Flickr – becoming more about controlling you.

inexploreblog

Last year I vigorously complained that the Flickr was routinely featuring photographers who were blatant Contact Collectors. This was made patently clear in the 2015 selections for “Flickr’s Top-25 Photos in 2015” where many of the featured photos were from accounts with more the 50,000 follows and followed.

This years annual feature is called “Top Flickr Photos from 2016“. While Flickr has finally taken action against many contact collectors an odd pattern to those featured was noted again this year. This is what Flickr says they used to determine the selections for 2015:

To compile this list, we started with an algorithm that calculates a combination of social and engagement metrics, e.g. how often the photo had been faved and viewed. To avoid the results being merely a popularity contest, the selection also involved curation by Flickr staff.

This is what they said for this year selections…

View original post 410 more words

Connected Autotags and Search

inexploreblog

I have noted an odd issue with the way autotags appear to affect search results.

Many autotags have a hierarchal structure. For example to get the TULIP autotag you first have to get FLOWER and to get FLOWER you have to first get PLANT. Similarly, to get the POODLE autotag you first have to get the DOG autotag and prior to that you need ANIMAL.

When you do a text search on ANIMAL or DOG the relevant results typically offer images with high social activity. However, when searching for POODLE, the relevant results offer mainly older images with low social activity. This pattern is noted with PLANT, FLOWER and TULIP as well, as it is with many of these autotag groupings.

Why would high social activity make animal and dogs relevant but low social activity make poodles relevant? Having different algorithms makes perfect sense but not within one hierarchal structure.

View original post 45 more words

Fickr and Security (or lack thereof)

inexploreblog

With news of Yahoo’s monumental security breach affecting many Flickr users, and the recent concerns over Flickr users copyrighted images being misused across the internet, one has to wonder if the old Flickr Helper adage that if you don’t want your images and information used then you shouldn’t upload them to the internet. While that might be feasible for our images it is not really practical in this day and age to hide yourself away from the internet completely.

If you are concerned about how this security breach at Yahoo affects you at Flickr, I suggest you read this thread in the Flickr Help Forum.

I won’t speak anymore about the security breach, but I did want to add some thoughts on the “jellyfields” copyright infringement issue.

Jellyfields is a third party website that uses content from Flickr for an image database. The issue is not that they use such…

View original post 507 more words