Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Flickr”
Photos and the Changing Online Landscape
I’ve been on flickr nearly since it first started. It’s been a great community to learn about photography and hook up with others who are really into photography as well. I have 10 700 photos on flickr so I’ve looked on various flickr developments with fear because of how invested I am in the site. I was scared when Microsoft was going to buy them because they haven’t always been as open a company as Yahoo. Frankly, I wasn’t too happy when Yahoo bought flickr because they’ve been so stagnant and development did stall for many years there. I used to listen to a lot of photography podcasts and they were constantly talking about the fall of flickr because the largest photo repository online was now Facebook. There were two reasons I never put photos on Facebook. At first it’s because I wanted to aggregate all the comments and views in one place. Later it was because posting photos to Facebook was a bad deal copyright-wise.
5 Tips for a More Successful 365 Project
One of the biggest trends on flickr is to start a 365 Project. This usually means taking one self-portrait a day for an entire year. This project is often misunderstood by those outside of flickr, especially since they’re used to the selfie-culture of MySpace and Facebook. It’s not a vanity project. A 365 Project is about taking the adage about becoming a better writer through writing every day to photography. It also has a special bonus of teaching the photographer what it’s like to be the subject. Many of us photo-geeks are behind the camera way more often than we’re in front of it. Sometimes we struggle with how to communicate to our subjects how to achieve the vision we have in our head. By being both the photographer and the subject, we learn to appreciate both points of view.
Top 20 Most Viewed Photos
Yesterday we took a look at the most interesting, now let’s look at the most viewed! Two photos of Nam that I took with my holga have really been taking off.
The Initial Failure and Eventual Triumph of Social Media in my Attempts to Get Tech Support to Help
A little past the end of February I started having problems with my internet connected devices. In the basement we have a Roku box that the wife uses to watch Netflix. She reported that it was no longer connecting to Netflix. We’d had issues before with it needing to be re-registered with Netflix, but that did not seem to be the case. I’d click on the Netflix channel and it would say “retrieving movies” for a while and then pop back to the main menu. At first I thought something was wrong with the Roku box, so I tried the Amazon channel, but that worked and I was able to watch my content. I figured it’d resolve itself. So she just popped in the latest DVD from Netflix into our DVD player. Later that night she was in the bedroom and learned that our Samsung BluRay player was no longer connecting to Netflix. I thought that was weird, but figured maybe it was a Netflix problem. I checked on my computer and I couldn’t log into the Netflix site. Neither could Danielle on her computer. These were Linux boxes (Fedora and Ubuntu respectively) so I tried on my Windows computer. Strangely, that one could log in. That’s weird. I tried on both Firefox and Chrome with no difference. So then I tried the guest computer - that computer hadn’t been used since December and I knew it was working for Netflix back then. That would help me eliminate the possibility that I’d installed a distro update that had killed it for me. (I knew that didn’t totally make sense because of the BluRay Player and Roku) That one could reach it either. What was going on here? Was Netflix blocking Linux? Well, I figured it might go away so I waited until the next day.
Top 10 Most Viewed Photos on flickr
I’ve had a few changes. My photo of professor Delchamps continues to fall from #1 and we have the Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum photo enter the top 10 for the first time.
Dual Photojojo Edition
I’ve been slacking a bit with these, so here are two photojojo entries. The first one is from 25 Aug to 8 Sept. Apparently only my 365 was interesting at the time:
Top 20 Most Interesting Photos (According to flickr)
I haven’t done one of these since last October. At lot of the same photos are there, but there are a few less panda shots. A few of the photos have switched spots with each other. And there’s the relatively new photo of Dina and Brian. Interestingly (no pun intended), my most viewed photo is not in the top 20 most interesting. (So people on flickr like uninteresting shots?)
MoMA and Family BBQ
On my Father’s Day Weekend visit to NYC I finally got to see some MoMA exhibits I’d wanted to see for months. First off was a Picasso exhibit called “Variations”. Ever since my parents took me to the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, FL six years ago, I’ve been very interested in painters – especially artists from the 1930s-1950s and the surrealist and associated movements. Also, as a person of Spanish heritage, I’ve had a special interest in artists from the region. So I was very excited to see this Picasso exhibit.
365 Graph
Today I worked on a python program to create a graph of the views of all my photos in my 365 Project set. Here’s the result: (click for full size)
[caption id=“attachment_2937” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“365 Project Views Graph”] [/caption]
I was curious how they stacked up and I wanted to see if I could detect any patterns. Except for a few outliers, they’re mostly below 50 views per photo. I also expected to see more views after I started adding my photos to more 365 photo groups, but this is not the case. There do appear to be clusters of views. In other words, one highly viewed photo seemed to lift the ones by it. That one huge outlier is my photo making fun of causes of the swine flu. The other big one is my Heroin Chic photo, no surprises there. It was fun to create this and I learned a new python module. Also, even though it probably took me a bit more time to program than to do it manually, it will now automatically generate whenever I want, and that’s worth the time it took.
It's Been an Interesting Year
I was looking at my flickr 20 most interesting photos and I realized that a healthy portion of them were taken this year. Six of the top 20, in fact, were taken in 2009. Here they are:
Ten Thousand Views!
