apparently flickr is "hiding" accounts' uploads if they contain drawings etc, rather than photos.
monkstyle.net/?p=274
I emailed Flickr support ... and was told ...:
Flickr is a photo-sharing website, so uploading non-photos will flag your account as NIPSA.
[[Not in Public Site Areas] which means that my account is more or less hidden to people searching flickr for photos.]
Now, to my mind, this is counter-productive for flickr. flickr's primarily about people sharing images. yes, it's not designed for artists to showcase their work -- it has no real Feedback or Rating system, for example. so artists seeking this functionality will go elsewhere.
but surely it's not antagonistic to the goals of flickr to allow sharing of images, no matter whether created by film+photoshop, drawings then digitised, or simple digital camera uploads? how is a photoshopped photo different from a scanned drawing?
over to iamcal for the usual ranting *cough* sharing of views...
Is a photo of a drawing flagged?
dunno
i've uploaded some stuff which is pure drawing or painting (not by me, just stuff i wanted to keep+show, in an accessible place) and haven't been marked NIPSA
Posted by
Brock, around 25th November 2005:
I really don't get all this "Flickr must change what it is designed to be to cater to it's audience". That is the biggest load of shite I have ever heard.
Flickr is a photo sharing site. Period. They say you can have any other sort of image on there (except porn, that gets your account deleted/ask you to remove it) as long as you mark it NIPSA yourself, or make it private. It is for photo sharing, but they tolerate other usage as long as it doesn't affect the public 'face' of the site.
It makes no fucking sense at all to say "Well, I have different stuff that fits on here, therefore you should change the way you do your site so that it works for me".
Fuck that. What a totally arrogant pile of shit. It's like someone coming here and saying "I want to post loads of smileys and arabic conversations LOL OMFGKTHXBYE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! XXX000000000000oooooooo000000xxxxxxxxx dhoiyqkubgdf7869782y35g2iut!!!" and expecting us to put up with it and not ban them. Would we/Cal put up with that? Would he fuck. Would we expect him to? No. Even more so if we were paying to be here.
Or by saying that you want to drive your Ferrari across a field and expecting Ferreri to put in 4WD and honour the warranty. It's just
not what the thing is for. Anyone, when offering a service or product, has a right to stipulate how it is used. The TOU on Flickr is clear, so the people bitching can just shut the fuck up, as far as I am concerned. Flickr has tens of thousands of people that want to share and see photographs. Why should they get what they don't want, when they have paid for a specific service just because of a (let's face it) small minority.
You (Generic you) want to use Flickr? Either use it as intended, or accept the limitations.
Don't want to accept the limitations? Go somewhere else.
Already paid for a subscription? Tough shit, you should have read the TOU properly. It's always been like that.
People take "The 'rights' of the consumer" too far and assume that the customer can dictate that the company should bend over backwards for it. Ridiculous.
Posted by
Brock, around 25th November 2005:
(you
did say rant...)
:)
Posted by
Sul_DUPE1, around 25th November 2005:
Well... (going a bit Hues Corporation) if they
want to expand and steal deviantart-like customers then it wouldnt be too difficult to appeal to both. If user's flag drawings as drawings and photos as photos then searches and user-settings would ensure you only got what you wanted.
Posted by
Brock, around 25th November 2005:
True, but they have specified (over and over again) that they don't want to do this.
Yet they still bitch about 'unfair treatment'. Twats.
Posted by
Sul_DUPE1, around 25th November 2005:
That's until Yahoo decides its a valid market ;)
Posted by
Brock, around 25th November 2005:
Heh.
They'll just copy the framework over and open up "Sketchr".
Oooh, that's a great idea. Cal!! If they do that, can I get a cut for thinking of it?
Cheers.
"Drawr"
brock, it's not about bullying/whinging flickr into becoming something it's not, it's a request from the market. and one which seems to me to fit into the community-essence of flickr. ie, i see this type of usage as more of the same, and hence will boost the appeal of flickr to its market rather than change the nature of its market.
Posted by
WarHead, 25th November 2005:
Too many markets.
Posted by
WarHead, 25th November 2005:
But you
can buy a fat pig there.
damn closing-time pick-ups
Posted by
Brock, 25th November 2005:
Like pubs.
Posted by
Brock, 25th November 2005:
Bastard, Sal.
:)
awwww. you remind me SO much of my mother when you talk like that. it's not just the hair, it's the tone of voice.
at some point in the future when we can classift such things and hide them easily from general photo search they'll be allowed i suspect. but they fuck up the photo search, encourage people to post copyrighted work, etc etc
Posted by
Brock, 25th November 2005:
That's what I figured. I said as much either here or when I was talking to Stri in the forums.
Fuck, I'm good.
