OddThinking

A blog for odd things and odd thoughts.

Online Photo DB: Stage 4n – Evaluation of Flickr Pro

This post is part of the Online Photo Database project documentation. Learn more about the project’s current status.

Which requirements does Flickr meet?

Id Pri Requirement Pass? Notes
GEN1 C Accessible by a typical web-browser Y
GEN2 I Active development of new features Y
OWN1 C Ownership of photos is retained by me. N Keep backup
OWN2 C Future-proofed against money running out: mine or yours N
OWN3 I Ownership of meta-data is retained by me. N
CAT1 C Photographs grouped into albums by event Y “Photosets”
CAT2 C Photographs tagged with people Y
CAT3 I Photographs tagged with locations, objects, activities Y
CAT4 I Performers tagged with real and stage names. Y
CAT5 I Attribution of photographer details N
CAT6 I Attribution of copyright owner’s details N
CAT7 I Rating of photographs N
CAT8 I Sorting/Filtering by rating N
CAT9 D Albums grouped by type N
CAT10 D Albums grouped by date N
CAT11 D Areas or points of photograph tagged Y
CAT12 D Simple contact management of subjects N Although there is friend tracking.
CAT13 D Hidden fields on contacts to distinguish like-named people N
CAT14 D Tagging of anonymous people to enable searching N
CAT15 D Corrections to names update everywhere Y
CAT16 D Attribution of copyright details Y Select from CC set
CAT17 D Control over (default) ordering Y
S+L1 C Link to other photos with same tag within an album Y
S+L2 I Associate URLs with subjects, that are displayed. N
S+L3 I Link to other photos with same tag across my albums Y
S+L4 I Search of tags by keyword Y
S+L5 I Cross-promotion of other albums and sites. N
S+L6 D Link to other photos with same tag across other photo sites N
S+L7 D Search of album names by keyword Y
S+L8 D User-generatable URLs to search tags by keyword Y
COMM1 D Multi-user Tagging Y
COMM2 D Notifications of appearance in photos Y
COMM3 D Comments permitted Y
COMM4 D Notification of comments Y
COMM5 D RSS or Atom Feeds for comments Y
COMM6 D RSS or Atom Feeds for subjects Y
COMM7 D RSS or Atom Feeds for new photos Y
PQ1 C Web-quality images shall be displayed by default. Y
PQ2 I Print-quality images shall be available. Y
PQ3 I Automatically generated thumbnail and web-quality versions. Y
PQ4 D Archive-quality images shall be stored. Y
PQ5 D Custom thumbnails (e.g. choosing to crop over shrinking.) N
PQ6 D Support for short video Y
PQ7 D Support for long video N
PERF1 I Quota > 0.5 TB, if any Y
PERF2 I Low-cost Y $US24.95 p.a.
PERF3 I Fast response time Y
PERF4 I Scale to thousands of tags Y
PERF5 I < 1 minute face-time per photograph N
PERF6 D Free N
UI1 C Forward/Backward navigation between photos in album. Y
UI2 D Slideshows Y
UI3 D Display of many thumbnails at once Y
PRIV1 C Their email address should never be published on the web. Y
PRIV2 I Registration and logging in not required for general use. Y
PRIV3 I Robust privacy features for photographs N Family/Friends/Public
WF1 I Hint to original location on my harddrive Y-ish Filename used as default title… until I retitle it.
WF2 I Auto-complete or partial search on tags during input N
WF3 D Read EXIF data from image Y
WF4 D Support unpublished draft state Y
MIGR1 C API to add photos Y
MIGR2 C API to add tags Y
MIGR3 I Tags can be non-specific to areas of photo Y
METR1 D “How many visitors?” metric Y
METR2 D “How long does a visitor stay?” metric N

Summary

Before I started this evaluation, Flickr Pro was the favourite contender, and it is easy to see why that is.

Flickr provides a very mature set of functionality, it provides a professional looking site, and the price is much more than free, but considerably cheaper than some of the other professional sites.

The main drawbacks are the standard ones with 3rd-party hosts; the data and the meta-data is handed over to another organisation that then have me over a barrel if they want to start charging me more, or if they go out of business.

