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My photo of Tim Lincecum got blogged and reblogged a bunch of times (87 reactions at last check). That’s pretty sweet, almost as much fun as getting a bunch of faves on flickr (see: mine). The day I took it is well fixed in my otherwise somewhat transient set of memories as the moment resides in a weekend of salience immediately following the San Francisco Marathon. Steven & Christine & Marc were still in town, we all had hot chocolate and saw the Giants win. All this is a roundabout way to point out that those three are all running the Boston Marathon on Monday, and that I really honestly wish them the very best.
It took 14 months for me to hit 10K flickr views, now another ~21 to reach 100K. My estimate for reaching one million views has shifted from sometime in 2113 to mid 2028. Those two peaks? The first was N&L’s wedding, the second smaller one is Foss Fest. A couple really big events and I’ll end up shaving a decade off that goal.
If you are a regular visitor to my small group of websites you might have noticed that hevelonian got a small facelift recently, corresponding to the release of wordpress 3.0. The most important change for my current purposes is the width of the photographs we’re now using has increased from 500px to 640px.
A primary aesthetic reason for doing this is the influence of The Big Picture – this has really set the standard for photo blogs for me, and while our photos are nowhere near as good as those, the size things are presented definitely makes a difference in how viewers reflexively assign merit to them.
So, four days ago I decided to update everything I could (within reason – we have 3300+ posts) to a width of 640. And today, magically, mercifully, flickr announced an upgrade. From now on two different “medium” sizes will be available, the prior 500px and the new wordpress standard 640. This is fantastic news. For one we won’t have to load the larger images and downsize them in browser with the width tag (for horizontal images, anyway). Also, given the changes to the way “blog this” works we may well get the 640 option direct to wordpress from within flickr, which is totally old people proof.
So cheers to the new flickr layout and size option! The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
And here’s November. I’m going to hold off on posting December until tomorrow sometime as I’m finding myself unable to commit to a final POTD of the year until the night is over. Happy New Year’s Eve everyone!!
I’m spending some time on this last snowy day of 2009 finishing up my Project 365 posts. This is the month of October, a pivotal time of the year for me. It starts with the second half of the move from San Francisco, through the start of my new job here in Boston.
Today’s the day my flickr pro account expires. Thirteen months ago I mentioned when I hit 10,000 views. As of this morning I’m at 57,000. How can I not renew with quantification of self-worth like that? It’s a funny time we live in, when everyone I meet is certifiably ADHD, no one (myself included) can make it through a meal without the omnipresent iPhone coming out for this or that time&soul-sucking reason, and the briefest snippets of anonymous attention is the only currency that matters. That and comments. Leave comments.
BTW, I’m still making moderate success in my “world’s cutest husky” spam campaign. I get quite a few hits through google image search on that term, but recently got my first through yahoo image search (which I wasn’t really aware existed). As of this posting, Maija is one picture short of being EVERY SINGLE PHOTO on the front page of results for that term. It’s the little things, you know.
Please note semi-intentional 13th & 31st symmetry this month. With my model gone (re: photo 239), September promises to be the most difficult of all the 365 project. Full month by month view is here, or on flickr here.
Inspired by mapping capabilities of my new phone, I spent some time geocoding a bunch of my photographs on flickr this morning, tagging about 20% of them with location information. You can see the results on this map (though, I think if San Francisco is visible in the frame, hitting the green refresh at the bottom won’t bring up locations further afield even when you’re zoomed out). I’m sure best practice for this would be to add this information to EXIF metadata prior to uploading but it’s a little too late to think about that now. Going forward, the really right way to do this is in camera with a GPS, but that requires a really clunky hot shoe add-on like this these days. Here’s hoping the next generation SLRs will have this feature built in.
