All Posts Tagged With: "flickr"

According to this particular Flickr mosaic meme, this image below represents me.

The rules:

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food? 
3. What high school did you go to? 
4. What is your favorite color? 
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink? 
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up? 
10. What do you love most in life? 
11. One Word to describe you. 
12. Your flickr name.

I threw in an extra image to balance out the mosaic.

Attribution: 1. Gabbra woman – Kenya, 2. Mango, 3. Deep Creek, 4. green & turquoise, 5. The Haitian, 6. macro water drop, 7. Santorini – Oia – Greece, 8. Cinnamon Ice Cream & Raspberry Sorbet, 9. Don’t Worry Be Happy, 10. My Wild River loves you!!! )), 11. unsure…, 12. The Road Home, 13. BONUS • HITOP

Many are no doubt wondering why I watermark many of the photos I post online. The most obvious reason is that I want to generate traffic for my blogs and other websites. However, this is not the only reason. Almost all of my photos on Flickr (except those with people) have a Creative Commons License 3.0 which allows the end user to 1) to copy, distribute and transmit the work and 2) to adapt the work provided 1) the work is attributed in a manner specified by the author or licensor (me), 2) the work is not used for commercial purposes, and 3) if the work is altered, transformed, or built upon, the resulting work is distributed only under the same or similar license to this one.

Many seem to grasp the meaning of the license while many do not. I have seen my images show up on blogs and even in a presentation from MIT. These were fine as they were not commercial uses. Where I start to have a problem is when images are used for commercial purposes without my express permission. There seems to be some debate as to what commercial means. For me if your site intends to make money (either through direct sales of products, through advertisement, or whatever) your usage is commercial.

I have had pleasant experiences with people asking for permission to use my images and I’ve had not-so-pleasant experiences. One woman (I presume) asks for permission to use one of my images for some jewelry she was creating. I asked for her website URL and photos of similar jewelry she has made before. She refused saying that it was only courtesy that she was asking for permission because my Creative Commons license entitled her to use the image anyway. Another bad experience was this image lifted from Webshots. Webshots used to have a copyright message but replaced it with “uploaded by [username]“. At the time I was not marking my images. While the photo is properly attributed to me, they have watermarked the image themselves and the site is obviously commercial. I contacted the owner of the site and never received a response. Unfortunately, I don’t have much recourse since the site is operated in the Netherlands. I’m especially upset since I stuck my hand practically in the bush where that cayman thought it was hiding to get that photo.

The fact of the matter is that no matter what you try to do to protect your images, everything online is fair game. If this is going to happen anyway, I can watermark the images to 1) better identify my original images and 2) get some attribution. I’ve been experimenting in ways to watermark images internally which would make them more identifiable when searching online. (Of course, that will do nothing to identify print publications.) Once I perfect my method I may talk about it on my GDGT GRL blog.

If you read my previous blog entry (She’s Got a Habit) you know that I’m using a Palm LifeDrive and a Motorola RAZR to access the web when I’m mobile. On my trip to the Dominican Republic I realized how much mobile websites suck.

Mobile websites are designed to use less graphics, Javascript, etc. so that sites load easily on mobile devices including cell phones, PDAs, etc. Granted these sites are designed to be lighter versions of the actual websites, I’ve found that the absence of certain features have to be an oversight or design flaw.

My first example is T-Mobile. I was sitting in Dulles wanting to go online. I put my Palm LifeDrive on the WiFi available at the airport. After looking at the available plans I decided that it was a better deal to sign up for the $19.99/month access plan being a T-Mobile subscriber. I log into the T-Mobile site and it automatically puts me on the mobile version of the site. On this site there is no option to subscribe to a WiFi plan. The only options available were to add more text messages to my plan. I kept trying to get out of the mobile site but I was stuck in mobile hell. The problem with this is that my LifeDrive can display full websites (the site that showed the access plans was a normal website) so I should never have been sent to the mobile site. In addition, the mobile site should have more options to change or update your plan. T-Mobile lost $19.99/month from me.

My next example is Flickr. I took a photo of the Caribbean with my cellphone and sent it to Flickr. The way I sent the photo set it to private so I logged in to Flickr from my phone to change it. Flickr showed me that the photo is private but did not give me an option to change this setting. Flickr does allow me to add comments and the like through its mobile site.

I also used Yahoo!Mail and GMail’s mobile sites while on vacation. Yahoo!Mail was more reliable but it was down for an entire day. (I know I shouldn’t have been looking at it on vacation anyway.) I normally have trouble connecting to GMail’s mobile site so I was surprised that I was able to connect to it. When I was able to connect to it I had no problems.

Surprisingly, I had few problems connecting to Twitter’s mobile site (when it was up). My only issue with it is that I am not able to see replies and direct messages from the mobile site. Twitter does, however, allow me choose whether or not I access the normal site or the mobile site so I still have access to those features.

My main problem with mobiles sites is when sites use browser detection to automatically send me to the mobile site and then the mobile site doesn’t have all the options available. My suggestions are simple: 1) If you use browser detection to send people to your mobile site, give us a choice on the mobile site to use the normal site. 2) Add commonly used features to the mobile site.

As an aside: Since I did not experience this on the Blackberry, I’m wondering what about its browser is different that the browser detectors don’t treat it as a mobile device. I ran into problems with this when I actually wanted to go to United’s mobile site to find out where my connecting gate was in Denver as the actual site was taking too long to load.

I was looking through my Flickr stream for photos of myself for something (contrary to popular opinion there are some in there) and I ran across the following photos that I hadn’t noticed before. Sure I took them but when I’m on vacation I tend to take a lot (and I mean a LOT) of photos so some slip through the cracks.

The photo at the top is from the Grand Canyon West in Peach Springs, Arizona. The other photo is from the Patagonia region of Argentina near El Calafate. I think the sky is very interesting in these photos.

I have more sky photographs on Flickr as well. I have more than a few but not too many.

I have been contacted by Schmap again regarding permission to use one of my photos from Flickr – this time for their Schmap Turin Third Edition. The photo they would like to use is of a copy of the Shroud of Jesus. The photo has been shortlisted meaning they are considering it for their guide. It may or may not make it in should I give them permission to use it.

Surely I have better photos to use than that one. I love sharing my photos with anyone who wants to see them but I’d rather share the better photos. I guess it being a travel guide they are just looking for photos of the sites they are recommending instead of me trying various angles to make artsy photos.

As a side note, Yahoo! Photos will close on Thursday, September 20, 2007. (I never liked it so there’s no loss for me.) They have set up processes to easily move photos to Flickr, KODAK Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, or Photobucket. Since I use Flickr, I chose to have my Yahoo! Photos moved there. As a result Flickr gave me 3 extra months on my Pro account. Cool.

Tags: schmap flickr yahoo photos turin photo inclusion

I have a lot of photos on Webshots and a few on Yahoo Photos. I recently ran out of space on Webshots and added photos to Yahoo Photos. I’m not happy with Yahoo Photos because the photos are displayed very small compared to other photo sites. I found Flickr, which happens to be a Yahoo company, and like it a lot. I especially like the Flickr badge (like below) that allows you to display photos from your album on any web page. Flickr allows you to email photos into your album as well. Those two features with a camera phone could be dangerous. I’ve uploaded a few photos. Check them out: