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Posts Tagged ‘Flickr’s’

Smartphones dominated Flickr’s 2017 uploads, but DSLRs are on the rise

13 Dec
Photo by Max Delsid

The iPhone has dominated Flickr’s annual ‘top devices’ list, representing 54% of the site’s top 100 devices in 2017, as well as the majority of the site’s 10 top devices list. These figures were published as part of Flickr’s end-of-year analysis, in which the platform reveals what cameras are most popular among its users, as well as highlighting the site’s top photos of the year.

Flickr’s 2017 Year in Review report shows that smartphones were once again the device of choice among the site’s users, increasing from 48% in 2016 to a full 50% of uploads in 2017.

But it’s not all smartphones this and smartphones that. In fact, DSLRs were used to take 33% of the images uploaded to Flickr this year compared to just 25% in 2016. And in an utterly predictable turn of events, the use of point-and-shoot cameras dropped from 2016’s 21% to a paltry 12% this year.

Mirrorless cameras were the only ones to hold steady, boasting just 4% of uploads in both 2016 and 2017.

Looking at brands specifically, Apple dominates Flickr’s 2017 annual review, with its iPhone representing 54% of the top 100 devices of the year. Flickr says that 9 of the top 10 devices were iPhone models; only the Canon 5D Mark III tarnished that record, coming in at #9. Canon, overall, was the second biggest brand on Flickr this year, accounting for 23% of the top 100 devices. Nikon came in third at 18%.

Flickr has a very large user base at 75 million, making its annual report a notable insight into which devices are most popular with the general public. Just like its top 25 photos of the year give us an idea of the photographic styles that appeal to the most people.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Flickr’s Redesigned Profile Page

07 Jun

Following on the successful redesign of the Flickr homepage last Fall, today Flickr is announcing the redesign of the photographer profile page. As far back as I can remember the Flickr profile page has remained the same — probably at least over the past decade or so — complete with the odd request for your airport code, even though that information never seemed to actually appear anywhere on your profile.

The new redesign is much more photocentric and offers a beautiful showcase of your most popular photos published to Flickr. Tiny little square thumbnails on the profile page have been replaced by much bigger, bolder versions of your own most popular images in an attractive mosaic format.

The new profile page will start rolling out to users over the next few days so if you don’t already have it, don’t fret, it’s on the way.

The redesign makes several changes in terms of what and how the information on your profile page is presented. Some information has been added, some removed and some streamlined.

Your Most Favorited, Interesting, Commented, and Viewed Photos on the New Flickr Profile Page
Flickr’s new profile page shows your most favorited photos on Flickr.

1. Most dramatically, by default the new Flickr profile page has a beautiful mosaic of large sized photos showcasing your 25 most favorited photos on Flickr. Additionally your profile visitors can use a pull down menu to look at your 25 most interesting (as rated by Flickr’s algorithm) photos, along with your most viewed and commented photos. This is a super helpful way to get a quick impression of the type of photographer you are looking at when you find someone new that you might want to follow on Flickr. Personally this is my favorite feature of the new profile page.

Your Custom Photo Showcase on the New Flickr Profile Page
Flickr’s new profile page lets you customize 25 photos on your page.

2. Because some people would rather show off other photos than their most favorited, popular, commented or viewed, Flickr now also allows you to add a custom collection of 25 photos as chosen by you manually from your stream. So you can showcase up to 50 total photos now on the profile page between your own chosen photos and Flickr’s selections. The organizer used to build your custom mosaic is super intuitive and allows you to review your albums or search for specific photos you want to add. You can change what photos appear here whenever you want. I’m looking forward to the creative ways that users come up with using this mosaic.

Links to Your Other Social Networks on the New Flickr Profile Page
Flickr now makes user view counts public.

3. With the new profile page Flickr now shows you how many views a user has racked up on Flickr. If there is anything even mildly controversial about the new page design it would probably be this. In the past your total view count was available to you and you only through the stats page if you were a paid Pro account. Now your view count is posted publicly on your profile page for the entire world to see. So for the first time we can see that the Obama White House page has racked up an impressive 303 million views on Flickr, while alas, the current Trump White House has only racked up only a mere 2.1 million views on Flickr thus far.

Not that anyone’s keeping track or cares about these type of things though, am I right? ?

