I’ve been a bad blogger. The Moo.com minicards arrived and I didn’t report back as promised. Here they are, modelled by groupies¹:

They’re great! Nicely sturdy and simply fun to pick up. The print quality is high, with a good level of detail on the city-at-night shot I used, and the text on the back is smooth without aliasing. They came in a neat little box which fits perfectly into a money pocket. A bit too perfectly, actually - I’ve been carrying them around in the (probably vain) hope I’ll be able to give one out, and am worried they’ll end up getting washed.

At $19.99 for 100 it’s quite tempting to get a larger box, although I’m not sure they’d ever be used for anything other than looking pretty on my desk…Hmmm.

1. Superman couldn’t be there due to world-saving activities, Batman didn’t care because it’s daytime [↩]

In a pleasing coincidence, yesterday I posted my 2000th blog post, as well as the 2000th photo upload to flickr. I shall therefore spend an introspective few paragraphs…

Well, maybe not. Well, maybe a little.

Since installing the mint stats collector just under a year ago, the most popular posts have been on HDR photography, 75 Bands and life coaching. Most ‘interesting‘ images are an HDR shot of a London market, Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas and Pink Floyd at Live 8.

Busy few days ahead. I’m off to see a Richard Dawkins talk this evening - I’m taking my copy of The Blind Watchmaker on the off chance he’s available for book signings - then tomorrow I’m going to St. Annes for a dancing weekend. I’m supposed to get a deluxe room after an email exchange with the hotel owner over the use of some photographs I took last year, which should be pleasant! It’s half an hour’s walk from Blackpool, and I’m hoping to ride the Manic Rollercoaster of Death during the day. I also have a 2200 word entry for a writing competition with a 1500 word limit, which will probably drive me nuts for the greater part of next week.

I just ordered a pack of Flickr Minicards from moo.com. Flickr users with a Pro account get 10 free cards, including postage to the UK and without any need to enter credit card details. They’re small business cards with a photograph on one side and six lines of text, plus the flickr logo, on the other:

I was quite impressed with the interface: I dragged and dropped ten pics from my photostream, which could be sorted by set, date or tag, then composed them around a frame which showed how much of the image would be included on the card itself. This was all javascript without any page refreshes required, nor significant slowing down of the browser.

So far, so good. I’ll report back on how they turn out.

Flickr’s new geotagging tools are fun. Apparently they’ve had over 1.5 million photos added to maps since they launched the service at the weekend, which is quite impressive! I geotagged all the shots from my March trip to New York, and it’s cool to look at the resulting map then turn off the filter so that everyone’s photos are visible. You can see similar shots at all different times of the year, which works particularly well in Central Park.

While trawling around the forums I came across a good method for geotagging photos before uploading. If you use Flickr to store your photos online, Picasa to organise them and would like to geotag them easily, there’s coolness afoot:

1. Pick up the new beta version of Picasa from here (you’ll need a Google Account, I think) and the Google Earth 4 beta from here.
2. While they’re downloading, make sure you’re logged into Flickr and go here and confirm you want EXIF data imported automatically.
3. Using the new Picasa, select a bunch of photos that you want to locate, then go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Geotag’ -> ‘Geotag with Google Earth’
4. GE will then open, and you can use the full power of its search capabilities to find the correct location. Hover the crosshair over the appropriate area and click ‘Geotag’, and repeat for each picture in GE’s window before hitting ‘Done’.
5. The latitude and longitude data have now been added to the actual JPEG file and are combined with the existing EXIF data. Send the pics to Flickr in the normal way (I tend to email them from Picasa, or if there are a load I’ll export them and use a bulk uploader). Flickr will automatically recognise the mapping data and add the images to its geotagging database.

I only found out about the Flickr’s EXIF Import option from a post in their forum - it doesn’t seem to be accessible from the standard Account options screen as yet.

Obviously this doesn’t work for photos already uploaded, although it’d theoretically be possible to ‘replace’ each one with a mapped-up copy. I’ve been using the localize bookmarklet, which works well but is far slower than the built-in interface would be. However, Flickr today released their mapping APIs and have explicity stated that people can build applications using other providers’ maps, so hopefully there’ll be a decent equivalent within a week or two.

Just back and looking at Flickr’s new geotagging tools, which allow you to specify the location your photos were taken. They’re very cool, in theory. Groups / sets / search terms / individual users’ photos can be viewed in a very swish interface - mine are here, for example - and there are plenty of searching options that seem most impressive. Full details are here. It’s all great and very well done, but they’re badly let down by the underlying map software: Yahoo Maps. It just sucks, especially when you compare it to the greatness that is Google Maps. I know it’s early days, but adding a location just now was nearly impossible.

