Landscape, Nature and Travel Photography

Today Flickr announced a limited partnership with Getty to create a Flickr Stock Collection.  In short you need to be discovered by Getty photo editors and additional details are forthcoming.

The great folks at Getty Images and Flickr are joining forces to create a collection of royalty free, rights ready and rights managed photographs. This announcement is just the first step and there’s a lot to do before we launch. We’ve created a FAQ to address what we think will be the initial questions.

The FAQ is quite barebones at the moment. You make the call if this is a good thing or bad thing for Flickr photographers. For now I withhold judgment as to how this can be interpreted for the state of affairs at Getty.

More on PDN

Technorati Tags: Flickr, Stock Photography, Getty

There have been many stories over the past few years about copyright infringement on Flickr. To date most have been about individuals maliciously downloading the work of others to resell it as their own or companies using photographs commercially violating either the licensing restrictions of the photo or ignoring the need for a model release. What most remain unaware of is that Flickr fosters copyright infringement through their API. The most egregious part of this is that Flickr knows it. Even if done with out malice you can expect them to spin it that they do not foster copyright infringement through their API or, as you’ll later see, that they’re immune from being liable for improper use of their API because of their API terms of use.

6 months ago I realized that two applications leveraging Flickr’s API were ignoring photo licensing settings that every user configures in the “Privacy & Permissions” section of their “Your Account” page.  Even now regardless of a photos designated licensing setting, whether Creative Commons or All Rights Reserved, these and other applications are publishing Flickr photos to 3rd party web sites and image files, high resolution if available, are being downloaded for reuse on personal computers. Worse still is that as recently as this weekend MyxerTones employed Flickr’s API inappropriately in effect making every Flickr photo available for sale as cell phone wallpaper for 2 days.

My first realization that there was a problem with how Flickr’s API was being managed was when Read more… »

Photoshelter on Tuesday March 4th released a Flickr Importer to enable Flickr members to migrate their photographs to their service. The import function is hardly as noteworthy as the export function of the tool which allows Photoshelter members to export watermarked images to Flickr. In an odd twist reported on March 5th Flickr disabled the ability of Photoshelters Importer to function. The exact reason the importer was disabled is unknown.

PhotoShelter Protects Your Images From Would-Be Flickr Thieves - Wired.com

It’ll be interesting to hear what the reasoning is for the shutdown of Photoshelter’s Flickr Importer. Either way if and when he application is operational again it will be nice to have an alternate way for others to secure their imagery with a watermark. To be honest though Photoshelter users are professionals or semi-professionals and likely have the means to properly watermark and embed ITPC data in their files on their own. Regardless its great to see an online service making an effort to address image security online.

For the sake of transparency I am a Photoshelter member and have no vested interest in the service this post is merely an editorial/commentary piece.

Technorati Tags: Photoshelter, Flickr, import, export, tool, watermark, copyright, protection, photo, photography, online, service

Join me at the Media Web Meet Up III: The Producers where I’ll be a panelist with fellow photographer Lane Hartwell, legal expert Jason Schultz from the Electronic FrontierFoundation (EFF) and announced last night Heather Champ from Flickr.

Event Details

Subject: The Producers - people creating content for the Media Web

Speakers:

Lane Hartwell, Photographer - http://fetching.net
Jason Schultz, Lawyer, EFF - http://eff.org
Jim Goldstein, Photographer - http://www.jmg-galleries.com
Heather Champ, Flickr - http://www.flickr.com

Probably the biggest stakeholders in the Media Web space are those who are producing the creative content that everyone is benefiting from. They are also the ones dealing with the pains that are multiple formats, incompatible platforms and closed protocols as well as the grey areas around copyright.

This month’s Media Web Meetup is a discussion led by The Producers themselves to talk about these important issues. Without artists, we wouldn’t have a media web at all…

++++++++++++++

Location:

Neue Songbird Nest

585 Howard Street between 1st and 2nd
San Francisco, California 94107

(Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps)

These meet-ups are intended to get people interested and working in the media web together to discuss what it means to be open. Those working on open protocols, methods and formats on the web are very welcome, too!