4. On the old profile page Flickr allowed you a single website link. On the new profile you can include a link to your website and also additional links to your pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr.

Testimonials Make the Cut in the New Flickr Profile Page
Testimonials make the cut for the new Flickr profile page.

5. Testimonials are still included in the new Flickr profile page. I think it’s been several years since I’ve actually written someone a testimonial, but they were a lot of fun to get and give back in the old school days of Flickr. I’m glad they made the cut on the new page.

6. The old profile page prominently featured a link to everyone you were following on Flickr and featured the avatars of the last 16 people you had followed. This section has now been reduced to a small link at the top of the page linking to everyone you follow listed alphabetically.

7. The old profile page had a link to your favorites from other Flickr members including thumbnails of the last 12 photos that you’d favorited. The new page has a smaller link that just takes people directly to your favorites page.

8. Hometown and current location information has been retained and is still shown on the new profile page, but gender and relationship status has been removed.

9. Additional links on the new profile page include links to a photographer’s tags (listed alphabetically), geotagged photos (shown on a cool interactive map), links to your favorites and your groups.

Large Photos You are Tagged in on the New Flickr Profile Page
Photos you are tagged in are larger.

10. Photos of a user are featured in much larger format with a link to all of the photos you are tagged in on Flickr.

Overall I think the new Flickr profile page is a terrific refresh to the site. It is good to see that Flickr continues to innovate finding fresh new ways to share photos. Although not the largest photo sharing site on the web today, Flickr is still my personal favorite and where I keep my primary archive of images. As a paid pro account (old skool) I am provided an unlimited amount storage for full high res photos at $ 49.99/year — a huge bargain. New Pro users get 1TB instead of unlimited storage so if you are old skool Pro *don’t* let that subscription expire. I also get detailed stats and an ad free browsing experience both for myself and for people who view my photo pages. If you are not Pro on Flickr already you should definitely consider it. It’s a wonderful community of photographers on the web where I personally interact on a daily basis.

Anyways, nice job to team Flickr on another big improvement to the site. Keep up the good work! More details in the help forum on the new page here.

You can follow my own photography on Flickr here. ?


Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

 
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Flickr’s New Home Page is Fantastic!

10 Sep

New Flickr Feed on the Flickr Home Page

Even in the new Instagram, Facebook, Snapchatty world, Flickr still remains my favorite place to share photos. I have now posted over 120,000 photos to Flickr and it remains my primary online archive for my body of work. Even though you don’t hear about Flickr as much in the headlines these days, there is still a very robust community there who shares great work every single day. I usually post two batches of photos each day to Flickr, once in the morning and once in the evening.

The value proposition for Flickr is compelling. Both free and $ 49/year Pro accounts offer 1 terabyte of storage for your photos. One terabyte should be enough for almost every photographer out there today. Fortunately for me, I’ve been grandfathered into the old Flickr Pro account structure, which allows *unlimited* photo storage. I have already passed 1 terabyte at Flickr, but I am a very rare outlier. 99.9% of the photographers using Flickr today are nowhere close to this limit.

In addition to generous storage, Flickr also gives both Pro and free accounts a terrific iPhone/Android app and a beautiful web experience. Where Facebook and Instagram downsize and degrade your photos, Flickr allows you to host your full high resolution original JPGs. This also makes Flickr a great place as an additional layer of backup for published JPG images. Pro accounts also get ad free browsing and sharing (that’s why even free accounts don’t see advertisements on my photo pages) which makes the account worth the $ 49 a year alone. There are also some nice additional benefits to going Pro.

Recently Flickr made a very significant change to the web version of the site. Flickr.com, the main home page has been completely redesigned and in my opinion is 1000% better.

You may or may not have the new home page yet, but they are slowly rolling it out to everybody over time. If you haven’t been to flickr.com in a while I’d encourage you to check the new feed page out. You have to be logged in to see the new changes, but they make following your Flickr friend’s photos such a better experience.

Several new design elements have been brought into the new feed page.

1. There is now a three column layout. Photos are easy to browse and you can just scroll down the page looking at photos from your contacts.

Previews in the New Flickr Feed Look Awesome!

