flickr – Page 2

Geotagging at Flickr

Flickr finally supports geotagging from within it’s toolset without the user having to add on their own geotagging apps. It’s really easy to use – search the map, search for your photo’s and then drag the photo to the point you want to map to. Done. At the weekend I had added in some photo’s from my trip to America in 1995 and as I had heard Flickr may add the new functionality I had geotagged them. But wait. Thats was done using Google and an add-on to Flock. Would the tags work with Flickr?

The answer is yes – Flickr have provided an importing tool so that photo’s already tagged can be imported. Worked with all my photo’s and gives me an excellent new way of viewing my albums. The only downside is that at the moment there are no high resolution pictures or maps of Glasgow. Doh. Searching for an address still returns an accurate point on the map but the lack of a decent street map or photo takes away the immediacy of adding pictures or where exactly the picture was taken. Still – theres a few added to Glasgow already.

Even easier – if a photo has been mapped then a map link will appear next to the photo or in the information panel at the bottom right of each photo. Also the ugly lat and lon tags are no longer required. Instead you will get a real world destination i.e. Taken in Las Vegas, Nevada. For those photo’s imported the tags will be automatically removed at a later date.

The best online photo management and sharing application in the world just got a little bit better and this new feature makes it easy to find great photo’s of an area without having to tag it.

Zooomr adds Portals

I’ve tried Zooomr out a couple of times but Flickr still wins due to size of community, other application support and features. However Zooomr today added Portals which is a nice way of adding details to photo’s and linking through to other photo’s in a set – almost like picture within picture on a TV. Good examples can be seen in the video on Zooomr Blog.

Click on the sample below that you allows you to see it in action (not IE7 friendly but works well in Firefox)

Wheres the toys? Hosted on Zooomr

Preloadr

I mentioned Preloadr a few days ago and finally got round to giving it a proper test. It’s an image manipulation tool which is integrated with the Flickr photo sharing website. Once you have granted access to your Flickr account you can easily select an image via sets or tags for editing.

The options available are extensive for an online only tool. You can crop, rotate and mirror your images and also add text. You can view the images histogram and also alter red, green, blue intensity. Layer support is also available along with the ability to scale and move images within a layer. Finally there are a number of filters including blur and sharpen as well as ‘Auto Contrast’ the results of which you can see below. The more helpful red-eye removal is not currently available but it is an early beta.

The only snag I found was that I couldn’t upload the saved changes back to Flickr which is a bit of a fatal flaw – hopefully this is just a temporary issue. For quick editing on the move away from an editor this was more than adequate though I’d still prefer a USB stick and Irfanview. It did highlight that I don’t pay enough attention to making the most of my snaps – the lightning image after applying the filter was dramatically different. I’ll give the Adobe Lightroom beta a try.

Flock Hands On

The first official beta of Flock was launched last week and as it promised so much I gave it an extended test. Eight months ago I was pretty scathing about Flock. Not for me was the upshot of my brief trial. So why is it now so close to becoming my default browser?

The browser has established itself as the most used app on a pc, for me at least. Get news, share opinions, shop, blog, download etc etc etc. No other app is used as much as the browser. So to move application it has to be as quick as the opposition, render pages accurately and also support easy migration from your old app. Flock is based on Mozilla (same code as Firefox) and I found the import of data to be excellent. Cookies and form data were imported as well as favourites although how the favourites were stored is another matter – more on that later.

I thought the previous version of Flock was slow, not just in the application itself but also rendering web pages – not so this version. Almost all of the extra functionality worked well and was snappy in use. Web page rendering was fast and accurate. I also love the look of the app – more like a Mac than a Windows app although after using Vista there are some influences from there too. You can easily see when there is new photo or news content – a small orange circle shows you when your contacts or RSS feeds have been updated. Makes for an easier browsing experience.

Photo’s
Flock integrates with Flickr and Photobucket via a Photo’s topbar. Once you allow the app to talk to your Flickr account it will check to see if your contacts have added any new photo’s and let you know when there are new ones to view. You can easily select your own photo’s or your contacts to be viewed in the topbar. Click on the photo to view it in the browser itself. You can also view your own, contacts or public photo’s by tag. The topbar totally changes how I use Flickr and now makes it easy to keep up to date with new content.

