Slashdot Mirror
A History of Flickr
Ant writes "USA Today has an interesting look back at how Flickr was born. From the article 'Caterina Fake knew she was on to something when one of the engineers at her Vancouver, British Columbia-based online game start-up created a cool tool to share photos and save them to a Web page while playing. "It turned out the fun was in the photo sharing," she says. Fake scrapped the game. She and her programmer husband, Stewart Butterfield, transformed the project into Flickr. In less than two years, the photo-sharing site -- now owned by Internet giant Yahoo! -- has turned into one of the Web's fastest-growing properties.'"
Like blogs, Flickr accounts are more for the person posting the pictures than for the audience. Not that that's a bad thing. It's probably a good idea to keep all those narcissists herded away from the rest of the web.
Her name is Caterina Fake? Caterina?!? Shyeah, right.
I've never used Flickr, but I have been using Gallery now for about 6 months. It's Open Source, based on PHP and MySQL. I've had to do two complete machine moves in that time, and it's handled them both flawlessly.
;-)
I think of all the image organization programs and services I've used (and there's a whole lotta them!), Gallery has brought me the most pleasure. I had more or less put down my digital camera, because I found sharing, storing and cataloging photos publicly too much of a pain. Being able to share my photos with my friends and family has just been a real joy for me. And no, it's not pr0n.
I suppose I could use the Flickr API, but I just wanted something I could stick on my own private site. If something bad happened with Flickr it would be far too much of a hassle to have to deal with someone else's system.
She lives on 123 Fake Street.
There is always ruby. I know you can create a flickr prog rather fast...
/me waits to be flamed
Quality for Software
anybody else having probs clicking the "reply to this" link under each message?
You can reach her with comments at foo@bar.com
I've come to realise that only 5% of the site is unsafe as well, mostly to do with porn not being porn but a man wearing suspenders over his legs and face squatting in disturbing poses.
Jonathanjk.com
that they sold out to Yahoo... now they insist on you having a Yahoo account in order to post your photos. Yahoo sucks... that amongst many other things...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I just want to let you know how impressed I am by the photo of you and your team. It's so professional and I've never seen that sort of photo before. It makes your website look professional, sensible and reputable. Perhaps what is most striking is how it doesn't look stupid at all. In fact the first thing I said to myself was "now there's a business team photo that doesn't look at all like it's a fake stock photo, not a tiny bit, rather it looks like an impromptu shot of the team hard at work, or else at an after-work cock-sucking-in-a-circle party". I look forward to conducting business with you soon, primarily based upon that photo of you and your team, as there was little other information available on your website, but I know how business is thesedays and who really has the time to update their website anyway? Regards, regards, and all and sundry.
What's wrong with this picture? Where's the revenue? It's a free hosting service, and they boast about how many people take up their offer of free image hosting.
Does Flickr actually make money for Yahoo?
flickr is awesome if you need a lot of images. Its very easy to write a script to scrape all of the images for a certain keyword. It is also really nice to use if you just want to manually search for some images with some keywords. Kudos to the people who brough Flickr to the web.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
Flickr also sells "pro account" subscriptions for the ability to upload more, no ads, etc. for $24.95 a year: http://flickr.com/upgrade/
Flickr isn't really about the "image hosting" part of it - it's about the social aspect of it. Putting pictures in pools, commenting on people who take pictures with the same camera you do, finding photographers you like and can gain inspiration from, sharing photos with friends, and so on.
Gallery 2 is a great piece of image organizing and hosting software, though. It's just missing the social aspect that Flickr has.
...is just getting sickr and sickr. ;)
So, uh, whatever happened to original engineer who thought up the idea? Did he/she ever get anything out of Flickr?
I have used most of the photoservices and Flickr is by far the best, the folksonomy system is just great.
The interface is nice and simple, the Organize tool is cool, sets are easy to create, and you can easily follow what your contacts are uploading.
Plus set your account to follow other groups/tags/people.
It's really neat, plus it's a great way to archive the photos you display on your site/blog/whatever.
A lot of people do upgrade to the pro account, as the free account only gives you 2 sets, and it's worth the upgrade if you do use flickr a lot.
Share your Knowlege - Kung-Fu Geekery
I went out and bought a pro account, and now you're telling me I could have gotten one for free? Darn.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You know, more and more I am reading news articles on slashdot that seem to be PR press releases more than they are "news". I mean, this is an interesting article and all, but it seems like shameless corporate patting yourself on the back.
I want my game, not some dumb photo album. Next thing they'll be telling us they scrapped making Halo IV in order to make socks!!
It also provides the ability to find scads of free-as-in-speech content, some of which is even pretty good.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
So what happened to the engineer who created it in the first place?
I've never used flickr but I'll comment on how great another service is. And then get modded up +5 Informative! Give me a fucking break!
The name is kind of weird to me because where I live (the Netherlands) 'Flickr' is a harsh synonym for 'Gay' and also is a synonym for 'Bad person'
Apart from the name it is a clever service, especially the tag-thing, like http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/sluts/
Damnit Jim, I'm [root@localhost w00t]#, not an AD-Adminstrator(tm) !
i was on y! photos before using the flickr but now totally swear by flickr .... coz of the features it provide like easy sharing/easy upload/comments/groups/shows the no of view for each image/communities ...... :)
i work for money, if u want loyalty, Go get a Dog.
