you.
PS: The ring was hidden inside my lensbaby, which I used to propose to her after taking her picture with it :)
NASA joined The Commons on Flickr today, creating 3 sets with 180 beautiful historic photographs from various points in the agency’s rich history. If you love looking at launch photographs, one of the three sets is dedicated to those.
As with most media that comes out of NASA, their photographs on Flickr aren’t under copyright.