If this wasn’t enough Flock also comes with it’s own uploader application to make publication to Flickr easy. Drag photo’s from any webpage to the topbar and it will launch the uploader app (which can be launched independently at any time). Using this app you can crop, rotate, resize images before uploading and create a new set, add to an existing set and then upload your images. You can also select files from your hard disk or just drag from explorer onto the app. Works really well and your newly uploaded images are instantly viewable in the topbar. More details after the jump. Continue reading “Flock Hands On”

Picasa Web Albums

Google launched Picasa Web Albums last week which allows you to publish your Picasa managed photo’s easily to the web. I was interested as I use Flickr for my web albums and my local photo management is poor – would Picasa sort out my local and web needs?

Even though Picasa is beta software the Picasa Web Albums are officially a ‘test’. Already trying to differentiate from Flickr Beta and Gamma. Once you sign up it’s then easy to publish photo’s from Picasa. Select a photo or album and load it into the Photo Tray. Then select Web Album to load whatever has been added to the Photo Tray.

The options on uploading are fairly limited. You can create a new album or add photo’s to an existing album. You can add a description or add location (for Google Earth integration which is really smart). You select the quality of the picture you want to upload and then finally whether the pictures are public or private. The uploading then takes place in the background allowing you to continue using Picasa.

Once uploaded you can easily see your gallery at picasaweb.google.com/username (mine’s here). Compared to Flickr there are some obvious disadvantages. No concept of tagging or groups and hence a real lack of community unlike Flickr which uses these features to drive the website and share your photo’s with other like minded groups. Picasa album functionality is also basic – can view a slideshow and change order but that’s about it – feels very old school compared to Flickr but that’s really just styling that could be addressed through time. There is nothing similar to the Flickr Organize features at all.

For free Picasa will allow for 250Meg of storage – if you take a lot of photo’s this will go quickly. For $25 a year you get access to 6Gig of storage. It’s not clear if that is the maximum amount of storage or whether you get an additional 6Gig every year. Flickr doesn’t limit storage but upload bandwidth. For free you are allowed to upload 20Meg per month and are limited in the amount of sets (albums you can create). There are also adverts. For $25 a year you get a 2Gig per month upload limit, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth and sets. No adverts either. For my requirements Flickr wins hands down.

Flickr also allows 3rd party access via API’s which means external apps and companies can access your photo’s (with your permission) to create print albums, allow for easy access from phones and other applications etc. Google doesn’t have anything like that at the moment although you can order prints from Picasa with ease.

If you use and love Picasa for local photo management then Picasa Web Albums will be a good solution as like most Google online offerings it is simple to publish and easy to use. Flickr is far more feature rich though and makes sharing and also finding photos easy. I also like the number of apps that now link to Flickr. Picasa Web Albums looks to be more expensive than Flickr while offering less. It’s a shame there is no way to use Picasa and publish to Flickr instead as on this showing I can’t see anyone wanting to move from Flickr to Picasa Web Albums.

Web Tools Update

Visit flickr – notice anything different? Some updates to the styling and some new functionality. It’s also officially moved out of beta…to gamma. It would be so wrong of any web app to officially move out of beta – just wouldn’t be web 2.0. I’m liking the changes to the search and organisation links. Organizing photo’s is a bit easier to – made the whole site easier to use.
Google Trends. Nice app for stat whores and info gatherers. Compare search patterns for up to five search terms and see some pretty graphs and also how that search term is used locally and across the world. For example, look at the increase in the term Edinburgh around festival time. Also links to related news items if available. Great app.
Google Notebook. Another Google app which has just been launched – this allows you to link and clip web sites. Online research tool basically. Download an extension for Firefox to allow easy access to your one or many notebooks from the browser (IE also). From what I’ve used it’s fine – no rss or xml sharing of list though so it’s not yet a del.ici.ous rival. Wasn’t there a Google Bookmarks app as well? There was – which has tagging of sorts but not much sharing. Combine the two and you’ve got a far better app.
Google Calendar. Has become my full time calendar replacing 30boxes and Outlook. Easy to use, search and is integrated nicely with Google Mail. There are other more feature rich apps on the web but this meets all my needs.
If Google integrates mail, calendar, notebook and some sort of to-do then it would be a perfect online organiser. Hopefully it’s only a matter of time. The apps (apart from to-do) are all there but have the feel of separate applications that are not well integrated. A wee bit of Ajax magic would soon sort that.

Site Tweaks

Finally got round to doing some small tweaks to tidy the site up. Sidebar is a lot less cluttered with links now moved to a page all of their own. Speaking of pages I’ve finally got an About page sorted that holds info about me (doh) and also last tracks heard, a currently list, gamercard and some site stats.

Flickr gallery can also be accessed through Gallery page which gives me a couple of options when wanting to view photo’s. Much tidier. Now back to real life tidying – this room’s a mess.