1000 Views

A couple of pics on Flickr topped 1000 views this week.

1000 Hits

This little picture just reached 1000 hits on Flickr. My 31st picture to do so.

I feel so proud.

Project Apollo Archive on Flickr

I never post pictures from other people’s Flickr accounts, but today I am making an exception. There is a new account called Project Apollo Archive that is essentially a dump of unedited pictures taken by the NASA Apollo missions to the moon. All of the astronauts had cameras built into their suits so they could snap away as much as they’d like. All of the pictures are unedited scans of the original film.

I believe the word you’re looking for is WOW!

Here are just a few shots from one roll of film taken during the Apollo 12 mission.

Sunrise

I feel like I say this every Friday during the Spring, Summer, and Fall, but I want to try and get up early so that I can shoot the sunrise tomorrow. I keep saying it, yet I haven’t done it since November.

So I want to get up super early tomorrow morning (4:30am-ish) and at the same time I want to stay up super late tomorrow night (1:00-2:00am) so that I can try to catch the last Rush show on Periscope (if someone is nice enough to stream it for us). I also want to mow the lawn, clean the bathroom and the kitchen, and take the cat’s litter box outside and hose the ever lovin’ hell out of it.

Could be a super busy day tomorrow.

I might need to take a nap in the afternoon.

That actually sounds like a super awesome idea! Nap time, kids!

Sailing

The search function on the new Flickr is pretty awesome. The search function on the new Google photos is better. Google photos’ search page prompts you with faces, places, and things. One of the things on my search page is sailing. Here’s a bunch of examples of what it found…

For comparison’s sake, here are a few of what Flickr found when I searched for sailing.

Well… I can’t actually post anything because Flickr’s search didn’t actually find anything when I plugged in sailing. How about sailboat?

Again, nothing. What about if I search for Boat?

I went back to Google Photos and searched for Boat. Google’s results returned much faster, but there weren’t as many hits. Both sites had a ton of false positives but I think Flickr had more.

So there is a wicked unscientific comparison of the search functions built into Google Photos and Flickr that is really just an excuse to put a ton of pictures into a blog post.

Muppet News Flash

The other day I started pulling all of my Flickr photos down from the web to create a backup on an external drive. I also decided to created a back up to the back up by moving everything into the new Google Photos. The process is slow and painful because Flickr’s new download function is slow and painful, but it has allowed me to uncover a few forgotten gems, like this little guy from our Honeymoon stop in Washington, DC.

Google Photos Test

For years I have been worried that Flickr was going to die and I wouldn’t have a place to host my gigantic mountain of pictures anymore.

Yesterday, a back up service may have presented itself. Google Photos… which considering I started hosting photos on Google Picassa before moving to Flickr’s unlimited storage service isn’t too hard to imagine. Google Photos offers unlimited storage, but not at full resolution. That’s a big negative, but if this terrible Flickr Free world ever exists I will live with it. It has an auto upload function that seems very similar to the one Flickr just added, and the search functions seem similar too, although Google > Yahoo when it comes to search. It has facial recognition too, which Flickr does not (yet).

The big test is can I use it to host pictures on the old bloggerooski. If you see Rush on this post then the answer is yes. If you don’t, then Flickr still rules the online photo universe.

Joining the Complainers

A few years ago Flickr completely re-wrote their user interface. Many long time users were furious. I loved it. I thought they improved the site in every way but one. The images used up all of the available screen real estate. Suddenly the main focus of the site was actually viewing images. The only thing wrong was that it was really, really slow. The speed improved dramatically over time. They updated the site a second time without making huge changes. They shuffled some of the screen elements around but kept the focus on the images. Again, I thought the changes were good while seemingly endless Flickr users were ready to burn down the entire United States in protest. I didn’t get it. I still don’t.

There is another new redesign now, and this time I’m less than thrilled. Basically they incorporated Apple’s attempt at redesigning their camera roll. It doesn’t look good for Apple. It also doesn’t look good for Flickr. Fortunately it is not the default view and it seems more of an attempt at organization than display. It’s okay in that sense, but I don’t think it’s necessarily better than the existing Organizr function. The photostream view is still there, and that’s what you see when you click on a user. That’s good.

If the camera roll view becomes the new “thing” I’m going to be pissed. It’s worse than the original Flickr from years ago. Everything is thumbnail sized. Fingers crossed that Flickr sees this as working in conjunction with photostream (which makes sense given the functionality we have now), not as the next generation.

The downside is that it’s the default view for your own user on the iOS app. Urgh.

The upside of the new roll out is what appears to be a standalone upload app and (praise be to the gods of the internets) A STAND ALONE DOWNLOAD APP! FINALLY FINALLY I can back things up using standard functionality instead of some dude’s Linux script! Oh happy day!

Having said that, let’s see how the download app works. It’s supposed to write your files into a zip. Hmmm… we’ll see.

I also did what I always do when Flickr rolls out changes. I went to the suggested user function and followed everyone there. I then reloaded and did it again. Three times. Anything to get people checking into Flickr. I still very much want it to be the biggest thing on the web instead of the after thought it’s become. And I’m not just saying that because I have more than 30,000 pictures on the site. I generally love it. Indeed I do.