post flickr retinal scarring
Oh my God.
Not that I have a God of my own, it’s just that a casual trawl through premier photo sharing site Flickr can leave some pretty heavy damage on the optics. My eyes are still watering after being abused with this, a collection of recent “specially” themed photoshoppings from around the web (and quite a few from New Zealand). Gee thanks to Brenda (alias taniwha on Flickr) for sending me down that particular rabbit hole.
One thing that is nice about Flickr is the ability to use the tags to find a picture of just about anything you can think of:
“Bella – what animal would you like to see now?”
“Well, I think a zebra, because black and white are my favourite colours. And purple and pink too.”
Well Bella, for you: some zebras. No pink or purple ones though.
Also recommended is the explore feature, where they use the users’ own behaviour to predict what may or may not be an “interesting” photo. This pulls out superlative stuff, every day – imagine 500 great photos to look at every day – well that’s what you get there. And then you can follow up on the photographers themselves – like the odd trend – maybe it’s just my perception – towards interesting, almost gothic arab women photographers like MisLeaD, UAE Princess, truth_hurts, UAE-inspirer, Sweet Princess, and this person whose name I cannot transliterate.
There are hours in there, hours.
Heck
17 August 2005, 09:33 #
Wow. Second time I see this happen, and it’s really scary. It seems to me incredible that no one notices, but then, what are the odds, among the millions and millions of photographs in hundreds of thousands of web sites all over the place…? I clicked on all the links you have here, and…
Sweet Princess posts this photo.
But here’s the original by Lia Saile. (Which is part of her “eye” series, and being her own, um, face, well, it’s not like there’s any doubt…)
If I catch someone doing this with my photographs it won’t be pretty.
You see, I have your problem with Flickr, but with deviantArt and other “artsy” webs… Hours? It’s been years, Alan, and I’m still at it! Which explains why I caught this one, I suppose… I once saw a kid in deviantArt posting wallpapers straight from the Iconfactory, my goodness.
Alan
17 August 2005, 12:49 #
That’s not good. At all.
Has anyone posted a comment to the original artist’s page? I can only load the Deviant art site by Gcache at the moment…
Heck
17 August 2005, 16:00 #
I’ve sent her a mail explaining it all with the links, I’m sure the people at Flickr will take action.
Again, what are the odds? Funny thing, this linking stuff in the interweb…
Alan
17 August 2005, 16:20 #
I think it’s less coincidental than it might seem: because the photo is so good, it percolated up into the “Explore” / “Interesting” categories on Flickr, thereby making it much more likely that it would be noticed by someone who had seen it before.
It’s a good test of Flickr’s interestingness algorithmn, in some ways.
Heck
17 August 2005, 16:56 #
You’re right, good point.
Martha
17 August 2005, 19:43 #
People are so naughty. Who are they trying to fool? A gang of virtual strangers?
Alan
17 August 2005, 21:16 #
Yeah, we’re on to them.
Ben
17 August 2005, 23:18 #
I loved “TheHoff” series! That has been the highlight of my web reading tonight!
Mr Reasonable
18 August 2005, 22:55 #
There are some amazing piccies out there. The link from Llews site to Rebekka kept me awake for hours. Stunning stuff.