Sometime today, the number of photos posted to Flickr under a Creative Commons license hit 50 million.

Here’s an updated graph of Creative Commons photo growth on Flickr.

Download tab delimited data

Previous related blog posts: one, two, three

In previous blog posts, I’ve documented the number of photos on Flickr which were released under a Creative Commons license (post one, post two). For the past year, I’ve grabbed the Flickr Creative Commons page nightly, which lists how many photos are available under each license.

The total number today is over 32 million which is just incredible. A few days ago, I compiled all the data and graphed the growth. Click the graph for a larger version.

Once I had cleaned the data up, I uploaded the data to Swivel.com to see if it could produce nicer graphs than Excel. Turns out it didn’t. In fact, I found the interface confusing… it automatically created graphs for each individual column (license) and then created a combined graph based on percentage which made no sense. I ended up ditching Swivel, not really realizing uploaded swivel data can be remixed easily by other users.

Then things sort of took off on their own… which is both amazing and frustrating at the same time. Brian Mulloy, the CEO and Co-founder of Swivel, created a useful graph of the data on Swivel (much like the one I made above). That got a bunch of views on Swivel… and the graph ended up on the front page of the Creative Commons website. It goes to show you just how incredible collaboration among people on the Internet is. Even when you don’t intend to participate in collaboration it still happens. Next time, I’ll get my act together and actually blog about what I’m up to before my data starts to spread.

Here’s the data in tab delimited form. And here it is on Google Spreadsheet. Spread it freely.

Update: I just noticed that the collaborative path this data took was blogged on the Swivel blog as well.

To test out Flickr’s new geotagging feature, I just finished up “mapping” all our 251 Club photos with Flickr. For a first attempt, they’ve done a great job of making it easy to geotag photos.  It isn’t always great at finding street addresses (in Vermont at least), but the drag-and-drop functionality is very smooth.

Another annoyance is that, in order for the map to be useable, they have to limit the number of photos that are shown on any given map.  They seem to be very conservative with how many dots per page they show.  This means you have to page through all the photos, which takes time to refresh. So the process is a bit slow.
As more people geotag photos, this has the potential of providing a way to find interesting sites in particular areas.

Click here for my geotagged photos around Vermont.

Using some magic sauce, Flickr determines the most interesting photos posted to the site each day. These photos are addictive to look at. Oddly, Flickr doesn’t provide an RSS feed for them. Flickr user steeev wrote a screen scraper to generate a feed, but it seems to be broken. So I just created one using the Flickr API.

Until Flickr makes an official feed subscribe here: Flickr Interesting Photos Feed

I built a light box this weekend out of PVC. Similar to this one. I spent some of today experimenting with the set up. The right combination of shutter speed, aperture, lighting, and white balance are deceptively tricky. I still don’t quite have it right. But it was a good way to spend a rainy Sunday.

Objects - 04/23/2006 Gallery

Yesterday I got a phone call telling me that I passed my background check and that I could pick up my 30 day MBTA photo permit at the transportation building in Boston.

After I picked up my permit, which just turned out to be a little piece of paper, I headed back to South Station. Took a few more photos of the new new Charlie Ticket equipment and was again told photography was not allowed. (They have staff around the equipment to help people figure it out.) I showed the woman my photo permit. She had never heard of or seen such a thing.

Overall, a highly secure system that a terrorist could never circumvent. cough.

I just got off the phone with MBTA Customer Relations (617-222-5215) and the guy I talked to, Mr. Bassila, confirmed that photography on MBTA property without a permit is indeed prohibited. He believed that this rule was put into place after 9/11. However, he couldn’t tell me any more details about what the rule specifically said. He also couldn’t explain why MBTA property is private, but I can’t blame him since it looks complicated.

He is going to email me a permit request form. I believe I can fill it out and send it back to him via email or fax. He then sends it to the police to perform a background check. It takes about a week, after which time you have to pick the permit up in person (10 Park Plaza, Boston, MA).

He also sent me the non-emergency number for the MBTA Police (617-222-1000) for more information on the specifics of the rule. They couldn’t provide any details, so they forwarded me to the legal department which was just a voice mail.

This whole thing is still just rediculous. It is a big inconvenience to everyone, while being ignored by terrorists. In addition, no one I’ve talked to knows how the rule was installed and what it actually says. Will it ever be retracted?