I tried to add a location to the photos from the Bloggers4Labour meetup last Thursday. The postcode was EC4M 9EH. Type this into Google Maps and you get:

The location marker shows the actual postcode location, and there are street names and other details. Great. Do the same in Yahoo Maps, via the ‘Organize!’ Flickr interface, and you get:

Which is just the Eastenders credits. The small blue circle is a preexisting image I’d eventually tagged from satellite imagery (it was taken on a bridge which was thankfully easy to spot). The postcode I want is actually centered in the view, although that isn’t mentioned. Zooming in to full detail gives:

Which is probably right, but I’ve no idea which building it is. I can’t even figure it out from street names, since they seem to have no data for central London.

I just tried tagging a photo from this weekend’s festival and had a similar problem. Yahoo just shows me a large area, whereas Google shows me a map of the locality that’s actually useful.

Maybe these are just teething problems, and Yahoo Maps will probably improve over time, but it’s a disappointment currently. The drag and drop interface is a great idea, but I hope somebody writes a greasemonkey script to change it to Google Maps. From what I’ve seen of the UK data it’s not really useable atm.

Just spotted this:

Round numbers are always pleasing

Google today launched Picasa’s long rumoured ‘web album’ feature. This allows direct creation of online albums from within the photo-management software. Although fairly simplistic currently, Google will undoubtedly add features as time goes by. It may well end up challenging Flickr, but Yahoo - who bought Flickr last year - don’t seem to care.

Having full control of the best and most popular photo-sharing website on the internet, what have Yahoo done? Built a competitor of their own, of course. You see, Yahoo have decided that Flickr is only for “professional and serious hobbyist photographers”, so are launching Yahoo Photos for “the mass market”. It’ll have the same tagging and organisation capabilities, but all photos will be private by default. There are claims that the two are aimed at different markets:

and that is the principal difference between those who will like Flickr (global exposure/RSS feeds) and those who will like Y! Photos (sharing with friends and family)

But it doesn’t make much sense to me. Why not just add some kind of password-protected album feature to Flickr, so that friends and family can view photos without creating an account? A separate system ignores the possibility that people might realise the advantages of sharing their photos, which is the concept that Flickr was built around. I don’t think the younger generation really care all that much about keeping everything private - MySpace users share everything, afaik, and MySpace is hardly doing badly. Plus, it’s not like Flickr doesn’t have privacy support already, if that’s really what people want.

Yahoo, please don’t kill Flickr. I like it. Please sell it to Google.

Schmap offer free, downloadable city guides. They include suggested tours, links to accommodation, shopping, attractions etc., all based around a google-maps like representation of the area. They accompany the text with photographs wherever possible, and a fair few seem to come from Flickr. A few of my shots have been included, and they’ve a neat system to request permission.

They send a polite message via FlickrMail that explains the idea behind Schmap guides and asks whether you’re happy for them to include specific photographs. You’re then sent to a page on the Schmap website at which you can grant permission for photographs on an individual basis, without having to register or otherwise give them all your details. If they decide to go ahead with your photo it’s credited to a username of your choosing, and the image links to its Flickr page. You’re then sent another message when the guide is published. The whole process seems to work well.

There’s one photo of mine in the Los Angeles guide and four in the Stratford-upon-Avon guide, plus another in the pipeline.

I think this is really cool, and it’s exactly why I publish everything I do under a creative commons license.

Flickr’s new interface didn’t work with Opera, and this was the prod I needed to take another look at Firefox. In the past I’d always found it to be slow, clunky and ugly. Its saving grace was the excellent rendering engine, plus possibly extensions. Apparently new versions have brought improvements, but I’d never played with them much.

I fired up 1.5.0.3, and it immediately seemed faster. Double-clicking to create a new tab worked without flashing the screen and pausing for half a second, for example. I don’t find it so snappy as Opera, but it’s fast enough not to be annoying. So that was a good start. However, it was still ugly as hell. Toolbars took up way too much of the screen; the tabs were far wider than was necessary; the browny background peeked through at every opportunity…It needed fixing.

A day later, and I’m pretty much happy with it:

Many of my alterations were to add features found in Opera, purely because I’m used to them and too lazy to re-learn anything. I thought I’d go through the steps I took in case anybody else is thinking of switching over.

