aiddy's not thought through thoughts, thoughts usually only intended for me
Want to add pictures direct from flickr into your blog posts without too much messing around?
Grab a copy of flickr4writer, a plug-in for Windows Live Writer that makes adding pictures to blog posts a snitch.
There. No more excuses.
tags: flickr | livewriter | blog | tools
Having pondered this for a bit, of course what you’d really want to know is not which cameras are the most popular (by counting uploaded photos), but which cameras take the better pictures (by counting some ‘better picture’ metric).
What metric? flickr has a concept of interestingness which I’ve always been a bit suspicious of. Interestingness is a secret combination of various factors, but since I have a picture with 0 comments, 0 favourite tags and 0 views listed as one of my more interesting photos, the algorithm is either extremely insightful, or not as clever as we’d like. Ideally I’d like to take some combination of the number of favourites plus number of views divided by some factor that combines the number of tags and groups to which the picture belongs [1]. But, and it’s a big but, getting the data I want for a better-than-interestingness metric isn’t currently possible, so instead here’s a look at the number of photo’s by different camera models in the top 500 interesting pictures with a taken date over the past twelve months.
[Click for larger image]
Caveats:
So here’s another view, this time of the top 10 cameras by interesting photos in the top 500 excluding unknowns:
[Click for larger image]
The top five cameras by number of pictures uploaded (based on data from the flickr cameras page):
and here’s the top five by number of pictures in the top 500 interesting pictures:
Conclusions? The number of unknowns is enough to swamp any meaningful comparison, but since there’s nothing but SLRs in the top of the list, it’s safe to assume that if you want ‘interesting’ pictures, a dSLR is the way to go (or that people that have dSLRs known how to play the ‘interesting’ game with their uploads to flickr 
[1] The rationale here is that adding tags or adding to groups increases the visibility of the picture to the flickr community and so would result in an increase in views and favourites irrespective of how good the picture is.
tags: interesting | interestingness | flickr | cameras | popular | photography
Via Scripting News: flickr is posting stats from the camera’s used to take the pictures posted on flickr (scroll down to the graphs under the sponsored slot at the top).
Question: does the fact that the SonyEricsson K750i is the most popular camera phone mean that:
a) people that use flickr seek our good camera phones (and therefore that the 750 is one of the better camera phones?)
b) the pictures taken with other camera phones aren’t worth posting to flickr
c) the pictures taken with other camera phones are posted to other photo sharing sites
4) other camera phones don’t do the right thing with the EXIF tags in the picture metadata
e) something else
Extrapolating a bit, I wonder if there’s a correlation between the photo sharing site you use and camera you use (and further, the newspaper you read, political party you last voted for, charities you donate to…)
Tags: flickr | cameras | popularity| relationships
What’s my highest priority feature for an on-line (or Web 2.0 if you prefer) photo site?
Auto tagging?
Geo tagging?
Open and fair policy on metadata?
Support for video?
Support for HDR?
Support for color management?
Trackbacks?
Slide shows?
Unlimited storage?
Unlimited uploads?
Image manipulation tools?
Fancy multimedia annotations?
Backup and retrieval?
AJAX UI?
Nope, it’s none of those.
What I love to see is very quick, very simple, very easy sign-up.
What’s the number one reason that friends and family tell me they can’t view the private piccy’s we post? That’s right, signing up for the sharing site we use is too hard. flickr is great if you already have a yahoo! account, but for the non-techie masses things aren’t that simple, and the antispam fun and games just make it harder.
Why post about this now? Because Kristopher Tate of zooomr fame has posted a link to a video on how to sign up for a zooomr account using OpenID. Well, it made me smile.
I’ve recently had friends send links to pictures on Kodak Gallery and Ringo. I couldn’t work out why they were using these – especially Ringo that doesn’t have the brand awareness of Kodak – until I twigged how simple sign up is. For example, Kodak asks for name, email and a password with a tick box for accepting the T&Cs; and another for adding your mobile phone – all on a single page. Yahoo! (e.g. for Yahoo! Photos) asks for first name, second name, preferred content, gender, yahoo ID, password, checkbox for yahoo mail, security question, security question answer, birthday, ZIP/Post code, Alternate email [optional], industry [optional], title [optional], specialization [optional], and the verification code before you can sign in. All that, and then you have to wait for a confirmation email sent to your alternate email address before you can go do anything.
No wonder some people I know have given up on signing up for flickr (now owned by Yahoo!) – which is a real pain for me ’cause flickr is such a great service otherwise.
Come on flickr, any chance of a simple signup like we had in the Old Skool days? Please?
When I was at college studying Photographic Science one of the more interesting subjects in Sid Ray’s applied photography module was photogrametry – the measurement of objects using photographic images (aside, doesn’t Sid have just about the best name for someone that writes books about things like this?).
Well, things have come a long way since my days in the labs at Riding House Street… Photosynth is a technology that takes a large collection of photographs of a particular place and reconstructs a three-dimensional space from which you can explore the images. Microsoft labs have just released a technology preview that includes four sample collections: the Piazza San Marco in Venice; Grassi Lakes in the Canadian Rockies; Piazza San Pietro in Rome; and the studio of artist Gary Faigin in Seattle. It’s a great, if sometimes befuddling, way to explore a space. I can’t wait to see what my own collection can look like.
Scoble says it was the killer app of the Web 2.0 Summit.
Here’s a snap of photosynth in action, you can try out the preview for yourself on labs.live.com (system requirements).
photosynth Hosted on Zooomr
I see stuff like this and think what more is to come in this rich world of imaging
Tags: photosynth | photogrammetry | photography
local.live.com has been our friend since we moved to the US, the birds eye view is great for figuring out where things are when you’re in a new and strange place and the ability to save collections has been useful for building our own geographical list of important places (like the post office, shops, places people have recommended to eat etc.). The coverage for Birds Eye is better in the US than elsewhere, but I met the person whos company is behind the aerial photography in Europe at a school sports day in the UK, and other places are gradually coming on stream.
This week, local.live has added support for 3D views and, as a fan of Google Earth, I had to check it out.
Above is the space needle in Seattle from a recent trip we made while below is something similar from local.live.com
seattleMSVirtualEarth Hosted on Zooomr
I tried getting views from Gas Works and Rainier, but you can’t tilt the viewpoint upwards enough from ground level to get close to a match, while Snoqualmie Falls just doesn’t have the imagery (yet?).
It’s not as feature rich as Google Earth, but the imagery is great and it’s nice to be able to flick back and forth with regular mapping in the same application. Two downers: you’ll need to be running Internet Explorer, so no Firefox; and the CTRL-Mouse controls feel wrong headed for my simple hand-eye coordination.
Tags: mapping | live.local | googleearth | virtualearth
Thanks to Windows Live Search C R O S S O A K is now searchable! If you want the add search to your own site, go grab the Windows Live Search Box.
Big thanks to the Live Search team.
[PS Written from a Toshiba M7 tablet running Windows Vista 
]
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