Update: I just received the email from Mr. Bassila with the Photo Permit Request form. More info after the jump. Direct link to the form here (warning Word Doc). The form says it could take two to four weeks to process. What is sort of strange is that you don’t provide unique proof of identification until you’ve been approved and are picking up the permit. It seems like it would be easy for the background check to look at the wrong person without any information like a Social Security number, or license number.
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Corin and I took the Commuter Train/Red Line to meet my mother for dinner last night in Cambridge. I was excited to discover that the token and turnstile system in South Station had been upgraded with the new “Charlie” system where you buy a Charlie card which contains credits and you feed it into shmancy new “gates” (that will probably be broken in a month). So before going through, I snapped a couple photos.
After taking my third picture (right) I was told by an MBTA employee to stop taking pictures. I asked why and she told me it was “illegal”. I asked her politely why it was illegal and turned around to find another MBTA employee in my face saying, “You ever heard of 9/11?!”.

Apparently everyone is a suspected terrorist now. Doesn’t it make you feel safer?

After again asking for clarification, they started to get riled up and wanted to call the police. Not knowing whether they were right or not, we simply continued on our way.

After searching the web, I came across a few discussions on Flickr of similar experiences (1, 2). However, I still haven’t found anything on the MBTA web site. I also don’t understand the concept of a “company” that is “owned” by the government. I believe that is basically the position of the MBTA. It was burped out by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts but how independent it is? Does it still get funding from tax payers? Is it no longer public property? Can they just make up any rules they wish?

According to the above discussions, you can get a permit to take photos, however it takes two weeks, requires two forms of identification, and requitres two trips to the office, one to submit the request and one to pick it up. Assuming they decide you are not a terrorist, your permit is only valid for 30 days.

Follow up to my post about Flickr and adding the original file name in directly in the Exif data… After some brief skimming of Exif documentation, I didn’t see anything that suggested I could add arbitrary tags.  I tried doing it with the exiftool utility and it doesn’t allow it.  So instead I added a “comment” tag with the contents: IMG_1234.jpg and that worked.  I then uploaded the image to Flickr and viewed the Exif data both through the Flickr website and through the Flickr API.  Oddly, the Exif comment data doesn’t appear on either the Flickr website, or through the Flickr API.  It does however preserve the Exif data, so if you download the original image it will still be there.

The solution of embedding the original filename in the Exif data won’t work anyway since I can’t easily add the Exif tag to the photos I’ve already uploaded to Flickr.  So it looks like a regular Flickr tag will be the best solution for now.  While it is a little verbose, I think I’ll tag them with the above formatting for easier parsing and clarity.

By the way, the Flickr Creative Commons page was finally fixed a couple days ago.

I’ve decided to slowly migrate the redjar gallery from Menalto Gallery to Flickr. Gallery just isn’t doing it for me. Feature bloat in the wrong areas and regular security vulnerabilities top my list. Flickr has it’s own downsides, loss of control and flexibility, but with a little work I think I can work around them. The benefits of Flickr are that I don’t need to worry about maintenance. They get to worry about things like security vulnerabilties and backups. And of course there is the community. For instance, if you are looking for a creative commons licensed photo of Amsterdam, or puppies, or whatever, Flickr is a great place to start.

It is going to be a mult-phase process. So far, in the past couple days I’ve migrated over 6500 photos in over 300 albums from gallery to Flickr using the gallery2flickr script. It fails to export the album title and description, so I had to take care of that with my own combination of scripts, Flickr API, and some kludgy TextWrangler find and replace.

One thing I haven’t taken care of yet is addressing the fact that when you upload an image to flickr, the original file name gets blown away. I can understand them changing the name so that all photos follow a convention, while avoiding name collisions, but there really should be a metadata field accessible via the public API that stores the original filename. My planned solution is to add a tag for each photo in the form of, “original_filename_IMG_123.jpg”, where IMG_123.jpg is the original filename. Another alternative that I haven’t looked at is the possiblity of stuffing the original filename in the EXIF data and seeing if it is maintained. I’ve never played enough the EXIF to know how straight forward that is.

The next phase, and the key to my even considering using Flickr is to use the Flickr API to put the photos on redjar.org, hopefully without the viewer even really knowing that they are hosted by Flickr (beyond the API requirement that there be a link back to the photo on Flickr).

