Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Flickr user Amsterdamned! published this compilation - “The Flickr Portrait Gallery Hall of Excellence 2007″.  Click on the image  above to go its Flickr page, which has links to the original images in larger size.  These are so good - they are an absolute must see!

Flickr has recently added support for videos.  Many thought (and some still do) that it was an April Fool’s joke, because the information broke out on the 1st of April, but it seems that it was no joke after all.

When I heard about it, I was a bit surprised, and had a slight negative feeling about it.  Flickr seemed to do just fine as they were.  The photo site community is very different from the video site community. And don’t we already have YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, and a tonne of other video sites?  Why Flickr should be spoiled by videos?

But after I spent some time reading about and checking the implementation, I have to say that I like it.  There is a FAQ about this new feature which does a good job explaining the idea behind it.  There are many ways to define what a video is and how it should be handled.  Flickr went for a very nice definition - “a long photo“.  They have imposed a 90 second time limit on all videos, as well as allowed uploads to Pro accounts only for now.  That’s about as right as it could have been done.

Indeed there is a need for short video support on Flickr.  I do have a YouTube account, but it’s not what I need right now.  I am not doing a lot of videos, and the ones I do usually complement the photos nicely.  Most of my videos are very short and rather personal.  For these needs, YouTube is a bit too much with its noisy community, channels, and subscribers.  But Flickr videos seems to be spot on! I suspect there going to be a few changes and adjustments to the current functionality in the near future, but even as it is now, it’s pretty handy.

Have you tried Flickr videos?  What do you think?

For years now Flickr has been greeting newly logged in users with messages in different languages.  It’s a really nice touch with helps one learn something new each day, but without getting in the way.   While I do pay attention to these messages, usually they don’t puzzle me for more than a couple of seconds (as in “how do I read that?”).

Today, however, was different.  It was the first time ever that I was greeted in Lolcat.

Lolcat, if you don’t know, is a sort of broken, but funny, English language, which usually goes together with an image of a cat.  The name comes from LOL - an acronym for “laughing out loud”, and cat - an animal on the picture.

As I said, it was the first time I saw Lolcat used somewhere outside of a lolcat web site (like  i can haz cheezburger).  And I was surprised to see at Flickr, which is not exactly the most serious of web sites, but is still rather big and popular.

My second reaction to this Lolcat spotting was to write this post.  My first reaction was “Oh culz!!!”

Once in a while I go through my Flickr favourites (unfortunately no RSS feed yet).  And every time I do so, I am amazed by this or that - models, lights, moments, post-processing, etc.  Today, I was impressed (again) by the beauty of women.  So much, in fact, that I decided to share the feeling via this blog.

And here is another one, totally different:

There are, of course, plenty of more, but most of those pictures don’t allow for bloggers to re-post.  So you’ll have to see them on Flickr. Because if you don’t, you are missing out.  Really.

After reading this post at Gonzo Engaged I decided to take another look at Flickr Community Guidelines.  After all I have more than 11,000 pictures there and I don’t want to have any surprises, if you know what I mean.

Here are two quotes that I think are worth a reminder:

Don’t upload anything that isn’t yours.
This includes other people’s photographs and/or stuff that you’ve collected from around the Internet. Accounts that consist primarily of such collections may be terminated at any time.

Don’t use Flickr for commercial purposes.
Flickr is for personal use only. If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account. Any other commercial use of Flickr, Flickr technologies (including APIs, FlickrMail, etc), or Flickr accounts must be approved by Flickr. For more information on leveraging Flickr APIs, please see our Services page. If you have other open questions about commercial usage of Flickr, please feel free to contact us.

Oh, and just in case you noticed that somebody took your pictures and uploaded them into their photo stream, and done so without your permission, here is an advice from Flickr on how to behave:

Copyright Infringement
If you see your photographs in another member’s photostream, don’t panic. This is probably just a misunderstanding and not malicious. A good first step is to contact them and politely ask them to remove it. If that doesn’t work, please file a Notice of Infringement with the Yahoo! Copyright Team who will take it from there.
You may be tempted to post an entry in our public forum about what’s happening, but that’s not the best way to resolve a possible copyright problem. We don’t encourage singling out individuals or their photos in our public forum.