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“Who knew Inuyasha was that popular?”] [/caption]
This photos is my most viewed photo on flickr and today it reached 10,000 views! The pace of views has been insanely quick. (for one of my photos) It only had 5,000 views 18 months ago and ever since then I’ve been wondering when it would reach 10,000 views. Now the next milestone on the flickr views groups is 25,000 views. It’ll probably take a while to get there. I know there are some who get 25,000 views in one day, but I’m not one of those, so this is pretty exciting for me. 10,000 pairs of eyeballs have seen this photo and that’s awesome.
Picture of the Day (Part 1)
It’s been a really long time since I did this. Here are some of the non-Project 365 related photos since then.
Most Interesting Photos (according to flickr)
Things have changed a bit since last time, so I decided to once again cover what flickr thinks my 20 most interesting photos are.
It's Back!
A while back I unveiled a web utility for telling when it was time to move a photo from one flickr views group to another. It got tons of hits. Then I switched my server and it all stopped working. Beej had gone to a new framework for traversing the XML and had some problems porting it over. Finally got everything fixed up over the weekend and I can come out with version 0.3!
flickr Top 40 Evolution
While finishing up my photographic bio, I was copying and adapting my introduction from my flickr Top 40 book. So I decided to see how the top ten photos in my flickr Top 40 have changed in the past three years.
2006
Original Rank: 1 Current Rank: 5 Original Views: 455 Current Views: 1881 Camera: Kodak DX3600
flickr stuff
My most used tag on flickr - portrait.
And my most interesting photos continue to shuffle around! Here’s the latest top 10. You’ll see that this photo, which had become my 2nd most interesting photo at one time, is now off the top 10.
My First 10 Photos on Flickr
I wanted to see how I’ve changed as a photographer so I went to my first ten photos uploaded to flickr. The two biggest changes are that I am now really into portrait photography (although mostly natural portraits) and not quite as much into photoshop. My first two pages are mostly photoshop-manipulated photos. The next ten or so pages are photos documenting my life. I got to do some exciting stuff like going to NYC for the second time (but with a lot more time to look around) and also was busy documenting my life as a college student. I’m still into documenting my life and activities I participate in, but I’ve become more sophisticated in my techniques. I now know about shutter speed, aperture, and ISO and I strive to use them to get the best photos I can. I came to appreciate light and how it can work for and against the composition. I also learned when to use flash and when it’s useless. Before I thought no one would want to see an unaltered photo, hence the focus on the photoshopped photos. Then I looked through photography books and learned about street photography and documentary photography. I’ve grown quite a bit from the old days and here’s the proof.
Suddenly A Lot More Interesting?
Just four days ago, this photo was my 11th most interesting photo. Now it’s my second most interesting photo! Wow! I wonder what factors contributed to this? Surely the fact that it has risen quickly to already have 200+ views?
Flickr Stuff
Unfortunately, the flickr map page for my account only shows the last 30 or so photos on the map. So it’s pretty rare to get it zoomed out this far to show your GPS shots. I keep wishing they’d show all the GPS tagged photos (using some algorithm to combine them into one dot if you’re zoomed out far enough) so you can get an idea of where around the world the users have been. So after uploading a few Hawaii photos, it looked like this:
More Views Than in the Past Few Weeks
I recently posted the photos I took during Dina’s Graduation Party. I then posted the link to Dina’s wall on Facebook. Check out the spike in my views:
[caption id=“attachment_2307” align=“alignnone” width=“416” caption=“My Daily Views on Flickr”] [/caption]
That’s 1037 views in one day! Thanks guys!
Most viewed Photos (Prime Numbers)
Instead of the usual Top 20 most viewed photos, I wanted to indulge in my geek side and show only prime numbers from my top 200 most viewed photos.
Picture of the Day
I’ve started up Picture of the Day again in an attempt to hone my photography skills. Here are the last three entries - ending with the one for today.
flickr programmers are fans of The Simpsons
The other day I was messing around with flickr’s slideshow feature and I came across this:
And here it is zoomed in:
This comes from an episode where the characters are discussing the founder of Springfield who uses the word Embiggen and some teachers debate whether it’s a real word. I love the way programmer put little homages into the code they work on.
Photos with Most Comments on Flickr
Some of these are the same as the previous two days, unsurprisingly. But some are new to this list..
Top 20 Pictures on Flickr
The top ten are mostly the same photos they’ve been for a while now, but the bottom ten have changed a bit. It’s very, very intersting (to me, at least) that every digital camera I’ve ever used is represented in the Top 20.
My Top 10 Most Interesting Pictures
Flickr has a secret algorithm for producing a list of the most interesting pictures. So here are what Flickr thinks are my 10 most interesting pictures. Do you agree?
Photos Moving up The Ladder
Here are some photos that recently went up in views and I wanted to share. From Views 75 to Views 100: The Old Gun Factory - another view -bw by DJOtaku, on Flickr
My Latest Procedural Art
More math-based art, but I really like how this came out a LOT better than my experiment with Fibonacci. Check them out!