Fixing the toolbars: The topmost ‘File’, ‘Edit’ etc. menu bar can’t be turned off, but there’s a way around it. I dragged the contents of the navigation toolbar into said menu bar, then disabled the navigation toolbar. I ditched a few of the icons - how often do I actually click ‘forward’ and ‘back’ anyway? - and set the ’small icons’ option, which saved a fair bit of space. The clever Compact Menu extension then replaced ‘File’, ‘Edit’ etc. with a single drop down button, which I placed next to the address bar. It was a little crowded by this point, so I removed the search box and installed Google’s Firefox toolbar, which is useful enough to be worth the extra space.

Tabs: For a tabbed browser, I thought the built-in tab support was lacking. The tabs themselves are huge, and the first time I closed the browser and re-opened it to find all my tabs gone was something of a surprise! Also, it seemed to open new windows at the drop of a hat. Happily, the Tab Mix Plus extension fixed most of that. The ’single window mode’ does its best to keep everything in tabs. There’s a built-in Session Saver, so you can re-open Firefox and be in exactly the same state as before. Also, it has the option to shrink the sizes of tabs to the width of the website title, but with a maximum width - this saves vast amounts of space, and you can see many more tabs on one screen than was possible before. The default ‘unread tab’ font was red italic, but happily that was changeable too. It’s endlessly configurable, and I’m still tweaking the options.

Theme: I tried a couple of the most popular themes, but they didn’t do much for me. Eventually I found an Opera theme which worked very well. I prefer the curved tabs, and the light blue background beats muddy brown any day I do have a slight problem with this theme, which I’ll detailbelow.

Features:

• Quicksearches - In Opera you can configure address bar shortcuts, so that typing ‘g monkeys’ will search google for monkeys, ‘az pullman’ will search amazon etc. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I’ve got used to hitting CTRL-T for a new tab, then quickly entering whatever search I was after. It’s faster than navigating to the google search bar, and offers a wider range of searches. I had some trouble finding out whether this was possible as I didn’t know what to search for, but it turns out that Firefox also has this built-in. Right-click on any search box and select ‘add a keyword for this search’, enter the equivalent of ‘g’, and you’re done.
• Mouse gestures - The All-in-One Gestures extension handled this perfectly. Showing the mouse ‘trails’ on screen is very helpful.
• Paste and go - A surprisingly useful little feature of Opera is being able to press ctrl-shift-v to open whatever URL is in the clipboard. It only saves one keypress, but I missed it within a couple of minutes. The paste and go extension solved that.
• Bookmarklets - I used to have FeedLounge and del.icio.us bookmarklets sitting in a toolbar, but Firefox doesn’t seem to allow URL shortcuts on anything other than the annoying bookmarks toolbar. I couldn’t solve this problem, but there are other methods. The del.icio.us firefox extension added a ‘tag this’ button to the address bar, and it’s superior to the bookmarklet in a few ways. The LiveLines extension alters the behaviour of the address bar’s RSS logo so you can specifiy an RSS reader instead of Firefox’s built-in system. Now, clicking the logo adds the feed to my FeedLounge account. I like that.
• Sidebar - I never used Opera’s sidebar all that much, but it did come in handy occasionally. FF’s built in sidebar was kinda lackluster, but the All-in-One Sidebar is far better, letting you manage bookmarks, themes, extensions, history and downloads from the same place.

Issues:

I have various extensions that place icons on the status bar. The Opera theme doesn’t seem to separate them and they’re all bunched together. Most other themes use a separator of some kind. Presumably I can edit the theme to do this, but I had a quick look and became terribly confused. Does anybody have any experience of this?

Opera has pre-defined text fields, so that when you started typing your address, for example, it would display a dropdown box letting you enter it automatically. I found InFormEnter, but that adds a large icon next to every field. Is there any equivalent for FF?

I used to have a sidebar with favicon links to my favourite sites. FF’s sidebar is too large for this, and you can’t set it to display the icons only. It’s not a big deal, but did some in handy occasionally.

Firefox suffers from the same problem as Opera in that if you submit a form and there’s a problem with the next page, when you hit back the forms are empty, or in the same state as when the page was loaded. I had a database connection problem and lost a post because of this.

Conclusion:

Although it took a fair amount of work, there doesn’t seem to be that I use in Opera that Firefox can’t emulate. Being able to use Google Calendar, Flickr etc. outweighs any disadvantages, so I’ll stick with it for the time being.

