All posts tagged ‘Flickr’

File Under: APIs, Web Services
Nov
11
2011

Backup Your Flickr Images in Your Own Parallel Dimension

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Like most of the web you’re probably waiting for the other shoe to drop on the much-loved, but seemingly beleaguered, Flickr photo service.

Let’s face it, Flickr’s parent, Yahoo, hasn’t exactly had a banner year and the company already all but killed developer-favorite Delicious. If you aren’t worried about the future of Flickr it’s probably because you aren’t paying attention.

Or, it might be because you’ve got a complete and total backup of all your Flickr images running on your own URL, complete with all the metadata, permissions and privacy settings you’ve stored on Flickr.

What’s that? You don’t have a parallel version of Flickr on your own server? For shame.

Lucky for you, former Flickr employee Aaron Straup Cope created Parallel-Flickr which, as the name suggests, mirrors Flickr on your own domain. Parallel-Flickr is, in Cope’s words, “still a work in progress… it ain’t pretty or classy yet but it works.”

In a nutshell Parallel-Flickr is a set of PHP scripts for backing up your Flickr photos and generating a database-backed website to display them. The feature list includes downloading and storing your original images (along with the 640px version) and grabbing all of Flickr’s metadata about each image as a JSON file. With that info Parallel-Flickr then constructs a database and generates a website with the same URL structure that Flickr uses. Parallel-Flickr also “honours the viewing permissions you’ve chosen on Flickr.” It’s that last part of that description that’s intriguing. Here’s Cope’s description of what the code does:

The thing that’s most interesting to me though is the last piece on that list: The part where the site uses Flickr to authenticate logged in users. What that means is that I can replicate Flickr’s privacy settings locally. It means that I can have a local copy of my photos and keep private things private…
…
If you come to my site and you’re not logged in (via Flickr) you just won’t see non-public photos. Neither will I, for that matter. But if you do log in then because you’ve logged in via the Flickr API auth dance I have a auth token for you and can look up your Flickr ID and whether you’re a contact and see when and where you have permissions to see all those other photos.

In other words, so long as Flickr is around, Parallel-Flickr allows your site to act exactly like Flickr. From the URLs to the privacy settings, you’ll have your data backed up and online. Should the unthinkable happen to Flickr your site will still continue to function, save your private images which will be hidden safely away.

As noted above, Parallel-Flicker is a work in progress, but if you’d like to try it out, head on over to the GitHub page and grab the code. If you prefer to wait for features like cron jobs for syncing, geodata backups, S3 archiving and more, keep an eye on the project, all that and more is already on the todo list.

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File Under: Web Apps
Sep
29
2011

Flickr’s New ‘Photo Sessions’ Bring Back the Slideshow

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Flickr has unveiled a new feature dubbed Photo Sessions, which are real-time slideshows you can share with your friends around the web.

Say you want to share a slideshow with some friends you met on your last trip abroad. You’re back home and they’re back home on the other side of the globe. No one is coming over for dinner and slides. Instead, you just create a new session on Flickr and send the resulting URL to your friends. Once everyone has joined in, sessions become a bit like screen sharing — you swipe to the next photo and everyone else’s screen follows along.

Flickr has thrown in a few interactive features as well, including the ability to chat while the photos roll by. There’s also a way for your friends to doodle on your images from their own laptops or iPads.

Combine Flickr’s new sessions with a group chat app — Skype, iChat or the like — and you have a kind of disjointed, thoroughly modern take on the good old carousel slideshows your parents subjected their friends to in the ’70s. Feel the shag carpet people.

Alongside Sessions Flickr also announced a new Android app, which is considerably more impressive than the company’s iOS app. The Android Flickr app offers filters, geotagging and sharing in a slick-looking app that seems aimed at catching up with Instagram.

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File Under: privacy
Aug
31
2011

Flickr’s New ‘Geofence’ Settings Protect Your Geoprivacy

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Fencing in the range with Flickr's new Geofence features

The popular photo sharing website Flickr has introduced a new way to geotag your photos without revealing your location to the entire web. Flickr’s new “Geofence” settings give users more granular control over their geotagged photos.

Perhaps the best part of the new Geofence features are how dead simple they are to use — simply draw a circle on a map, choose a geoprivacy setting for that area, and you’re done. Your new fence will apply to any future photo uploads and Flickr will offer to update the privacy settings on any existing images that fall within your new fence.

To get started head over to the Flickr Geo privacy page.