2. Preview. This is my favorite feature of the new feed. If you see a photo on a page that you want to see larger you just click on it. The photo instantly blows up big and beautiful in a very clean version on your screen. Even better, Flickr has incorporated keyboard commands to the large view of these previews, so if I like a photo and want to favorite it or comment on it I can just press the F or C key on my keyboard. If someone has uploaded multiple photos in a batch (like I usually do) I can also easily use the forward and backward arrow keys to go through a batch of photos, easily interacting with each image with my keyboard commands.

Once you are done looking and interacting with a batch of photos using preview, you can just hit the escape key and it takes you right back where you were to your place in feed. Very slick!

Previously if I wanted to go through my contacts’ photos I would have to go to the “People” menu item which was a very glitchy page that bounced around too much on page reloads. I still use the People tab because it allows me to filter between friends/contacts photos and sometimes I just have time to look at my friend’s images, but I’m finding that I’m spending the majority of my time following my contacts’ images through the new feed page. I also like that it includes entire batches of photos that I can click through if I want whereas the old People page only would show the last 1 or 5 images depending on how I set it.

In addition to providing a great new way to look at your contacts’ photos huge, the new page is very fluid and very fast. It feels like a big tech breakthrough vs. the old People page.

Please, Please, Please Make this Load More Button Go Away

My only complaint about the new page is that like other pages on Flickr it still makes you hit the dreaded “load more” button when you get to the bottom of the page. I wish that Flickr used true infinite scroll like Facebook does. It is such a better experience.

At first I did not like that you cannot fave/comment on batches of photos directly from the page, but after playing around with preview and seeing how well it worked and how fast it was, combined with awesome keyboard shortcut commands, I became a convert and now flickr.com has earned a coveted spot on my bookmarks bar. Hats off to the Flickr design and engineering team for such an awesome improvement to the site. ?

There is a help forum thread on the new Flickr feed where you can read more about the new Flickr feed and see what others think of it here.

You can follow my work on Flickr here. ?


Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

 
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First Impressions on Flickr’s New Book Publishing Service

20 Nov

I Just Published My First Book

I just published my very first book.

I’ve been meaning to do a book forever and today I finally did it. Flickr launched their new book publishing service today and I wanted to try it out, so I created a 200 page book called America in Progress.

The book is comprised of 200 photos I hand selected from the almost 88,000 I’ve got published to Flickr. It cost me $ 137.94.

The basic charge for the new Flickr book is $ 34.95 for a 20 page book. Additional pages are 50 cents each with a 200 page maximum. In my case shipping was another $ 12.99. ($ 34.95 for the basic book + $ 90 for an extra 180 pages + $ 12.99 for shipping).

The Breakdown on What My New Book Costs
My book cost me about $ 138 for the maximum 200 page book.

The book should arrive in the next 5 to 7 business days.

It took me about 2.5 hours to make the book. It’s a photo only book and the only text I was able to add was the title of the book — which is on the cover and on the spine. I didn’t see any way to change the font of the title so I went with what they offered by default.

The Breakdown on What My New Book Costs
My book should be here in 5 to 7 business days.

There were a lot of glitches when I built my book — which is to be expected when you try out a new service within the first hour of launch. The first book I tried to create sent me to a non-existent page when I tried to check out. The publishing page was also running very slowly for me at one point. It would take me about 45 seconds to add a new page to my book. My session crashed and when I refreshed the page it went faster. Fortunately Flickr auto-saves the progress on your book as you go, so I didn’t lose any work when this happened.

The Layout Tool For Flickr's New Book Service Was Super Easy to Use
Despite some glitches, Flickr’s layout tool for creating books was really easy to use.

I was also warned when I tried to check out that there were print quality alerts on some pages of my books, but I carefully checked every single page and didn’t see any alerts anywhere. It would be nice if you could click a link which would tell you what pages specifically Flickr was concerned with.

As far as book publishing goes, it was really easy to create the book. I could either pull from my Flickr photostream or from any of my sets. You just drag and drop the photos into a book publishing sort of layout and you can move pages around so that things go where you want them.

Because I have so many photos in my Flickrstream and so many sets in my Flickrstream, I found it difficult to find all of the photos that I wanted to use in the book. Most users won’t have 88,000 Flickr photos though, so it should be easier for them. It would be nice if Flickr also offered a third way to find photos to publish, search.

