Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

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.

Flickr Blog has two good news:

1. Flickr Uploadr 3.0 is available.  Those of you using Flickr Uploadr to send pictures to you Flickr photo stream might want  to upgrade.  The new version offers a bunch of handy functionality, such as tagging, naming, and describing photos, as well as reordering.  These are much faster to do on your computer than over the network, so it should speed up your processing quite a bit.
2. Statistics for Pro accounts.  If you have a Pro account, you can enable statistics and enjoy some graphs.  It takes about 24 hours for the stats to appear once you enable them, so be a little patient.  Finally, you’ll know  how people are finding your pictures, where from they are coming, and what are looking at the most.

Flickr is fantastic. Although I ran out of my bandwidth limits, I still visit it daily for a fresh portion of visual pleasure.

I am looking through a whole bunch of images daily. Sometimes though, I find something exceptionally perfect. Such images have to bookmarked (or “favourited” in Flickr tongue) immediately.

Every time I come back to my collection of favourites, I discover this or that common trend. It’s interesting to see how a bunch of images that I favourited over some time point me to things about myself that I’ve never noticed.

Today I discovered yet another fetish of mine. I doubt that there is even one word to describe it. Consider these two examples - one and two. (Women, dressed for chilly weather, drinking hot drinks from cups?) I favourited these two images days apart. On closer inspection of my favourites, I’ve also found this image, which is somewhat different in style and execution, but still features the same subjects (woman and cup).

I’ll be watching myself for more…

In the excitement of move to Flickr, I totally forgot about one thing - bandwidth limitations. Even when I was reminded that they exist, I simply ignored the signs. Even though I have a professional account that allows for 2 GBytes per month, I should have checked the size of my photo gallery before I started the move.

I have uploaded albums from 1995, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and a few from 2004, when my limits were out. I checked the size of my entire photo gallery and was somewhat shocked to find out that it was more than 2 year’s worth of uploads at this rate.

Apparently, there is a thread at Flickr forums where several people ask Flickr to give them a way to upload more. Even if that means paying more. I joined with ‘me too’. Flickr is a nice tool and the more I use the more I like. There are tons of features, and possibly the cleanest user interface out of all webservices out there.

In the light of this limitation however, I’ll have to somewhat review my migration process.

Firstly, I’ll be adding new images to my current gallery, not to Flickr. Hopefully, I’ll be uploading faster than making new pictures. So, eventually I’ll have it all at Flickr.

Secondly, I’ll have to trim my photo gallery a bit. There’s just too much noise, which I don’t care about. Although some people would probably find some pictures pleasurable. I’ll be going through the gallery, deleting bad pictures, and slightly compressing the rest of them. Images that come out of my camera are usually bigger than 3 MBytes. But they are totally uncompressed. A reduction of 10% quality, which is not even noticable can bring the image size down to 1 MByte. Before I didn’t have any space or bandwidth limitations, so I didn’t care. Now, I am very willing to sucrifice 10% of quality for 66% of the size. I am not going to resize pictures to 1024×768 though.

Thirdly, my uploads to Flickr will be in large batches. So, instead of adding a few pictures every day, evenly through a month, I’ll be adding a few thousand during the first few days, until I hit my bandwidht limitation. This way, I’ll save a lot of time, albeit will make it hard to follow for those of you who do. That’s temporary though, so, you can ignore me for the time being.

I guess that’s it.

As I mentioned earlier, I am migrating all my pictures to Flickr.

Previously I was posting only selected images that I considered worthy. It was interesting to see reactions of other people (comments, bookmarks) to those images.

This time, I removed all pictures that I had there, and started from scratch. I started with the oldest albums of 1995, 1996, and so on. I am currently working my way through 2003.

Again, it is interesting to see how other Flickr users react to this images. Since the images I am uploading now are very different (more noise, less post-processing, less quality) from those that I had before, the reactions are different too.

Below are a few examples of what I am talking about.

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