Tight Cornell Archemedean Spiral by DJOtaku, on Flickr A really tight Archemedean Spiral featuring my photos tagged with Cornell
Portrait Archemedean Spiral by DJOtaku, on Flickr An Archemedean Spiral based on my Portrait Photos
My latest Procedural Art Experiment
I think that nearly everyone who has ever learned about the Fibonacci Sequence is fascinated by how quickly it grows. I wanted to illustrate that, so I created this collage with some modifications to J im’s makeCollage.pl script. The rules were that each picture takes the place of a number on the Fibonacci Sequence and is displayed that many times. Of course, I skipped Fibonacci number 1, which is 0. No point in having a picture show up 0 times. So the first picture is shown once, as is the second. Then two times, then three, then…..
Procedural Art
edited to add the tags I used
That collage was created by a program. I certainly don’t have the patience to arrange all of those photos one-by-one!I told the program to download all of my pictures tagged with Eric Danny David and Danielle and create this collage.
But does that make this any less of a work of art? I think the answer is no. The artwork was just created procedurally instead of visually. To argue that this is less artful is to say that the The Lion King isn’t art because the wildebeast scene was created procedurally. Of course, in this situation I don’t see myself as the artist, but the guy who wrote the program is the collage artist. It’s his procedures which created the art. His name is Jim Bumgardner and he’s a really nice guy who helped me fix up the script. I copied it from his book, Flickr Hacks, but unfortunately, as the code he relied on has changed, it didn’t work as posted. In fact, here is the fix you need in his program, makeCollage.pl :
More Flickr Hacking
Over the last two days, between playing Portal and Age of Empires III (both of which are…awesome!), I’ve been doing a little more flickr hacking. This is very closely related to my previous Flickr program where I checked if my pictures were ready to be moved into the next views groups.
This time I wanted to see which of my photos were not in any groups. So in the case that I’ve missed putting a photo into the 25 views groups because it’s a few pages back and I really don’t have time to go back through all of my photos to find the pictures to put into the groups. I tried that once and it was excrutiatingly slow - even slower than figuring out if it was time to graduate my pictures out of the views groups. So here’s the output of my current program:
Flickr Views Program
I forgot to post this about 1 or so weeks ago when I finsihed up the script. So here’s how the output looks on my flickr views program:
Now my next step is to put it on the web. However, the Python API I’m using doesn’t do web-based program authentication. It also doesn’t handle multiple user authentication, which I’d eventually like to do. Right now I’m thinking of porting it to Perl or PHP. I’ll keep you posted.
Hacking Flickr
So, thanks to a problem I had with rigging up Nick in " Sugar", I’ve temporarily lost interest in animation. This happens to me all the time, and I think I’ve mentioned it before in previous blog posts that I’m too lazy to look up before that I tend to gain and lose interest in my hobbies. For example, I haven’t touched the Wii since I beat Mario Galaxy during Christmas and until this recent problem with “Sugar” happened, I hadn’t done any programming in about a year. Even my interest in photography has ebbed so much that I let my subscription to Digital Camera Magazine lapse.
Social Web Part 2: Mugshot
Mugshot is the website that continues to surprise me the more I use it. At first it was just a website with an unusual purple theme. Then it was the very frustrating site with the purple theme. Now it just may be one of the most interesting and underrated sites of the year.
In case you haven’t clicked on the link yet, Mugshot is a social web aggregator. You sign up to Mugshot and then let it know about all of the social networks you’re a part of such as Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, delicious, Picasa, digg and Reddit. Additionally, you add in some feeds from Amazon.com, last.fm, and Netflix. Finally, if you enter your blog address it tracks new posts. It then uses this to track all of these in one convenient place. The thinking is that you and your friends all sign up for Mugshot and then you have one-stop-shopping to find out everything that’s up with your friends.
How Flock has completely changed my browsing habits
Flock has completely changed how I interact with the so-called Social Web. In my case, that means Facebook and Flickr. Ever since I first started using Flock and received the help I needed to get the blogging to work, I’ve been using it every day. In fact, that only thing that has kept me from having it be my only/default browser is that it’s extremely slow in Flickr when loading pages. Also, in any pages with videos (whether from Youtube or Vimeo) there is a video and audio stutter that renders the video unwatchable. But that’s the only real negative I’ve been able to find with Flock.
Surprises in Flickr Views
Last time I checked on that picture it had 25 Views. As of this writing it has 230 Views. That’s not a very high number of views, but for the amount of time it’s been up (about 5 months), the subject matter (a plain view of The White House), and lack of groups (when I wrote this it was in just three groups - although I’ll be adding it into more now) it IS indeed a high number of views. Which just goes to show that you don’t need pictures of naked women to get views on Flickr (as some have argued).
Further Review of Flock 0.9
So I’m using Flock daily now for my web browsing to see how I like it. Since I don’t usually go to Facebook on my own, it’s nice to see the notifications within Flock. Thus, I’ve been more responsive to my Facebook private messages, a good thing since my second-cousin recently caught up with me on Facebook. So I’m liking the Facebook integration even more than I thought I would since I’m not a Facebook-heavy person.