The book will be 11” x 8.5 and will be a hardcover. Flickr says it will be printed on “premium white proPhoto paper with a Lustre finish,” and will come with a dust jacket.

If you change your mind on buying the book after you create it and check out, you have an hour to cancel your order.

I will report back more when I actually get the book as to the quality of it compared to other self publishing group books I’ve been involved with. Books can only be delivered to the Continental U.S.

I think it’s smart for Flickr to get into the book publishing business (and their timing is pretty good with the Holiday season approaching). It’s a natural way for them to grow and make money. I suspect that today’s offering is only the beginning. I could see Flickr also offering a way for book publishers to sell their books as well in the future, like blurb offers.

For more feedback on this new book service from Flickr you can check out this thread in the Flickr Help Forum.

When I First Tried to Check Out Flickr Took Me to a Non-Existent Page
An error sent me to a weird non-existent page when I first tried to checkout and pay for my book — Flickr seemed to want to send me to giantsouthern’s photostream instead.


Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

 
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Flickr Founder Stewart Butterfield on Flickr’s New Redesign

28 May

Founder of Flickr Likes the New Flickr


Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

 
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Hacking Flickr: How to Build Your Own Personal Version of Flickr’s Explore Using Advanced Search

16 Oct

One of the things that I dislike about Flickr’s Explore algorithm is that it shows me so many photos that I’m not interested in. It seems like every time I go there I end up with a hodgepodge of photos that I dislike — overwatermarked, overcooked, etc. I’ve always been interested in is a version of Explore that would filter out everyone on Flickr except for my contacts. Over the years I’ve managed both my contacts and friends/family list to my own personal taste as a consumer of photography.

The most popular way to view your contacts’ photos of course is on the “Photos From Your Contacts” page. This page shows you the last 1 or 5 (you choose) photos by your contacts or friends/family (again you choose). So you basically have four different ways to view your contacts’ photos, but all four are by recency only.

Sometimes you might want to look at photos by your contacts in ways other than recency. Over the years I’ve added a ton of people as contacts — so many in fact that there is just no way that I can keep up with every single photo every single contact posts every single day. So instead of the recency view I’ve been looking for other ways that I can look at my contacts’ photos.

After playing around with Flickr’s advanced search page this weekend, I figured out how I can view my contacts’ photos by interestingness instead of only recency. This is helpful if you want to see what are the best (most popular) photos by your contacts over past period of times. Flickr’s interestingness algorithm gives every photo on flickr a hidden internal score. This score is based on lots of factors including how many favorites a photo gets, how many comments a photo gets, tags, where it’s posted on the web outside of Flickr, etc. The basic premise though is that the more activity a photo receives the more interesting a photo might be.

Advanced search on Flickr lets you customize your search criteria and seems to even work with empty search queries (which seem to return all photos). You can customize the search page to only search using your contacts photos and you can customize it by past time periods. So if you want to run through all of your contacts’ photos by the last day, week, month, etc. and have them ranked by the most popular photos to see if you’ve missed any great photos you can do that using this page.

The way Flickr returns photos in search is a little clunky and is not as elegant as the justified view for photos on your contacts most recent photo page, but I bet search results on Flickr end up with a justified view at some point in the future as well. A photo wall that you can favorite from is a much superior/engaging layout after all.

Anyways, these links below should work for you as well and allow you to see the most popular photos by your contacts and friends/family over previous time periods. If you command/click (Mac) on a thumbnail it will open it in another window and then you can just tab through these windows to fave/comment/view larger any of the photos you have an interest in.

Most Interesting Photos by Your Contacts September 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Friends/Family September 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Contacts August 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Friends/Family August 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Contacts July 2012
Most Interesting Photos by Your Friends/Family July 2012

Most Interesting Photos by Your Friends/Family YTD
Most Interesting Photos by Your Contacts YTD

For some reason, some searches using empty queries on flickr for earlier time spans (like all of 2011) produced no photos for me, so something must have changed with how Flickr handles empty queries after 2011.

I’m not sure how long you’ve been able to search empty queries from the advanced search page. I tried to go use the wayback machine at the Internet archive to see what this page looked like in the past but apparently Flickr is blocking the internet archive from indexing this page (and other pages as well, including one specific group, which seemed odd).


Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

 
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