I’ve looked at a couple projects that do just this including f*gallery (no CMS dependencies but also not very advanced and not being actively developed), FAlbum (Wordpress plugin) and this Flickr module for “CMS Made Simple” which is the closest to what I’m after, but of course is tied to “CMS Made Simple”. However, none of them go quite far enough. I don’t even want the image src to use flickr.com, I still want it to be a redjar.org URL. Why? Because I am absolutely sure, that in a few years, the next Flickr will come along that will make Flickr’s offering look rediculous, and I’ll want to switch, hopefully without breaking URL’s.

By the way… strangely, after my Flickr account reached 100% of the 2 GB per month upload limit, my uploads just kept chugging along. Weird, but I’m not complaining.

The Flickr Creative Commons page has been static for at least a couple weeks now. No updates to the thumbnails or photo count. I’ve emailed them, I posted a bug report in the Flickr Bugs forum. No response. This happened before, pre-Yahoo! ownership days and it was fixed within 24 hours of my report. Draw your own conclusions.

In my previous post where I mention that the Internet Archive is using ultra-expensive, 16.7 Megapixel digital cameras, I wondered how long it would be before a 16.7 Megapixel camera dropped to an affordable price. A couple hours later, I have a graph, but no answer. It turns out Barbie was right. Math is in fact hard.

I scraped data for digital cameras off of the excellent Digital Photography Review website. I gathered make, model, introduction date, introduction price, max resolution. From there I calculated the exact number of effective pixels. Then I calculated the dollars/megapixel. (Yes, I realize there is a whole lot more to the quality of a photo than the number of megapixels). I graphed the result Dollars/Megapixel on the Y-axis and Date on the X-axis. Added in a trendline and displayed the equation for the trendline. With this equation I should be able to enter a future date, and have it spit out the approximate cost per megapixel. The only problem, I don’t know how to input a normal date into the equation. I know excel has an understanding of dates, or I could convert all the dates to a Unix epoch (number of seconds from 1970-whatever)… but I’ve been staring at this computer too long and suspect there is an easier way that I’m not aware of.

Here’s the graph as it stands now. Click it for a larger version.

After a slight lull in gallery activity, I bring you not one, but four galleries of fun filled photos:

Candlepin Bowling	Anna, Corin, and Ketzel put things on their head
Ketzel with friends on a play date	Boston Musuem of Science visit

The gallery even has its own RSS feed if you are in to that sort of thing.

I recently found an excellent deal on a Canon Elph SD550. Corin has been itching for a camera to call her own to use in her classroom. So I picked up the SD550 and she gets the hand-me-down ELPH S400.

I’ve only spent a little time with the SD550, but so far, it is a pretty sweet upgrade.

• 7.1 Megapixel (same as my Digital Rebel, but it fits in my pocket)
• Start-up time is much snappier than the S400.
• Big 2.5″ LCD. Changes the user experience more than I expected.
• Refined interface that takes advantage of the bigger screen. I thought this meant that items would be buried in sub-menus, but that isn’t the case.
• Records video at 640×480 30fps video with sound
• LCD screen: 2.5 in. approximately 115,000 pixels

On the downsides:

• I prefer CompactFlash over SD flash memory
• The battery is lower capacity than the S400 (790mAh vs the S400’s 840mAh). Combine that with the much larger LCD, and I suspect the battery life won’t be too great.

I started playing with shooting video, then playing it back on the LCD. I then realized in theory I could put videos on to this camera and use it to watch movies during my commute. It apparently has a higher resolution than a video iPod (115,000 pixels vs. the iPods 76,800 pixels. I haven’t gotten much further than that, but it is an intriguing idea.

According to the Quicktime player, the video that the camera shoots is in an AVI container with Motion JPEG video and Unsigned Integer audio.
Quicktime Pro allows you to export a quicktime video using Motion JPEG, but I’m not sure about “Unsigned Interger” audio. Motion JPEG also isn’t an option when exporting in an AVI container.

The other three practical issues are:

• Getting video back on the camera. I think that each image and movie has a corresponding metadata file that the camera creates. Not sure what the file contains, or how easy it is to re-create.
• How many minutes of video you could watch before the battery died
• How to get the A/V out port to work with 3.5 mm headphones.