Originally uploaded by Ian Fuller
I don’t understand Flickr’s ‘interestingness’ metric.
According to Flickr this is the most interesting of the 200 photos in my photostream. Yet it’s been viewed less than 20 times, is nobody’s favourite and hasn’t been commented upon.
I sense a bug.
I have uploaded my limit of photos to both my Flickr accounts: Ian Fuller & GB-in-TH. Fortunately the counter resets tonight so I can upload more tomorrow. I am too ‘kee-niaw’ (tight fisted, Cheap Charlie) to buy a subscription!
Actually, I had a subscription for many years but I let it lapse as part of my ‘moving to Thailand’ economy drive. I used to use it as a backup medium and uploaded every photo I took without much effort to keyword them, or add them to groups.
Now with a photostream limit of 200 photos and a 100MB/month upload limit I am far more selective. I try to ensure that each image is better than my average shot or of something (I think is) interesting. I keyword each image, carefully select the groups I post it to and geocode all of them.
It’s interesting how Flickr has become a bit of an obsession with many people. I spend far too much time selecting and uploading images. But more than occasionally I meet interesting people online that make it worthwhile.
It’s probably true that no matter how obscure your interest you can find a group about it on Flickr. That of course leads to other photographers with a similar interest.
For some reason, despite some superior features and the Google brand, Google’s Picasa Web Albums have not achieved anything like the same scope or community. Maybe I’ll write more about my ideas on that in a separate blog post.
I discovered Cooliris via a note on dpreview.com – at http://www.dpreview.com/news/0906/09063001cooliris.asp.
I downloaded it for the first time and enjoyed using it with Flickr. Even though my internet connection in Thailand isn’t that fast I was able to look at many Flikr images very quickly. It seems to be a good idea to give it some time to settle down by caching a load of images. Then you can move randomly around a 3D effect “wall” of images very quickly.
It is a add-on for Firefox and probably other browsers.
Flickr’s normal web interface is slow and clunky that I rarely look beyond the first few pages of images in a group. I suspect they make it like that to limit the load on their servers. If they made it too easy to navigate people would use it more – so it is a compromise.
You can also use it to browse images on other sites and on your computer. The latter isn’t much use to me. Why? Because of course it views the original images as I imported them to Lightroom. All my editing improvements are in the Lightroom database. Cooliris also does not display DNG or RAW files.
I am sure a Cooliris Lightroom addin would be a great success.
One thing I don’t understand – how do they monetize (make money on) this tool? It’s clearly the result of a lot of work from some very clever people. They don’t even show me ads. The economics of the web still mystify me.
If you try it, please post here and let me know what you think.
I was uploading some images to Picasa. Lightroom crashed when I pressed the Export button in Library View. There wasn’t an error message, the window closed and the process terminated.
My heart sank. but when I restarted everything appeared to be fine. We’ll see.
I backed up the database with the option set to verify the database integrity. that didn’t produce any errors. But of course it’s impossible to prove there is nothing wrong with the database. I wish that process would produce a report so I can see what it has checked. I may not understand it but I’d feel better.
Maybe I’ll be testing database recovery from the XMP information in the image files soon.
My database is 605MB and catalogs 29,192 images. I hope that is not considered big and I am not pushing the envelope of Lightoom scalability.
It’s worrying when a crash happens with no error messages and is not reproducible. When I wrote software we used to joke about random un-reproducible bugs being caused by alpha particles. I wonder what today’s programmers blame.
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