photos

Showing 12 posts tagged photos

Is a comeback in the cards for the first social network I ever loved?

alexrainert:

Mat Honan:

And that’s the thing: Flickr feels like a permanent home. While sharing is great, it turns out that as we progress in our digital lives, as we take more and more photos and share them more and more places, we eventually want to go back and see them again. (Which explains the popularity of services like TimeHop.) We want to revisit them. We want to relive them.

This is a great insight. We take more and more photos but it seems like a lot of services are geared towards “share now!” vs reflection and coming back to the things we’ve done and getting some narrative out of them.

Coincidentally, these abstractions: stories, moments, reflection, images — they coincide (hehe) with everything that I’m interested in tech at the moment. It’s everything that i has informed my work at Flickr and at Tumblr. So.. stay tuned for more in this space ;)

EDIT: question: do we ‘really’ want to see all these mementos again? We create so much volume now and a simple economic rule of thumb is that the greater the supply, the lower the demand.

bijan sabet: Since you can't outsource your soul, you can't outsource your design

bijan:

Earlier this week, i reblogged a Steve Jobs quote that was lighting up on Tumblr with well over 200 notes. Here’s the quote:

Last week, I shared my thoughts about wanting to see the Vimeo of photos. From the comments and from private emails, it’s clear I’m not alone. 

I also received about a dozen emails from entrepreneurs that want or have started to build something to take on flickr. 

This is interesting. If I could design something like Flickr but not like Flickr from the ground up, how would it work? For starters, I’d make privacy and connections dead simple: here are people who are important to me, here is the off/on switch for how I can and can’t interact with them.  Focus on gorgeous, big images without clutter.  Strip away tools that aren’t used very much. Appeal to the idea of sharing moments and stories and not sharing objects.  And a simple, elegant interface for you to highlight moments you want to come back to later, subscribe to events from people that you’d like to keep in touch with and a way to glean and present your own moments that you care about and want to come back to.  Something that invites you not just to spew out content but to come back to the things you’ve shared to make sense of them in new found contexts. I guess I would make something for myself mainly, and wouldn’t care too much about scaling to photographers who aren’t like me.

It wouldn’t be a Vimeo for photos — I find the discovery on Vimeo to be a bit noisy at the moment.  It would be something else entirely, something that plays nice with other networks but ultimately it’s something that revolves around the power of great images, something that you can come back to time and time again to look at, to appropriate it for projects, to treasure.  

A lot of services now aspire to end with ‘sharing’.  Like sharing is the endpoint.  I’m curious to build out services that will let you remix and create narratives from these objects.

The Flickr guys are doing the work of heroes right now, because such a large service that really is operating incredibly at scale and serving so many different use cases would require a team at least 3 times their size — or more, if you consider the platform titans like FB or Twitter.  And it’s so easy to think about rebuilding something from the ground up — since you don’t have to consider the myriad of ways in which users depend on your product or features that belong in the appendix. (Lord knows one of the great joys and headaches of a large service is realizing the community is using a feature in ways that are totally unexpected!) Starting from a blank webpage is incredibly liberating and so much easier than moving mountains.

It’s incredible to think the power that photos have as an underlying basic piece of the web.  If Flickr turned off the lights tomorrow, how would I find photos? Shudder. It’s a testament to Stewart’s vision and the team’s execution that Flickr photos are now taken for granted as part of of the web.

I’m keen to see what they come up with next. As the only photo-sharing service on the web that’s worth any value to me (as a photographer who loves moments and metadata as storytelling), it’s where I keep my photos, but it’s fun to approach a basic idea as sharing photos from other angles.

nervousacid: So here’s something interesting: Brooke Smith, who plays Dr. Erica Hahn on Grey’s Anatomy, actually grew up in the early ’80s New York hardcore punk scene. That’s crazy! She recently scanned a bunch of old photos and sent them to the Internet, and while I’m definitely not nostalgic for that ill feeling I used to get in my stomach walking onto the corner of Bleecker and Bowery every Sunday in 1988, I did get slightly nostalgic at the sight of a long-gone Alphabet City. There was a mnemonic device associated with the neighborhood back then: If you walk on Avenue A, you’re Adventurous. Avenue B, you’re Brave. Avenue C, you’re Crazy. But if you make it as far as Avenue D, you’re Dead. The first three descriptions were accurate enough to keep me from ever fucking with the fourth. High-res

nervousacid:

So here’s something interesting: Brooke Smith, who plays Dr. Erica Hahn on Grey’s Anatomy, actually grew up in the early ’80s New York hardcore punk scene. That’s crazy! She recently scanned a bunch of old photos and sent them to the Internet, and while I’m definitely not nostalgic for that ill feeling I used to get in my stomach walking onto the corner of Bleecker and Bowery every Sunday in 1988, I did get slightly nostalgic at the sight of a long-gone Alphabet City.

There was a mnemonic device associated with the neighborhood back then: If you walk on Avenue A, you’re Adventurous. Avenue B, you’re Brave. Avenue C, you’re Crazy. But if you make it as far as Avenue D, you’re Dead. The first three descriptions were accurate enough to keep me from ever fucking with the fourth.

Evolution of Flickr’s redesign.  Beyond usability and performance issues, we thought a lot about what the photo was about — images are taken for granted as part of the web’s fabric now.. but they’re so much more than just re-arranged pixels. High-res

Evolution of Flickr’s redesign.  Beyond usability and performance issues, we thought a lot about what the photo was about — images are taken for granted as part of the web’s fabric now.. but they’re so much more than just re-arranged pixels.

“Your photos already carry the narrative elements of who, what, where, when and how whenever you upload them to Flickr. Browse Flickr and you’ll see stories within stories — photos within photostreams within groups or any kinds of combinations. So we’ve made it easier to find when a photo was taken, it’s location, camera/exif info and your name in one location to the right of the image. Along with the title and description and we think that photosharing will increasingly become story-sharing.”

My proudest moment as part of Flickr so far. 

“

Researchers at Yahoo, which owns Flickr, developed a way to gather photos and construct travel itineraries based on the location of the photos and the time between each picture. The tool, which gives people possible itineraries if they select a city and indicate how much time they have, works for five cities — Barcelona, London, Paris, New York and San Francisco.

The researchers call the Flickr photos “social breadcrumbs” — information that people leave behind when they share things publicly online.

”

WSJ - Using Flickr photos as a travel guide