These days geotagging isn’t just something for nerds. In fact, chances are your camera (especially the camera in your phone) is recording location data in your images whether you know it or not. Like other location-aware services, geotagged photos are fast becoming a big part of the current cultural debate about who should be able to see which parts of your life on the web.

“A few years ago, privacy controls like this would have been overkill. Geo data was new and underused, and the answer to privacy concerns was often, ‘you upload it, you deal with it,’” writes Flickr developer Trevor Hartsell on the code.flickr blog. “But today, physical places are important to how we use the web. Sometimes you want everyone to know exactly where you took a photo. And sometimes you don’t.”

Previously, Flickr limited its geotagging options to a simple yes or no — either you shared location data with everyone or no one. Now you can share location data with only those people you trust. For example, you might leave the geodata for your vacation photos visible to everyone, but limit the location data of photos around your house to only your friends and family.

In those cases where there might be overlap between two geofences Flickr will default to the more restrictive of the two. For example, if you draw a circle around your house and limit it to the most restrictive group, “Family,” and then draw a circle around your whole neighborhood and limit that to “Friends,” any areas where the two overlap will still be limited to only the Family group.

Flickr’s new Geofence settings are among the best implemented privacy controls we’ve seen, striking a nearly perfect balance between genuine control and simplicity. And while we’re glad to see Flickr taking the lead, here’s hoping Facebook and others will copy these features into their own privacy controls.

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File Under: Mobile, Web Services
Jan
6
2011

Flickr Goes Native With Windows Phone 7 App

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Flickr, the grandfather of online photo-sharing sites, is giving the kids a new way to use the site with their fancy Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 devices. Yahoo has announced Flickr for Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 — native Flickr apps for Windows phones and tablets.

Flickr already offers an iOS app for Apple devices, but the new Windows 7 apps look considerably slicker and offer a much better interface than what you’ll find the iOS app. The new software won’t be available until the end of January, but you can check out the video below for a teaser.

According to our friends at ReadWriteWeb, the new Flickr for Windows 7 apps use Windows Azure, Microsoft’s foray into cloud-based software, behind the scenes. It’s an interesting choice of platform considering Flickr is already, well, in the cloud. Given that Yahoo has a considerable infrastructure of web-based services, why use Azure?

Marcus Spiering, Flickr’s mobile product manager at Yahoo, tells RWW that “Azure allowed us to build an app quickly and do it with quality.” Reading between the lines it’s hard to escape the subtext: Yahoo’s own tools weren’t up to the task.

Whatever the case, Flickr for Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 is a slick looking app and we’re hoping to see the iOS version get a similar makeover. Curiously, there’s still no official Flickr app for Android.

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File Under: Location, Web Apps, Web Services
Nov
30
2010

Mining Flickr to Build 3D Models of the World

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Microsoft’s PhotoSynth tool is jaw-droppingly awesome. But, because it’s a Microsoft project, the technology is unlikely to appear on some of your favorite non-Microsoft online apps, like Google Maps or Flickr.

However, our friends at ReadWriteWeb stumbled across a very similar tool — at least in terms of the end result — developed by the University of North Carolina in conjunction with Swiss university, ETH-Zurich.

The team has developed a method for creating 3D models by pulling in millions of photographs from Flickr and using some fancy algorithms to generate 3D models of local landmarks. Perhaps even more impressive the results can be generated using a single computer in under a day.

Project lead Jan-Michael Frahm touts the project’s efficiency saying, “our technique would be the equivalent of processing a stack of photos as high as the 828-meter Dubai Towers, using a single PC, versus the next best technique, which is the equivalent of processing a stack of photos 42 meters tall — as high as the ceiling of Notre Dame — using 62 PCs. This efficiency is essential if one is to fully utilize the billions of user-provided images continuously being uploaded to the internet.”

While the results are cool and would make an impressive addition to any number of geo-based services, more serious use cases include helping disaster workers get a better idea of where they’re headed and the extent of damage.

So far the researchers have released a movies demonstrating the technique on landmarks in both Rome (get it? built in a day…) and Berlin, and the results are impressive. For more information on how the process works, check out the UNC website.

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File Under: Identity
Oct
29
2010

Flickr Adds Limited OpenID Support

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Large web services from the likes of Google, Yahoo and others love to tout their OpenID support. But when these companies say “support,” sometimes what they mean is that you can use them as an OpenID provider — and store all of your precious personal information on their servers.

