Following my post last week about Flickr's interpretation of my photos' EXIF metadata, I spent a little more time this afternoon looking deeper into the problem.

End result: I understand the problem a bit more and have a workable solution...

(Read more...)

Topics: software/linux, photography

[#]

Dear Flickr,

You know that I like your site as a place to display photos. Like so many other people, I happily upload my piles of crappy images to your servers in the hope that one or two lost souls might stumble across them and, becoming confused from the long journey, consider them worthy of viewing.

I realise you are not perfect and remain in that mythical state called "perpetual beta" as a way of warning users that there will be some rough edges. And, boy, are there some rough edges. However, your abuse of user interface conventions and sacrificing of simple web browser functionality to the Gods Of Web 2.0 are not the topic of conversation for today. Rest assured, we will be talking about those in the near future, but today we have a much more serious problem to address.

To wit, when the Exif data from my camera says the following (and I am quoting from your own interpretation):

how about we agree that it is incorrect — nay, dishonest even — to decide that the upload date is something like this?

Due to stupidity on my own part, I had need to replace a large number of photos in my Berkeley set today and after going through the somewhat tedious replacement process, I now have to spend more time going through and correcting dates. I have noticed your tendency to get the dates incorrect in the past, but the ongoing problem is really starting to annoy me.

Please try to do better in the coming year.

Thank you for your attention,
Malcolm

P.S. Yes, I've filed a bug report.

Topics: photography/flickr

[#]

Syndication has become important over the last few years. Sure, it's been around for a while, but these days it's almost at a point where I could see my parents using it — OS installations are shipping with feed readers, third-party apps are readily available and the feeds themselves are pretty standard on many "updatable" sites.

That being said, having ubiquitous feeds throughout a site is not a universal trait. If creating a feed is any real amount of work, it means you have to actually design the feature and work out where you want feeds. If creating feeds is simple and somehow built into your toolkit (whether your toolkit is a bunch of common libraries, or a framework, or just the knowledge in your head) then you are going to be more inclined to put them everywhere you can.

I was recently thinking through how to integrate some feeds and some Atom publishing entry points in a site I am working on and I arrived at what I suspect is already common knowledge: each new piece of metadata is a potential feed. So if you classify things by author, then there could be a feed per author. If you (also) have tags, there is a potential feed per tag, and so on. Even in places where I thought this didn't quite make sense, it ended up being useful. A feed per day or per permalink? Sure — it includes the article, plus any comments and updates. Not everybody may want such a feed, but it costs nothing to include it (if you're clever) and for those who might like to consume your data that way, why not help them out?

Coincidental confirmation that this kind of mapping is useful arrived yesterday evening: Dave not unreasonably called me out for not taking many photos of where I live. This led me to wonder what other people had done around here (home) and looked up the area via Flickr tags. Well, sure, there are some useful tags such as pc2077 and hornsby. There is also a feed on each of these pages so that I can track any updates. Obvious enough, but not every website does this and Flickr has enough rough edges that I was briefly surprised they'd got to this point. Nice one, Flickr.

Topics: technology/xml/atom, photography/flickr, technology/metadata, thinking

[#]

Flickr's drag-and-drop photo geo-tagging is a nice addition. Simple enough interface, works smoothly, integrated nicely with their batch organiser. I'm not a big "Web 2.0" fan normally, but this is enough to impress me. Spent a few minutes yesterday and today putting my various sets of photos on the map.

Will be interesting to see what people do with this feature to integrate and extend it elsewhere.

(This post brought to you by a 90 minute American Airlines delay at SFO.)

Topics: photography

[#]