A couple of things I’ve noticed about this. First, there’s probably a quarter of my collection that doesn’t really need to be geotagged. Indoor shots of inanimate objects, random things inside my friend’s apartments aren’t really what anyone searching on a map would be looking for. I’m contemplating sticking those shots in the middle of the ocean just to get them out of my way as I work through the non-geotagged bin. Second, Yahoo Maps is really frustrating to use, it feels several generations stupider than Google Maps. It turns out to be much faster and easiest (if clunkier) to do the searching in Google in a second tab, then copy/past the address I find there into the map tab of the Flickr Organizer. Also, what’s with all the clouds? Below is what I see when I try to place my stuff from my Plymouth set. Yikes. It’s all under there somewhere, I guess. This kind of thing has come up a couple of times.
One thing I like about the whole 365 concept is it serves as a defacto memory bank for stuff about my own life I’d otherwise forget immediately. My May selections cover some big-for-me stuff, 48 hours in Boston, our road trip up to Ukiah & the old people’s visit to San Francisco.
PS. Full set on flickr.
Six month’s ago my flickr photostream reached ten thousand hits. Today I noticed it crossed the thirty thousand views mark (currently, 30,067). That’s roughly 100 views a day since October, and it wouldn’t be honest if I denied deriving some amount of satisfaction from the fat roundness of those numbers. I’m sure this is rounding error compared to some people but I have depressingly realistic expectations.
I was poking around at the bottom of my stats page and noticed of the roughly two thousand photos in my stream, I have ten with zero views. I’m not sure which ten – when I tried to sneak my way to the least popular by guessing URLs for the most views page I got down to a bunch of ‘one view’ shots, the last of which was the grass photo above. It’s a crap throwaway macro, but on some level I like it because I remember the context of posting it – NP and I were walking around at the Charles watching the regatta, taking pictures and shooting HOCR. My most popular recent photo (likely due to it’s mild salaciousness) is this one of sexy coneheads from Yuri’s Night. Flickr deems my most “interesting” photo overall to be this one of maija from leaf-raking day back in Burlington. I’m not so sure about that – I think there are better ones of her since we’ve gotten to California.
At any rate, 30K. It’s like playing the stock market, but monotonically increasing! Definitely the highlight of my day.
Only took 14 months. At this rate I’ll hit a million in 115 years. Maybe I should flush out some of the older sets.
Photoshop Express, a free web-based (& Flash 9 driven) photo editing and gallery service was released today. This program lets the user make minor modifications to a photo either hosted by Adobe (each user has 2GB of storage to work with) or on Facebook, in a Picasa web album or on Photobucket.
Some qualms based on an hour worth of playing with this:
- Overall, it’s antisocial. There’s no commenting support or obvious way to tag anything.
- There’s no support for Flickr so we’re stuck with Preloadr.
- Embedding options are limited. And by limited I mean there are none, so you get what you get – 256 pixels max dimension.
- It’s slow. Clicking ‘Edit Photo’ can lead to extended (or indefinite) waits while ‘Preparing Photo to Edit’.
- See an interesting photo in another user’s gallery? Don’t expect to be able to find a direct URL to it or embed it.
- Don’t expect to be able to copy or paste any text, anywhere from this site. For instance, it is possible to see another user’s main url, but it’s not a link (so can’t be right-clicked and copied), and highlighting and copy/pasting is non-functional. So if you want to get back somewhere you’d have to transcribe that url by hand somewhere.
The issues I have with Photoshop Express are for the most part problems of presentation rather than function. If you think of this more of just an editing tool than as an actual photo sharing platform on par with Flickr or Picasa (or hell, Dropshots), Photoshop Express may have a chance to be useful rather than just shiny. Granted that all the edits you can make here are of the type one could otherwise quickly make in the free desktop Picasa, but once your photos are already online, this may be the best option for tweaking. If you want to see the test album I created with some hevelonian shots that’s here. The original on which the purple facade above was based is here.
She’s been sick as a dog (sorry) for almost a week now, but tonight I guess she’s feeling better. This little montage was made (like these others) with Picasa.
Steve’s heading to California, not to see VCbut to move a car back east with one of his friends. I’m using that as an excuse to test out the “Blog This” feature from flickr, with a Golden Gate shot from one of his last trips West. If you follow the photo stream, there’ll be a NSFW nude dude surprise.
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