So anyone know of a nice photo album software with tagging features and such ?
...
... found nothing at the time)
I love flickr, but I love my pictures more and would rather feel safer hosting them on my own
(I checked about a month ago on sourceforge, freshmeat, and hotscripts
Thanks!
HAHA! Wow. WHY would anyone take that even for a STOCK photo shoot?! Unless someone is creating media for "GayExecutiveCircleJerkBukkake.com," that picture is completely uncalled for.
"Pic1: Moments before show time!"
I mean LOOK at it. How can that be interpreted as anything else but none-too-subtle sexualized dominance. It's a ring of sycophants ready to "service" their master. "All johnsons on CEO Johnson!" I mean, seriously, WTF? This bothers me. Not the message, but the fact that someone would be so dense as to put it on an actual business site and not think that people's eyebrows are going to jump. Unless, like I said, your business charges $19.95 a month with "discrete" recurrent billing.
OK. Too much anger for a Sunday morning. Getting coffee.
If Yahoo leaves Flickr just the way it is, it's gonna be killer. But leave it to American MBAs to fuck up the simplest things.
You can't compare Gallery to Flickr.
...
Gallery is nice, but
a) Gallery without ImageMagick available sucks sucks sucks. My webhoster doesn't provide ImageMagick and the scaled down images made with the built-in GD look blurry. Flickrs photo scaling is worldclass. The scaled down images look clear and sharp.
b) Only you and a few other people know about your site unless you some famous internet personality.
c) Gallery is an photoalbum application while Flickr is a social photo sharing service.
d) Gallery2 seems to choke on progressive saved JPEGs. You can't even delete them properly once you uploaded them... strange.
I do have a Flickr account and a Gallery2 setup. I used Gallery2 to upload visual experiments (like: look here for the crop you suggested) while discussing my photos within the Flickr service.
I went from a staunch Gallery user to Flickr Pro. Gallery is great and maybe is still the first choice for lots of folks, but not me. In addition to all the features they have in common, Flickr can show latest photos on blog, can publish photos sent via email, can receive camera phone pics, can blog photos sent by email/camera phone, integrated creative commons licensing, supports notes on pics, can link to friends, makes awesome use of metadata tags, and is a great way to find other people's photos. Flickr feels social to me. And I think my pictures get looked at more. It's well worth the $25 for pro.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Slashdot indexes interesting articles and lets us discuss them.
The problem is that some stupidly large chunk of articles in news sources *are* lightly-modified press releases. Because, well, that's just how news works these days.
All you're seeing is a reflection of what the news sources are doing.
Granted, Slashdot can focus more on blogs and so forth than news sources (honestly, the most interesting and in-depth articles do seem to usually come from sources other than conventional news articles). However, it would probably be pretty easy to just write a script that scans each Slashdot article summary for links, and checks to see if those links are to some list of conventional news sources that you dislike and just filter out those articles.
I've been pretty happy with the BBC and other British news sources. C|Net seems to usually be pretty good. I like Economist articles -- they're long enough to have excellent, informative articles. NASA and the ACM seem to be pretty good. The New Scientist seems to get a lot of IMHO bizarre articles referenced on Slashdot -- I dunno about them. If the NYT didn't have that godawful registration, they'd range from not-so-good to pretty-darn-good. On the other hand, CNN tends to do puff pieces -- an attention-grabbing headline, lots of emotional appeal, and then not much in-depth content (and while I dislike Bush, their mudslinging over even trivial things reaches the ridiculous). Fox News...well, I don't think we even need to go there.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
What I really like is
1. The use of frames. It's not at all like frames have been found wanting since the mid '90s.
2. The use of tables for layout. Brilliant. Hardly anyone does that. It's really making use of existing technology there!
3. And to top it off, the image is scaled up just enough (from 180x176 to 250x239) to change the aspect ratio (from 1.023 to 1.046) and make it blurry. How appropriate when talking about a service that handles resizing.
I am using Coppermine and I am pretty happy with it.
It is free and written in PHP. It runs well on my hosting services web site.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
I was hoping that some slashbot would be able to help me with this question, since no one on flickr seems to be able to.
Is there anyway to sort through flickr by both creative commons license AND by interestingness?
I ask because I spend a huge amount of time on flickr looking for images that I use in my classroom presentations (also CC licensed) and it seems like madness that I have to look at ALL the 'physics' photos to try and find the few good ones.
-CGP314 on Flickr
http://caterina.net/
This is just another instance of a Canadian selling off bit of Canada to the yanks. It makes me SICK.
Available for a short time only!
http://www.hetemeel.com/einstein/86180.jpg
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Personal plug: I've been developing my own alternative photo bloggy thing in PHP (ad hoc'ly called Pho Bo Blog); although I am currently my only user, I'm eager to share/extend/develop according to the needs of any other interested parties.
-b
myselfmusic