Homepage

http://www.openmediaweb.org

Media Web Meet-Up III: The Producers

More on this event:

Fresh from the controversy… - SF Weekly

Technorati Tags: Media Web, Meet-up, Lane Hartwell, Jim Goldstein, photography, EFF, Jason Schultz

This weekend I got to take a peek at the Photophlow site that is now in a limited beta and experience the Flickr community like never before. At the moment the site is growing through an invitation only process not unlike Googles Gmail back in the day. What is unique about Photophlow is the truly real-time discussion of photography in a very clean interface.

It’s not often that a site comes along building on Flickr’s API that in itself is superior to the original. Photophlow has a very intuitive and clean user interface that enables multiple people the opportunity to navigate, search and discuss photographs collectively. These discussions occur in rooms, not unlike the old IRC model for discussion rooms, that are open to the public in the instance of the “Welcome” or “Photophlow” room, are tied in parallel to existing Flickr groups or are rooms of the individual user.

The photos display from small thumbnail to a small preview with the ease of a mouse over and clicking on an image will load the medium size image for all to see in a particular discussion area. Users can discuss the image in the room and/or comment/fave the image which is also registered on Flickr. Along with the medium image display is basic image, EXIF, copyright licensing information, description, tags, photographer and the person that initiated the discussion about the image.

A very cool feature is the embedded search terms that highlight automatically as links with in discussion entries. This is a great mechanism for free form exploration of the Flickrsphere and takes the powerful search in Photophlow to another level. Notification features are also embedded in the site so that users can be notified of activity via email, IM and Twitter. If you have a Tumblr account you can port interesting photos to your tumblog. All this functionality combined with the active photographer community equates to a very addictive environment.

If you’re big on photography and are part of the Flickr community keep your eyes peeled for available invitations.

Photophlow Screenshots: Read more… »

Yesterday Dave Winer announced the release of FlickerFan. FlickrFan (see FlickrFan.org for product details) enables Flickr users with a MacMini connected to their TV to display photography from their Flickr Contacts. This automatic feed is actually very cool and the type of use is a really nice way of displaying some great photography in a larger format. Robert Scoble ran a quick demo and fielded questions about FlickrFan yesterday evening see the two parts of this demo on Robert’s Qik page.

There is one catch that concerns me though… Read more… »

Self-admittedly I am a statistics junky. If I employ a service, I like to monitor the traffic and trends. I’ve done this since the day I launched my web site and I’ve done it for my Digital Railroad, Photoshelter, and PodBean (for my podcast) accounts as well. I’ve found some tools for Flickr but they’ve been pretty limited. I’ve regrettably been monitoring the numbers by memory. Today Flickr announced the release of a Statistics page for Pro accounts. Now I can obsess over the numbers, more importantly accurate traffic numbers, at Flickr to track trends.

If this is new to you don’t feel too bad it was just announced a couple hours ago (~11AM PST) so you may want to check the Flickr Blog for more detail.

Stats, stats, baby! - Flickr Blog

I just activated my Stats page so once I have something meaningful to look at I’ll post a mini-review. Apparently once you activate your Stats page it takes a day or so to see, but after a quick check it looks as though my Stats page is live with a week or two worth of data.

Statistics reported include:

1. View Counts (Photos, Photostream, Sets, Collections) for the day, week, last week and overall.
2. Your Most Viewed Photos (Views, Favorites, Notes) for yesterday and all time
3. Referrers (Visits, Percentage ) for yesterday and all time
4. Referring Domains (Visits, Percentage)
5. Breakdown of your photos (Public, Private, Friends, Family, Friends and Family, Tagged or not, Geotagged or not, In Sets or not, In Groups or not, With Views or without, With Comments or without and Farvorited or not.

Technorati Tags: statistics, Flickr, stats, page, photography

More coverage has surfaced on Creative Commons licensing this time specifically in relation to Flickr on Wire.com. Check it out…
Creative Commons Licenses Are Permanent — Except on Flickr - Wired

An added perk… I was quoted in the article as a result of my blog article on the topic.
What licensing do you use? Take part in my poll

Technorati Tags: Creative Commons, Flickr, Wired, photo, pohtography,