Flickr has two advantages here. Their sheer size means they are less likely to disappear suddenly without warning. They also provide sufficient APIs to make backing up the data to a local machine feasible.

Flickr’s popularity and API access has ensured that there are a large number of tools; I haven’t looked at these directly, but I am sure I can find techniques to link it to my Facebook and similar accounts.

Flickr normally uses spaces as a tag delimiter (which I am not fond of), but it is smart enough to notice that I have used spaces and commas in the same text box, and it automatically added the quotes around the spaces, which was a nice touch.

Flickr has the concept of friends, so you can monitor their new photos additions. However, it strangely doesn’t allow you to associate a tag with the owner of another Flickr account.

The levels of privacy seem to be very primitive – you can choose between friends only, family only and the general public. There’s no way of ensuring that “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” by limiting photos to an album-specific group.

While notes can be put on selected parts of the photo, the notes are unrelated to tags, which was another surprise.

My final gripe (common to many tagging sites) is that there is no way that I can associate information (such as a URL) to a tag, so people who are impressed with the performance of Krusty the Clown, for example, can see his booking page.

Still definitely a contender.

Note: Chris at BrainSnorkel had a stab at this same evaluation using an early draft of the requirements. I was impressed that he was “at least two weeks ahead of me“, 5 1/2 months ago!

EDIT: Corrected sentence that suggested other sites were more professional.


Comments

  1. Don’t confuse this with trying to push you toward Flickr, but a couple of additional data points:

    On PRIV3: You list Friends/Family/Public. This is really Me only/Friends/Family/Public, and a strange other thing called a “pass”

    Passes are long-ish URLs you can generate that you can distribute to open up a specific photo set (or, collection, from memory) to anyone who has the URL. You can cancel the pass at any time. This is my preferred way of granting temporary access to family photos to friends and family unable or unwilling to get/login to their own Yahoo account.

    Passes can be revoked at any time. You can monitor the number of people visiting on them, but you can’t tell who they are (of course).

    A non-obvious downside of Flickr, is that something is up with large portions of the community of Flickr users. When Flickr added the ability to host short videos, there were howls of protests from a surprisingly large number of Flickr subscribers. How dare Flickr offer more features! How dare they… try out new stuff & give users more options…

    I don’t really understand it, but it worries me.

  2. I’m not exactly an expert, but I am a happy pro subscriber. Your requirements seem to be a bit more stringent than mine, but your criticism seems more than fair.

    CAT9: I think you can do this, using Collections (ie have a collection per “type”).

    CAT10: Not exactly what you want, but you can group photos by date (taken or uploaded). Flickr doesn’t assume all photos in a set have the same date, so the idea of grouping sets by date doesn’t really make sense.

    WF1: I use the Flickr uploader plugin for Aperture, and it inserts the photo ID and URL into the original photo’s metadata on my hard disk, also adds a (local) “flickr” tag. Makes it very easy to locate the original photo, and in fact you can re-upload the photo if needed (eg better image tweaking).

    Seconded Chris’ recommendation of the pass – it sounds weird but is quite useful in practice. I don’t think it addresses your Vegas requirements though.

  3. Alastair,

    Thanks for your suggestions.

    Re: Cat9

    I assume you mean “sets” rather than “collections”? There is a subtle difference between Flickr sets and Cat9. In Flickr, you can create custom sets of photographs. In my own software, I was experimenting with a sets of albums (or occasions, as I called them). I used a tree structure to sort the albums by type. I was never particularly happy with the result.

    For example, all the weddings albums were grouped together, but not all the wedding photos were grouped together.

    Okay, that’s not a good example, so let me give two better ones. All of your corporate events could be grouped together, so a coworker could browse by event, choose one of interest and then look at the photos of it.

    I have a special (handwritten, hard-coded!) page which only lists all the circus festival albums, because there is a large audience who are only interested in those, and are not interested in what I did last New Year’s Eve.

    Making a set with all the circus festival pictures I have taken would result in many hundreds of photos, which would be like drinking from the proverbial fire hose.

    Re: Cat10

    Another interesting one.

    In my custom software, I originally didn’t have dates associated with albums.

    I did create a date field in my scheme for photos, but I never got around to populating it; it didn’t seem necessary.

