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.
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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 :)

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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.

NASA on The Commons (via Flickr Blog)

The Royal Family is really getting into social media: in addition to their YouTube channel, Twitter, and series of iTunes podcasts, the Family now has a Flickr account which went live to the public this morning. Currently, the British Monarchy’s photostream contains 683 uploads of both recent and older historical photographs. According to an announcement from the Royal Collection, photos will be continually added to the account. The Flickr account launch was scheduled to coincide with the summer opening of Buckingham Palace. Some of the images featured on the photo-sharing site are to be featured in the exhibit, The Queen’s Year, which opens tomorrow at the Palace.

If you login to Flickr today, you should see a notice at the top of your photo pages informing you of a soon-to-be-released redesign and allowing you to preview it. The new design features the photograph much more prominently, upping the size from 500px wide to 640px on a wider page. The goal seems to be making the page cleaner and more minimalistic, with many of the icons moving to drop-down menus. There’s also a heavier emphasis on geo-tagging, which appears as a small map to the right of the photo.
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Flickr has just announced a new feature that lets you to add a “Request to License” link to all of your photos stored on the service, allowing visitors who wish to license your photos to send you the request through Getty.

Visit any of your photos while logged in, and you should see a link under “Additional Information” that says “Want to license your photos through Getty images?”. Follow the instructions after clicking this to change your preferences.

Once you’ve enabled the “Request to License” link, visitors can click through to be put in touch with a Getty representative, who will then handle the details and send you a FlickrMail with the licensing request.

The companies are mum regarding the rates paid for photos, but BBC News reports that the average rate may be between $150 and $240.

One complaint that members are making on the Flickr forum is that the feature is globally enabled or disabled rather than allowing you to choose which photographs to show the link for. Presumably Flickr is working on changing this to give users more control.

Have you sold any photos on Flickr through Getty? If so, what was your experience?

Five years after acquiring the photo sharing service Flickr, Yahoo has finally obtained ownership of the domain name Flicker.com.

One of the common characteristics of Web 2.0 companies is the use of misspelled words in their name, since the correctly spelled words are typically too pricey for a bootstrapped web startup to purchase early on.

Flickr was one such company, settling for the now ubiquitous name after being unable to purchase Flicker.com.

As you might expect, the enormous popularity of Flickr has led to an absurd amount of traffic for Flicker.com, as people often type in the domain name either as a typo or being ignorant of the “correct” spelling”.
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Flickr has just announced a new feature that allows you to connect your Flickr account to your Facebook account to automatically update your Facebook friends when you upload new photographs. The above screenshot published by Flickr shows what the resulting Facebook status updates look like. To get started, visit the Sharing & Extending section of your Flickr account settings to connect your accounts in a few easy steps. For those of you who are already using the Flickr app on Facebook, Flickr recommends turning off that app and using this new feature instead.

Two weeks ago we posted on the Geotaggers’ World Atlas, a project by Eric Fischer that shows heat maps of where photographs are taken in big cities, created using geolocation data from Flickr and Picasa photos.

Fischer now has a new set of maps called Locals and Tourists that distinguish between photos taken by inhabitants of the city and others who are simply passing through.

Some people interpreted the Geotaggers’ World Atlas maps to be maps of tourism. This set is an attempt to figure out if that is really true. Some cities (for example Las Vegas and Venice) do seem to be photographed almost entirely by tourists. Others seem to have many pictures taken in piaces that tourists don’t visit.

Blue points are locals (determined by whether the person has a history of photographing in that city), red points are tourists, and yellow points indicate photos for which it cannot be determined.

San Francisco

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