In Korea

Too tired to write up fully now, but thought I’d point people to new photos up on flickr (press the photos button up above) of my trip to Korea.

Flickr Squirrels

Hahaha, I laughed out loud when I saw this photostream on flickr. The guy has managed to catch squirrels playing around with cameras and well look at the photos, you’ll get what I mean.

Top 10 cameras according to Flickr

Here is a great example of the useful information that can be harvested from the plethora of metadata type information floating around the internet. The guys at Flagrantdisregard.com scrapped the EXIF data from photos being uploaded onto flickr and compiled a list of the top 10 camera models being used.

1. Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT
2. NIKON D50
3. Canon EOS 350D DIGITAL
4. Canon EOS 20D
5. NIKON D70
6. NIKON D70s
7. Canon PowerShot S2 IS
8. Canon EOS 30D
9. Sony CYBERSHOT
10. Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL

It is worth noting the potentials for skew that exist in this data, but overall it can be taken as representative of digital camera enthusiasts.

Of course, the data may be skewed, since some users might unknowingly be stripping off EXIF data from their photos before uploading to Flickr (say, if the photos were resized using an editor that didn’t save the
EXIF along with the resized image). Also, notice that Sony cameras are marked by “CYBERSHOT,” and not by exact model–likely, photos were taken with phone-cams.

Further, you will notice that the D-SLRs dominate the list. Perhaps this is due to the sheer volume that photo enthusiasts (amateur photographers and professionals) upload on their sites, which sometimes serve as their portfolios. They’re likely the ones to have Pro accounts, too, which gives them unlimited upload capability. Casual users, on the other hand, might not be uploading so frequently, and would probably have free, limited accounts.

Brisbane Sampler from flickr

Just thought I’d put together a little sampler of the latest flickr photos tagged with “Brisbane” to give my out of town readers some idea of how lovely this city really is.

Zooomr – New flickr competitor

The zooomr site looks like it is a fairly straight forward rip of flickr (which you all know can do no wrong in my book) and from the quick look around that I’ve had I can’t see too many new and excitingfeatures which would persuade me to jump ship. You can add sound to photos, but I can’t honestly see anyone doing that more than once for the novelty factor. It does add two intersting features though, the first of which is the ability to label people who are in a photo. This feature could be one of the most incredible things for photo sharing if it is done really well, and will be a so-so affair otherwise. One of the first issues is that suffered by all community driven sites in that different people will label things differently (some of my friends call me James, I normally go by Jamie however) how then to realise that Jamie Cook in photo 782 is the same as James Cook in photo 1089? And also how to tell the difference beween James Cook (me) and say James Cook the famous captain who discovered Australia? I did see a site a while back that claimed to be able to perform face-recognition on photos to tell you who was in them which seems like an admirable task but I don’t think it’s how zooomr will be doing this.

I had an idea a little while ago while doing some work with image databasing and searching. Never really took it anywhere but then noticed that this new site had implemented the same idea in a pretty neat way. The concept is basically that each photo is tagged with geo-spatial co-ordinates as it is uploaded and then other images which were taken in the same area can be easily called up.

Pretty simple concept but I think that it will help to re-invent how we browse and search for images – well at least it will when all cameras come equipped with GPS by default anyways I’m trying not to get side tracked but it’s a pet peeve of mine when reading about “web 2.0″ and the “semantic web” (or community driven web) is that all the information required to make them useful has to come from somewhere and no one really says where it’s going to come from except “the users”. Now I think I’m a pretty dedicated and pedantic person but the thought of tagging all the photos I have in my collection makes me go cold all over. I think spatial information, such as geo-tags collected automatically via GPS, would be a great way to increase the automatically available metadata for photos.

So in summary I don’t see anything great that I don’t think flickr will be implementing shortly anyway

Flock Browser

I installed the 0.7.1 version of the new flock browser yesterday and thought I’d post a few of my thoughts (and try out the integrated flickr features). The first thing I did upon setting up the browser was to give it my flickr account details – this is where I first ran into trouble. My girlfriend had her flickr account signed in and flock automatically redirected me to a page asking if I wanted to give flock permissions under her account. If it had been my account signed in it would have worked straight away but trying to change the login to my account involved a serious amount of fiddling and a restart of that portion of the installer (for some reason the back butttons on the installer weren’t working).

But eventually I did get it updated correctly and had access to all my photos from the photo strip which sits atop the tab space. It pops up my photostream with the latest photos first and provides some basic functions like favourite button and a drop down box showing which of your contacts has new photos available – clicking on any contact will display their photo stream in the strip. What I really wanted to try out though was the drag and drop function – which is why I’m writing this post really. To the left is a photo of centerpoint tower in Sydney which I took with my phone, I simply dragged it into the wordpress editor and voila… photo in my blog. I had been a bit worried that the WYSIWYG editor wouldn’t understand the html that was being dropped in but that didn’t seem to be a problem.

The only other thing that I’ve had a problem with so far is the built in search. As far as I can tell firefox’s quick search functionality has not been included with flock – my setup of firefox involves setting the google quick search to ‘g’ (I know David simply uses ‘?’), my process for searching is then 1) Ctrl-T (new tab) 2) Alt-D (highlight address bar) 3) type “g my search string” and I have a new google window with the search results I want without ever having to take my hands off the keyboard. Missing this little piece of functionality could be a deal breaker for me… I’ll have to give it a bit more time to see. I’m also a bit miffed with the search bar, the default is yahoo for a start and I’m not sure what has happened to the I’m feeling lucky search (in firefox typing a search into the address bar would give you the I’m feeling lucky result from google).

Finally the integrated RSS reader seems to work just fine, adding new feeds is easy and the icons are prominently displayed. The reader itself is very easy on the eyes with the one exception of squashing images, I read a lot of comics and when the strip is comressed 50% it makes it impossible to read the included text.

Thats it for now, I’ll put up some screenshots later if I feel inclined.