    For my albums, I created a “sort order” field. It wasn’t long before I was typing in, for example, 20081201 as the sort order value.

    Looking again at Flickr, it is true I can’t sort the sets by date, but I can choose the order by hand, so I am free to sort each one according to date as I add them, which should be enough to put a Y in the Cat10 box.

    (If you are worried that every time an experienced person looks at my evaluations (e.g. th evaluations of Smugmug and Flickr Pro), they find I have overlooked significant features in my summary, you are not the only one.)

    Re: WF1

    Interesting; I am uncomfortable about the way that Picasa, JAlbum (to a lesser extent) and Aperture (I guess, but am not sure) modify my original photos and/or subdirectories – especially on photos that have already been backed up to optical media. I consider the backups to be the master copies, and the ones on my hard-drive merely temporary, cached copies. So modifying the versions on my hard-drive seems wrong to me.

    I suspect that I am going to have to get over that; my workflow will change as I adopt a new system.

    (Another change I will have to take care of – my scanned images have bad EXIF data, especially the dates.)

    Re: Passes

    I can see how guest passes solve the Vegas situation. Add private photos, not shared to family or friends. Create a set called “Vegas”. Email a set guest pass to the co-conspirators on the trip, and remind them not to share it with their spouses/bosses/elephant-handlers.

    (Thanks Chris for explaining about Guest Passes. I went back to Flickr to have a look, and they are pretty well hidden!)

  4. Re: CAT10

    I assume you mean “sets” rather than “collections”?

    No I mean collections, a pro only feature. I haven’t used them myself but have a read and see if they meet your requirement.

    Re: WF1

    Aperture definitely has a concept of a backup but it’s different to yours. In Aperture a backup is called a “vault” and it’s on R/W storage. I keep mine on a separate HD. Each time you start up Aperture it tells you in the splash screen how many photos you have added to the library since the last backup.

    This scheme works well for me because I am (in theory at least) constantly preening the library, touching up and reorganising photos from the past. Also I’m taking a lot more raw photos these days and so my library at 28G is already quite awkward to backup to optical media.

    In other words, modifying images on your hard drive is the right thing to do. Think of it as modifying files under source control – it’s fine as long as you remember to commit the changes back to the repository!

  5. Alastair,

    Thanks for the pointers to collections, which I hadn’t heard of. Reading through, it sounds like exactly what I am looking for.

    As for the source-control model of photographs, I can see that I am going to have to change my thinking, but, right now, that model scares me.

    Having a vault on the same machine as the originals is risky. Computers get stolen.

    I have a slight feeling of dread for the past 6 months that I have been out of paid employment, because both of my piles of optical storage disks are in the same building. Houses catch fire. I used to use my desk drawer at work as my off-site storage.

    With source-control, you need to back up the whole repository regularly, so going to such a model will mean more back up disks, not less.

  6. Maybe you both need to back up in bigger chunks, and arrange a system of email-coordinated backup rotation with trusted friends for off-site backups.

    Actually, I think your desk drawer is still available for off-site storage.

  7. I’ve been pondering a backup solution that involves 3 identical disk-drives, a RAID-1 disk controller, a fire-resistant media-cabinet and a sign.

    Two of the drives would be in my computer, mirrored. That protects me from drive failure.

    Every now and again, I would pull out one of the drives and replace it with the spare. The re-mirroring process would run in the background, at the hardware level, so I wouldn’t need to stop working.

    The spare drive is my backup, which would protect me from accidental formats.

    The spare drive would be in the fire-resistant safe to protect me from fire.

    I’d keep my will in there too, because the law hasn’t yet caught up with good data-protection practices. You may only have one official copy of your will. Madness.

    The sign would say: “Dear thief. I know you are in a rush, but please read this. This safe does not contain anything with a re-sale value. To prove it, the combination is 1234. Take my TV and computer; leave my backups alone.” Hopefully, that would protect me against theft.

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Web Mentions

  1. OddThinking » Online Photo DB: Stage 3 - Identify possible solutions

  2. OddThinking » Online Photo Database Project - Status

  3. OddThinking » Online Photo DB: Stage 6 - Deeper evaluation of Flickr