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Five Years of Flickr

Walkway in Sackville, New BrunswickFive years ago today Flickr started and it changed the way that people view and share photos online. It also was the first place that I really used and understood tagging and folksonomies. I joined in August of 2004, and the photo of the walkway in Sackville, New Brunswick is the first image that I uploaded to my photostream.

A few minutes ago I uploaded my 9,211th photo (my 7,451st public one) to Flickr and I’m so glad that Flickr is still around to let me share photos with the world, my friends and family. It was a different world in 2004 and while I signed up for Flickr fairly early, it took me a while to upload my first image. When I would explain how I found this neat place to put photos online it would often result in a blank stare or the question, “why”? But now in the age of Facebook, not many people wonder about sharing photos, videos or other parts of their life and Flickr laid much of that groundwork for me.

While sharing is a lot of fun, it’s the community that got me hooked with a diverse range of people whose images I enjoyed seeing and commenting on. When people started commenting on my photos it really started to make a lot of sense. Then the group of friends grew as did the groups and I started taking photos just about every day. Flickr is a wonderful way to communicate how you see the world and it transcends language and crosses borders.

The evolution of tags makes it much easier to find photos and since I fairly compulsively tag my images, I can also find something much easier online on Flickr than I can on my hard drive. The free form tagging or “folksonomy” that is created is a vast pool of information that grows and provides a more valuable context for photographs. Tags give you a way to identify photos and group them together with others who use the same tags for events and places. With the Flickr API (Application Program Interface), there is a wonderful range of applications and sites that enhance and use the millions of photos there. My favourite (and essential) add-on is Frasier Speir’s Flickr Export for iPhoto, which is how I upload photos, tag them, and add them to groups and sets.

I still check in with Flickr every day and upload photos every week. The evolution of the site has continued with the addition of location-based geotagging, the fascinating concept of interestingness as a way to find photos, and video. But Flickr is about the images and the people and it’s still what keeps me there. Happy Birthday Flickr!

February 11, 2009 , , , ,

One Thousand Photos

Film on a ReelI just uploaded a photo to Flickr that brings the size of my archive to one thousand photos. That’s a lot and it confirms my belief that Flickr is a killer app. It’s actually changed the way that I think about photos and I’m taking a lot more. There are many ways to upload and share photos, but what makes Flickr great is the social component. When I started uploading pictures I was thinking that it was a great way to share photos with my family as it just didn’t make any more sense to keep emailing the same photos around all of the time. The other thing is that I didn’t want to upload photos of the kids and family events for the world. Sharing pictures with the family worked great, but it wasn’t until I started getting comments on my public photos and started participating in groups that I really started to get more heavily addicted.
What is wonderful about Flickr is that you can connect with people from around the world and communicate visually. You find people who have a similar visual sensibility to you. Now if someone adds me as a contact I look at their photos to try and figure out why. Usually it only takes a few images to figure out what you share in common, whether it is an interest in things that are rusting, similar framing or topics. I look forward to seeing the images that my contacts have uploaded and I want to share more.
The other thing that this sharing has encouraged me to do is more fully embrace Creative Commons licensing as all of my public photos have an “attribution-NonCommercial” license. I love being part of a community that communicates through images.

December 18, 2004 , ,

Flickr

I like to think that I’m an alpha geek. I try as much stuff out as I can and I like to be able to see things that are coming or things that I want to see develop. There were some rumblings about Flickr and I noticed it and looked at the site and the photos there a few times and read about it, but never signed up. Finally I did and I was hooked fairly quickly. Flickr is a way to share photos which isn’t really that revolutionary, but it’s how they do it that is remarkable. There are a bunch of ways to put galleries together to share images, but they can be a bit of a pain. If you want to have more personal photos you can set up rules and passwords, but that’s not a lot of fun. Flickr really clicked for me when I realized that I was emailing the same photos to different people. It would make more sense to have the photos in one place and let them go there. Then it clicked even more when I made the connection between RSS and Flickr. In the same way that I don’t need to go to a different site to see if it has been updated, it’s easier to check the feed. With Flickr you have an imagestream, which consists of the photos that you upload. You can also view streams by how they are tagged or who uploads them. When this is combined with the ability to share certain images with contacts or friends or family or everyone it moves into the killer app territory. It’s in beta now and all of the details aren’t worked out, but I’m hooked. It’s easier to understand once you use it though. The interesting thing is not that you have a limited amount of space, but it is how the space is limited. You have limits on how much you upload each month. So the bias of the system is to post stuff every month (or day or hour if you start to use it a lot). If you have a cell phone with a camera you can send images directly to Flickr. If you have a blog you can blog directly from Flickr. Technologically it’s great, but the social component is what will make it stick… that and the well-documented Flickr API that lets you make other cool new things out of it and of course they have a blog. They also have Creative Commons licensing built-in as well! Hopefully as it develops and the pricing scheme is worked out it will take off. This is going to be very big I think. In some ways I think that Flickr and the RSS and Atom feeds that it generates will also help a lot of people understand why they would want to use feeds. Outside of the more tech-savvy blogging world there are a lot of people who use the Web and don’t use feeds. NetNewsWire has changed the way that I view the Web because of how it lets me use the feeds and I think that Flickr is dramatically changing the way that I see sharing images. You can go to my Flickr page and you’ll only see the photos that you’re allowed to see… if you’re a contact you’ll see more, if you’re not you’ll only see the public photos. It’s simple, functional and addictive!

September 6, 2004 , , , , , , ,

Circular Logic

Last week I uploaded Circular Logic: 6 Loops in Wolfville to my space at ZeD. The Circular Logic project originally happened for the Digital Dialogues exhibition at the Acadia Art Gallery that was curated by Gair Dunlop. I’d been working with QuickTime VR for a while and was thinking of doing something with that. Then I started thinking about going around in circles and taking stills along the way. When that was combined with stop-motion I thought that I would have something that looked like pixilation but where the camera moved instead of objects.
I tried some experiments and it worked if I made sure that there was a focal point in each image. That’s the reason for going in circles around a building or large public object as it gives you something to focus on and gives me a way to keep the image in the frame consistent. I like to think of it as the (somewhat) inappropriate use of technology. I wanted to use a digital still camera to take single frames that I combined together to create an animation. For the loops around Wolfville I took over 1000 stills that I combined together in QuickTime Pro and then manipulated them in Final Cut Pro.
For the show at the gallery I burned the loops onto a DVD that looped and it played on a television set in the gallery. Later I made a shorter, more linear version for a screening at Salvation in Halifax and that’s what I have up at ZeD now.

June 25, 2004 , , ,

Hand Processing Workshop Photos

I put some of the photos that I took during the recent hand processing film workshop at the NB Filmmakers Co-op up on my Mac.com site. They are in the Hand Processing Workshop Gallery. I had a great time and the images give a bit of a glimpse of things that I noticed during the workshop.

June 11, 2004 , , , ,

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