Flickr upgraded from ‘beta’ to ‘gamma’ status on Tuesday. As well as a new search system and a new Organizr, the largest change was a revamp of the interface.

The top-of-page options have been grouped into ‘You’, ‘Organize’, ‘Contacts’, ‘Groups’ and ‘Explore’, with drop-down menus for quick access. I’m not generally a fan of drop-downs, but these aren’t too bad. The section links themselves send you to the most important pages, so navigation is still generally a one-click process.

Group pools are much better. The Flickr Elves have managed to create a layout that looks neat, without vast amounts of whitespace. That’s quite the feat, actually. I’ve tried creating photo layouts on websites, and different orientations and picture sizes play havoc with any kind of aesthetics. See the FlickrCentral pool for an example.

Individual users’ photostreams now have two columns of photos, the space for which was found by emptying the sidebar of all links and grouping them under the username. This is undeniably neater. ‘Interestingness’ has been renamed ‘Popular’, which, although understandable, is a shame.

The Organizr seems to have been re-written from the ground up. The flash-based interface is gone, replaced by a clever AJAXy system. I haven’t had time to play with it properly, but immediate impressions are that it’s an improvement. It’s way faster, with no annoying delays on adding photos to sets. It also takes up the entire window, which definitely helps! Deleting a photo from a set is also an spectacular experience
They must be saving substantially on bandwidth with the new layout, and the whole site does feel more responsive.

The only real quibble I have with the revamp is that on Tuesday I wrote and distributed instructions on how to use Flickr, and got home to find various parts were wrong! They had given some warning, to be fair, so it was my own fault

Following my last post, some calming penguins from Flickr:

and there’s always room for ducklings:

and…relax.

I was just flicking through photos in Picasa, and it randomly fell on my USA Photos folder - shots from my road trip in 2004. It’s easy for me to forget that I took far more shots than are currently on Flickr. It was fascinating to go through them and be reminded of things I’d completely forgotten. I got as far as New York before deciding that there were many shots I liked - why hadn’t I used them before? Then I remembered my filtering process. I first sorted them in the pre-Flickr days, when I was using gallery software on this website. I had little space so had to take only my very favourite shots, then resize them by 50%. As such, I picked 150 of 1750 shots. Now that I have unlimited space on Flickr, and a much faster upload, I’m putting all but technically-flawed and Just Bad pictures online. It’s great as a full-res backup, if nothing else! I doubt anybody has an RSS feed of my images, but if you do - apologies. I’m working on one city per day, and it’s going to take quite a long time! If anyone’s interested in seeing the new stuff, it’ll all be in this set.

Meet Flickr Monkey Sam.

Monsters fear Flickr Monkey Sam.

We all know Flickr Monkey Sam could take Batman without even smooshing his banana.

Yes, thank you, I actually do have enough to do. For the Flickr Monkey group.

Does anybody know if a screensaver keeps going after XP powers down the monitor? I’ve just installed the rather excellent slickr screensaver, which I’ve set to download a new interestingness photo from Flickr every twenty seconds, but am concerned about my bandwidth limits! In theory it should only run for the twenty minutes before power-saving kicks in, right?

Qoop are a photo printing company who can link into your flickr account and produce high-quality bound books. They’re reasonably customisable too: you can select from various page layouts, change the book title, select different types of stitching etc.

A few weeks back I ordered a Qoop book of the photos from my friend’s daughter’s 21st birthday party. I ordered it on a Saturday evening. 132 photos with a four-per-page layout. The total cost, including delivery to the UK (from the US), was just over £17. It arrived the next Friday, which was quite remarkable - I’ve known UK deliveries take longer! The full-colour result was very impressive and the birthday girl was very pleased with it. You can see various examples of the books here, and they also print posters. I’ve asked for their help a couple of times and they’ve replied very quickly and helpfully. I like them.

So here’s the thing: you can order books of other people’s photos. They would make great presents. However, the photo owner needs to set their flickr printing options, or nobody will be able to buy them the book as a present. Hint.

There seems to be a slight issue right now to do with your flickr location, and for the moment I’ve needed to set my own location as the USA to see the Print options for other people. This is either a slight glitch that they’ll fix, or I’m being a muppet and misunderstanding the process. I have a sneaking suspicion it’s the latter, as there’s a bell ringing somewhere in my brain that I can’t quite locate…(update: now fixed. The site, not my brain.)

So please go set your options, for all frustrated present-givers out there. Then, if the option isn’t there at least we’ll know that it’s a deliberate choice