posts by tag

Flickr launched a developer site recently (code.flickr). Dev sites intrigue me, especially those belonging to well-known companies. And for some reason, statements like this always seem to draw me in:

In the last week we deployed new code to Flickr 50 times, including 546 changes by 16 people. We issued over 2,000 new API keys, and third party developers made an average of 704 API calls per second, across 109 public API methods. We added 1 new API method, and updated 7 others. There are approximately 10,000 lines of open source code in our public subversion repository.

Sheesh, 704 API calls per second!? To interface with an API requires a slight bit of knowledge (and actual skill to do properly); I mean, it’s not something cousin Elroy could just “throw together” real quick. So to think there are that many people making that many requests per second is kind of crazy.

You can find running totals for those types of stats at the bottom of the main code.flickr page. Pretty cool.

Several months ago I posted about Flickr Video. For the most part, I was in favor of neglecting it. My position hasn’t changed, really, but I feel compelled to give kudos on their implementation.

I’m relatively satisfied about the way Yahoo has introduced this (inevitable) feature. I personally like how they’re intertwined with the photos. I didn’t really expect that. One might not even know video is supported by Flickr until it’s time to upload. Even the URL for a video is of the form ”/photos/[user]/[id]”.

I think limiting the length of a video to a max of 90 seconds was a good move, too. I know that won’t last, but the initial 90 second limit may weed out those who were wanting to use Flickr as a YouTube clone.

Considering the impossible reality that Flickr would remain 100% based on photos, overall, I think video couldn’t have been introduced any better. That’s not to say I’ll ever upload a video, but it is what it is. And considering the millions and millions of Flickr users, all with different concerns about video, I think they’ve met both sides of the argument on common ground.

Here’s the official thread and here’s a direct download. Editing tags/titles/descriptions/sets is much easier now, and it supports drag and drop reordering for those suffering from obsessedwithuploadorderitis like myself. It automatically saves your progress, too, which is awfully thoughtful. If you don’t have it yet, you should get it.

Since I have some sort of obsession with patterns and data, I’m going to time stamp the day my photos reached 10,000 views. Before the Nikon, I had around 1,800 views of about 1,200 photos, and now it’s 10,000+ views of about 1,950 photos. That’s a 727% increase (1.5 views/photo to 10.9 views/photo).

OK, I’m done.

This is exactly why I wasn’t happy about Yahoo acquiring Flickr. Major companies can’t let this stuff go, they have to have their hands in everything.

Music videos, movie trailers, television shows and sports highlights are among the features that will be available on the new site, Mike Folgner, Yahoo’s general manager for video, said in an interview. Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing site will also be adding video, he said.

I’m a big fan of Flickr, and have been since its inception. I follow a slew of discussions and groups, all of which have taught me a lot about photography. Every question I’ve asked has been politely answered with an often exuberant response. I’m afraid adding video will turn Flickr into something that I don’t want to be a part of anymore. It’ll clearly become less focused on photography and potentially start to attract the slandering nonsense found on sites like YouTube. But, as long as Yahoo makes more money—that’s what really matters.

Flickr upgraded their slideshow (example) a week or two ago—it’s much improved. I didn’t use the slideshow before, because I wasn’t crazy about it. I’ve already used this one about 3x more than the last one.

I think business cards are really fun to design. They’re fun because the space is so limited, you’re forced to make smart decisions about what should go on it. I’ve designed two. Although I’m really lacking in logo design—I can draw up a solid logo, but often can’t get the drawing mapped out in Photoshop.

Here’s a flickr set of business card designs. It’s just as satisfying as a CSS gallery.

There’s an odd/artistic appeal in heavy equipment photographs. I’ve come across them quite a few times on some of the more popular flickr photostreams. The lens has a lot to do with it, though, as I don’t think they (such as the following picture) would have near the impact if it weren’t from a fisheye perspective. Even so, it still takes a creative eye to turn an overbearing, ugly thing into something that could be worth paying for.

One of my favorite photographers (although I don’t know too many) is Rebekka Guoleifsdottir (her Flickr stream). She has not only inspired me to really dive into photography, but she has also made me want to travel to Iceland—it looks awesome there.

Strobist is writing a series called “Flickr and You.” In part one, they talk about Rebekka Guoleifsdottir, and how her fame became known through Flickr. It seems as though her photography is spreading like wildfire, and she might owe much of that to Flickr (she just reached over 3,000,000 views). Since Flickr is one of my top places to spend “internet time,” I naturally find articles like this interesting. Let’s hope Flickr doesn’t change by attempting to capitalize even more on its ability to fuel the fire for amateur photographers all over the world.