What’s much less common from the big companies are sites that let you sign in with OpenID. Today the popular photo sharing site Flickr has taken a small step in that direction.

The site has stopped short of true OpenID support, though that appears to be the end goal. For now its offering a way to sign in with your Google OpenID. Yahoo, which owns Flickr, is using Google’s authentication APIs to power the sign-in experience. Sadly, the new feature is only available for those signing up for Flickr. If you’ve already got a Flickr account, you have to authenticate using your original login.

Given that most of you probably already have Flickr accounts, today’s news isn’t all that exciting. But hopefully, it means the wheels are turning at Flickr and one day you’ll be able to sign in with any OpenID account.

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File Under: Multimedia, Web Apps
Jun
23
2010

New Flickr Is Bigger, Wider and Uncut

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The new Flickr photo page

The grandfather of online photo-sharing sites is rolling out a revamped design. Photo pages on Flickr have been redone to feature larger images, maps, and a much cleaner, more intuitive interface.

For now, the new look is opt-in, but Flickr plans to make the new page design the default some time next month. To see the new photo page in action, log in to your Flickr account and visit any photo page. You’ll see an option to test the new look. You can also use links provided by Flickr to switch between the two experiences.

Flickr's old look: Click for larger.

It’s been a long time since Flickr did anything major to its main photo pages. Flickr started with a limited set of features and has been bolting new features onto the old design ever since. The result has been a slightly cluttered collection of buttons, tools and bits of data that can distract from the main point of the site — your photos.

The new look changes that, streamlining the navigation and tools while “embiggening” your photos (as Flickr refers to it).

The first thing you’ll notice is that the primary image is much larger. The long edge of your image is now 640 pixels across, a 30 percent increase. If that’s not big enough for you, just hover your mouse over any image and you’ll notice the icon changes to a magnifying glass. Click the image (or the new button between the Newer and Older buttons) and you’ll enter what Flickr calls the Lightbox view.

Similar to popular JavaScript slideshow tools, Flickr’s Lightbox view enlarges the image and overlays your screen with a slightly transparent black background. The nice thing about the new Lightbox view is that you can browse through photos without closing it, as well as leave comments and favorite photos.

Perhaps the single most-useful enhancement to casual viewing found in Flickr’s redesign is the addition of new keyboard shortcuts — yes, left and right arrow will now flip through photos just the way you’d expect. The keyboard navigation works in Lightbox mode as well.

The new look consolidates all the tools previously scattered around the page — adding notes, viewing EXIF data, editing images and a dozen more — into a single Actions dropdown menu. The result is a far less-cluttered page that still offers easy access to anything you’d like to do with your photos.

Continue Reading “New Flickr Is Bigger, Wider and Uncut” »

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File Under: Social, Web Services
Jun
10
2010

Flickr Hooks Up With Facebook for Photo-Sharing Love

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Photo-sharing website Flickr has announced a new Facebook integration tool that syncs your Flickr photos to your Facebook account. Flickr’s sync tools are built on top of parent company Yahoo’s Updates platform, and will push photo thumbnails, titles and descriptions to your Facebook feed.

Of course, Facebook also offers way to pull in your Flickr images with RSS, as well as about a dozen third-party photo syncing apps that let you post to both services at once. If you use any of those tools, make sure you disable them before turning on Flickr’s new features, otherwise you’ll end up with duplicate photos in your new feed.

The integration of the two services is the result of a new partnership between Yahoo and Facebook announced this week. Yahoo will continue to let its visitors consume Facebook feeds on various Yahoo properties and post to the social network from its pages. Once users link their Yahoo and Facebook accounts, they’ll see news feeds from their Facebook friends on the Yahoo homepage, the web’s most popular news page, and in their inboxes in Yahoo Mail, the web’s most popular webmail service. Flickr, a powerful social network in its own right, is the next testing ground for this integration. Yahoo plans to integrate other social networks, like Twitter, this summer.

To enable the new Flickr-Facebook integration, head over to Flickr and turn on the Facebook Updates feature. Once that’s done, any new photos you post will be pushed to Facebook. By default, only photos marked public will be sent, though you can tweak the privacy settings on your Yahoo Pulse page (bet you didn’t know you had one of those, did you?).

The new Facebook support certainly makes it easy for fans of both sites to get the best of both worlds, but we’re hoping this doesn’t signal a mad rush to add dozens of sharing tools to Flickr.