Posted by
ellipse, around 26th November 2005:
flickr is about photos
there are other places online to post non photo stuff
and you can post non photo stuff just mark it so it doesn't become part of searches and the like
the copyright issue's valid. but easily defended against by simply adding a term to teh TOS that users guarantee and/or are responsible for valid copyright usage.
but i'm afraid i don't see how drawings can fuck up a photo search.
and flickr is NOT about photos. yes, that's its remit, its starting point. but think: there are any number of other photo sites out there with a much better history than flickr. why then has flickr taken off? why has flickr taken off while those other sites --typically much better at showcasing photos than flickr is-- have stagnated or grown only very slowly?
FLICKR IS FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT FROM ALL THE OTHER PHOTO SITES. the proof is in the pudding: its "market" takeup is following a wildly different pattern to all the other photo sites.
so why? what's different?
flickr did NOT create a "photo"sharing site -- it allowed a social-type interaction for humans to share pictures. THAT was loudly and repeatedly touted in its original blurb. it deliberately created a community, a community of sharing images.
Photos
It's not so much a Capturing, as a Sharing in your hand of a moment in your Eyes.
and from what i've seen, the overwhelming majority of the most popular "photos" are just digital art that's based on a digitalcam photo and heavily hacked on in photoshop or similar. i'm afraid that in this context i really can't see any difference between that and a drawing/painting. they are both fantasy images manufactured by human effort and presented for sharing/social-attention reasons rather than showcase/money reasons. e.g.:
Finishing touches:
The Finished Installation:
Note that "both" girls are the same person, and that both "photos" are completely artificial, but are using the camera as one of the image creation tools.
how is this (using camera plus photoshop and/or image-freaking tricks as an imagecreation tool) any different from using a pen?
just different tools. same purpose. same object. just different tools.
on a side note: the Loader app and the Loader webpages do NOT make it obvious that you can(should) tag some things as not part of the photo search. as someone very used to reading screens rather than assuming things about them, this is the FIRST time i became aware of even the flickr
concept of NIPSA.
underlying anthropological reasons why flickr has exploded where other photo sites which are arguably better for simply showing photos have stagnated:
www.catb.org/~esr/writings/...
ahhh, and cal you might note something in the revision history
Bring me a snore smilie... stat!
;)
but have a read through that paper. eric has a gift for slow protracted gently-building-a-case (yet still tight) reasoning, whereas i get bored with having to say much more than the blindingly obvious.
note that it defines
b3ta.com, the blogoverse, the BBC R&D department(s?), victorian aristocracy, blah blah blah. this is where cory doctorow got his "whuffle" from, BTW (though AFAIK he's never acknowledged it...), though he failed to observe that "money" is a "whuffle" and that "whuffle" is a primary coin in all human interaction.
Posted by
ellipse, 26th November 2005:
you want non photo sharing go hang at deviant art
yeah it's crap init
that's why i suspect flickr is being hardcore about non photographic images, so it doesn't become another deviant art
no, you're missing the point, sue.
flickr's essence is "sharing"
not "photos"
"sharing"
THAT'S what makes it different from all the other sites doing functionally essentially the same thing
if it wants to hardwire some core tags into its framework, cool. ie: radio buttons on Photos|TweakedPhotos|ArtOnPhotos|Art.
but how is me uploading THIS, so that i can share its peculiarity with other people, bad?
and is this a photo, or a (pseudo)sculpture, or a photo of paintings? and if its focus is manual art (which it is), is this bad?
or is it maybe just a lovely image that i wanted to share?
Posted by
ellipse, 26th November 2005:
to be honest sal i don't think i am missing the point.
flickr is not so much about the users defining the product anymore. Yes it once was extremly user driven and i miss those days, just as i mis flickrlive and before that GNE. But it's got a bit too big for that and flickr is drawing (hurhur) a line in the sand and that line is something that is not a photograph.
The line has been there for about a year now.
Posted by
Brock, around 26th November 2005:
And as Cal says, once the emphasis within Flickr can be assured to be on Photographs (either by control of non photographic images, or even by sheer out-numbering) they will be a lot more open to it.
Once a precedent is set, it is very difficult to change. If Flickr's early impression for new people when they arrive is 98%-100% photographs, the people will treat it like a photo site. That is what they WANT to happen, regardless of whether you (or even they) think it will 'damage' it.
Once they have a defined flow and the momentum of the style of the site is set, they can allow the drawing/non photographic images to leech in. I think that they have to be very strict to start with as if a greater proportion of drawn art over-powered the photo's on the site, the change would be very fundamental in the social community structure.
I think the way that Flickr are doing it (keeping drawings at arms length) is the right way to do it.
As for the argument about heavily photoshopped images, that is an entire different ball game, and separate to the desire of Flickr to generate a 'style' or corporate image for the site. It creates a grey area, but does not change the intention.