Just recently, I found a Web Design Inspiration set on Flickr that has a wealth of good, solid designs. There’s a brief description of each, along with a link out to the actual site. Not surprisingly, I’ve clicked through each individual design (only within the Flickr gallery—I’m not that bad). Here are a few others (not in the set) I’ve come across lately:

• http://www.karaburke.net/ – the static flower at the bottom is sort of cool
• http://www.fluidbook.com/ – not only is the site nice, but the book itself looks nice, as well as the shopping bag
• http://www.non-format.com/ – a site consisting of all things design (this one is more because of the content)
• http://bubblessoc.net/ – can’t decided if I like it now
• http://rpheath.com – oh, wait. never mind.

If you’re stuck in a rut in terms of creativity (like I am right now), you should click through that Flickr set. I don’t always get motivated just by looking at other designs (real photos actually do more for me), but today, it helped.

I’ve read, a time or two, things like “if you’re going to scale, you should probably move away from MySQL up to Oracle or SQL Server.” And for all I can argue, that may be true—but it might depend on your idea of scaling. The other day I read through a Flickr presentation on their Architecture (they’re using MySQL), and came across some very impressive stats (such as ~25,000 DB transactions/second). The presentation says a snapshot of db1.flickr.com shows…

• SELECT’s 44,220,588
• INSERT’s 1,349,234
• UPDATE’s 1,755,503
• DELETE’s 318,439
• 13 SELECT’s per Insert/Update/Delete

I would consider that to be a reasonable scale. Oh, and keep in mind, that presentation was from 2004. They’ve probably doubled that since then.

Glancing through those slides has shown me how much I really don’t know about high-traffic application design. But that’s not too disappointing since I’m not-so-much interested in that stuff. Server issues and “vertical partitioning” a DB (whatever that means) doesn’t intrigue me near as much as the application itself. Of course, though (and thankfully), I won’t ever have to worry about an application experiencing over 50 million SELECT’s on one instance of a database cluster. But apparently, when properly configured, MySQL can handle it. I think I’d save the $25,000 it would cost for SQL Server, too.

I realize not everyone likes to browse Flickr, but I do. I’ve posted about a nice Flickr gallery before, but I’ve found a couple more worth mentioning.

1. http://www.flickr.com/photos/valpopando/
2. http://www.flickr.com/photos/rebba/

The first heavily uses HDR, which is an editing technique used to, essentially, bring a photo to life. It basically increases the difference between light and dark, by using several different exposures of the same image. Part of me doesn’t want to get into that, as I’ve played with Photoshop a lot, and I’d rather not edit images outside of what can be done on the camera—for now, at least.

The second is (from what I’ve read) the most viewed user on Flickr. She’s an award-winning photographer. If you’re not planning on viewing either of the above galleries, at least check out her freeze! set.

Flickr is probably my most favorite web application I’ve ever used (“most favorite” doesn’t sound right, but you get the idea). Now that I’m really getting into photography, I’m realizing more of what it can do—which results in me loving liking it more and more. Then today (or maybe yesterday), Flickr released collections and a customizable layout. A collection is nothing more than a ‘set of sets’, but this is something I’ve been wanting for a long time. Now, not only can I organize my trips and vacations into sets, but I can have a collection of sets for Trips & Vacations.

The fact that you can associate a few sets with a collection isn’t that impressive (although very beneficial), but the way they’ve implemented it is impressive. The ‘organize’ section of your photos is where you can setup collections. Just drag your sets over to the collection of your choice, and viola, it’s that simple (you can also drag/reorder your sets within the collection itself). Then you can create a mosaic for that collection, choosing a nice blend of 12 photos from any of the sets it contains (those are also draggable). I think that’s awesome, and it works really well.

And to add in a little more, you can now specify a different layout for your main photo page. You can have small pictures with sets to the right, or small pictures with collections to the right, or large pictures with sets to the right, so on and so forth. There is a total of six layout options. I personally like having smaller photos with my recent sets to the right—the default view. But when I get a new camera, I’m sure I’ll be taking pictures at least 2-4x more than I am now, so I might decide that collections to the right would be a better fit. Either way, it’s nice to have the option. Kudos to Flickr for being perfect.

I like to browse photos on Flickr every now and then. If I see someone with a nice collection, I’ll subscribe to their feed. It’s inspiring to look at nice photos. I stumbled across this Flickr collection yesterday. It’s probably among the best I’ve ever seen. It makes me want to travel, just to take more pictures.

I sometimes browse Flickr because I like to look at photos. Mainly for two reasons: 1) inspiration and 2) because I like to look at photos. Part of why I used to often visit Popurls (with “3x more buzz” selected) was because of the random collection of photos streaming through the site. Flickr leech is a much better option for quickly browsing photos on Flickr. I’ve never heard of it until today, but it looks promising.