Flickr, which helped popularize social photo sharing when it launched in 2004, has long been something of a lone wolf on the social web — the Share This tool on its photo pages is admirably spartan. But it’s also a great reminder that, before the isolated model of Facebook gained popularity, there was just the open web. To that end, anyone clamoring for more sharing tools on Flickr are missing the obvious — all your photos and photo collections have a unique URL attached, and you can share that anywhere you like.

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File Under: APIs, Web Apps
Nov
4
2009

Discover Cool Photo Apps With Flickr’s New ‘App Garden’

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Everyone has an app store these days. But of course, for Flickr, the photo sharing site that brought you rainbow vomiting Panda Bears, “store” is far too pedestrian. Which is why Flickr has launched a new App Garden.

The new Flickr App Garden consists of mobile, desktop, and online widgets that interact with Flickr and help you get more out of the site. Flickr already had an extensive list of such apps in its “Services” area, but the new App Garden is considerably simpler and makes find cool Flickr apps much easier.

Unlike the former app directory, which was a simple list, Flickr’s App Garden gives each app its own page where users can leave comments, tag apps and mark them as favorites. The ability to favorite an app means users now have a way to promote their favorites in the App Garden showcase. The app pages also look and feel just like a Flickr photo pages, which makes App Garden feel more like a part of Flickr than the old services directory ever did.

To make it even easier to discover cool apps, Flickr has also included tags on user’s photos which tell you what app the image was uploaded with, and then link back to that app in the new App Garden. If you don’t want others to know how you upload your photos, you can turn off the new tags in your account settings.

The result is that you can stumble across some very cool stuff like Suggestify, an app that allows you to geotag other people’s photos by suggesting a location to the photo’s owner. Following the tag “geotag” then led us to an interesting iPhone app, FlickrUp, which lets you geotag photos uploaded from the iPhone.

So far there’s no way for developers to charge for applications through the Flickr App Garden, though there are some non-free apps listed. Since actually download the apps you want — whether free or not — requires at trip to the developer’s own page, it seems that, at least for now, the App Garden is more a place to browse, not buy apps.

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File Under: Multimedia, Social
Oct
21
2009

Flickr Adds People-Tagging for Finding Friends in Photos

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Popular photo sharing service Flickr added a new feature Wednesday that lets users tag each other in photos. In addition, Flickr has updated its privacy controls, so users can opt out of being personally identified in individual photos.

The new feature lets you tag particular people in pictures by drawing bounding boxes around their faces. Flickr then asks you to ID each person, and if the person is a Flickr member, the system suggests the member’s name to you as you type the tag.

Once people are tagged, it makes finding them in searches much easier. Instead of searching for somebody’s name and only seeing photos blindly tagged with your search term, Flickr now shows you where that person is located inside the photo — especially helpful if you’re looking at a group shot.

Flickr has over 40 million members according to Yahoo, which owns the service.

People-tagging features have long been available to users of other photo-sharing web services like Facebook and Google’s Picasa. And Flickr’s new feature doesn’t go as far as Picasa, which will actually find the person’s face in the picture and take a guess at who it is. Google debuted this technology in 2008 and enhanced its capabilities just last month.

But while Flickr’s new people tags are close to what you’ll find elsewhere, Flickr’s implementation offers more user controls for privacy by letting you opt out of being ID’d.

As Facebook users know, you often get tagged in a photo that you didn’t approve of, isn’t particular flattering or shows you in a, shall we say, “compromising position.” But once you’re tagged in a picture on Facebook, that photo with you in it gets tied to your profile. It shows up in image searches, whether you want it to appear or not.

Flickr’s new face-tagging system lets users opt out of being tagged in individual photos. So, you can pretend that’s not really you holding that bong or shotgunning that can of PBR. You can also set your preferences so you can never be tagged in a photo, or you can determine which users are allowed to tag you and which users aren’t. You can also opt out of the whole face-tagging system in general.

Non-Flickr members can be identified in photos as well, but they’ll need to approve the ID before it appears within the system.

That won’t stop users from adding your name as a tag on the photo. Users can also draw a box around your face and add your name as a note. But neither of those options physically connect the tag to your Flickr account the way the people-tagging feature does. Instead, it’s just another piece of metadata attached to the photo.

For those who want to play along, just watch your Recent Activity page. Every time you’re tagged in a picture, you’ll see a little notifier in your Recent Activity stream telling you who tagged you, and offering a link to the picture.

Once a photo is tagged up with people, the photo page displays a list of all the people identified within the picture, along with links to their Flickr profiles.

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