I swear that when I tweeted this morning:

I had no knowledge that only a couple hours later, Flickr would unveil a newer interface. Flickr has been enhanced with several updates to photo pages.

Similar Look; Several Enhancements

The overall look remains similar, but here’s what you’ll find with the new Flickr photo interface (along with a few editorial comments):

• The default photo size has been increased to 640 pixels wide (up from 500 previously). Bigger is better, but in these days where it seems that everyone’s default resolution is at least 1280 pixels wide, I’m a bit disappointed that only half of that is being used for a photograph.
• A new lightbox view, accessed by clicking on a photo, opens a black-background lightbox for image viewing. I don’t see this as being used by many folks, but it’s nice to see a black-background option being available. Even better would’ve been the ability for users to choose their background color for the page.
• Photo titles now display underneath images (near the description) instead of at the top of the page. The image comes first, the supporting words second.
• Photos with geolocation data display a small map on the right. The camera information is displayed in this same area. Both of these items are more prominant than the previous small-font display that was down near the bottom of the sidebar.
• Navigation buttons to move to previous/next images are now fairly prominent. A new “filmstrip” look replaces the older single-photo options to move forward or back within the photostream or image set.
• Several of the options that were previously in various above-photo menus have been consolidated into an “Actions” menu. This results in a cleaner interface, but it’s going to mean an extra click if you frequently used some of those options.
• Previously viewable only to photo owners, Favorites are now public and displayed along with the comments.
• Licensing information is now displayed more prominently, including on the “All Sizes” view of a photo.

First-Glance Conclusions

Overall these are evolutionary, not revolutionary changes. I think it’s definitely a step in the right direction. When I got word of the new interface I’ll admit I was kind of hoping for some bigger changes but I suspect Flickr users might have revolted at anything too radical.

For power users who might be enhancing Flickr with Greasemonkey scripts, my suspicion is that most of these scripts will need to be updated to accomodate the user interface changes. Incidentally, I use about ten scripts that enhance Flickr, and none of today’s announced changes addresses the shortcomings that I overcome with scripts.

I’m not really sure where Flickr is headed. Perhaps these changes are the first step or are needed to support some bigger innovations that have yet to be announced.

Get Started with the New Interface

The new interface is technically in a beta period right now, but signed-in Flickr users can opt-in to the new design. Use this link to opt-in to the new Flickr photo interface.

Read more about the changes in the announcement blog post, the Flickr FAQs, or a Flickr Group that’s been set up for discussion.

Flickr Unveils New Photo Page Interface. I Swear I Didn’t Know, Really. is a post from Social Photo Talk. Subscribe to the free Social Photo Talk e-newsletter

Late last week, Flickr rolled out a change that widens the reach of it’s collaboration with Getty Images and allows anyone on Flickr to offer their photos for sale via the Getty program.

Previously, the Flickr+Getty partnership was essentially invitation-only, where selected photographers would be invited to have selected photos represented by Getty. Now, photographers can opt-in to allowing any of their public photos to be licensed via Getty. Photographers will see a “Want to license your photos through Getty Images?” link in the “Additional Information” section of their public photo pages. Clicking the link leads to the preferences screen (shown partially in the screenshot) where a photographer can opt-in to allowing Getty to manage licensing of their public photos.

For photographers who choose to participate, a link will be added to all of their public photos page that allows a viewer to request to license the photo. When a request is made, a Getty editor will manage the deal between the photographer and the buyer.

Will This Impede Licensing Deals?

At first this sounds like a great way for photographers to license their work, but I’ve started to think more about it and I wonder how this might over-complicate the behind-the-scenes licensing deals that already occur on Flickr. It’s not uncommon for a photographer to receive a licensing request via Flickr and work with a buyer to arrange terms and payment; will the introduction of Getty into the picture lead to less of the informal deals? Might folks be put off by the formal nature of introducing a third party?

And What About that Non-Commercial Angle?

As most Flickr users know, Flickr prohibits commercial use of the service. From their terms of service:

Flickr is for personal use only. If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account.

We’ve seen in the past that Flickr is quick to delete accounts without warning for this reason. By rolling Getty licensing out to every user, it’s clear that Flickr is fine with commercial use as long as Flickr gets a piece of that deal. If this was about allowing users choice or flexibility, I’d be able to add a link that allows users to license photos directly through me. That’s not what it’s about. By forcing users to license through Getty, Flickr can control the terms and presumably earn a portion of Getty’s proceeds on the deals.

Are you going to offer your Flickr stream to be licensed via Getty? Does this feature excite you or do you feel limited by the lack of licensing options on Flickr?

Flickr Enables Anyone to Make Commercial Sales… Sorta is a post from Social Photo Talk. Subscribe to the free Social Photo Talk e-newsletter

Last night Flickr announced direct sharing integration with Facebook. Sounds great, but as part of Yahoo’s attempt to stay relevant in the social space, it’s integrated with something called either Yahoo Updates or Yahoo Pulse (I can’t figure out if they’re the same thing or not) that adds one more layer of complexity to the privacy picture.

The premise seems straightforward: each time you upload a photo to Flickr, that photo is shared on your Facebook wall. Once you have things configured, that’s what happens.

How to Setup Flickr to Facebook Connectivity

First, if you’re already using the old Flickr to Facebook integration (which was, to put it nicely, flaky at best), you’ll want to disable that so you don’t end up double-posting. To disable the old system, on Facebook, go to your Profile. Click on Wall, then at the top find the Options link, then Settings, and if you see Flickr, click the little “X” to remove it.

Next go to the Sharing & Extending options of your Flickr account. Near the top you should see the blue button to connect with Facebook. When you click it, you’ll establish the Facebook connection, but you’ll also end up diving into a world of likely having to enable Yahoo Updates. What is Yahoo Updates? If you’re like me, you’d never heard of it previously. From what I can tell, Yahoo Updates is a social sharing system that spans Yahoo services. You’ll need to configure your Yahoo Updates to allow Flickr to share with Facebook (it’s a simple checkbox) and then, in theory, the connection will be established. At least, I think you’re configuring Yahoo Updates. That’s what it’s called in some places, but the page also brands itself as Yahoo Pulse. Pulse, Updates, who knows. It’s cute that Yahoo is trying to establish some sort of sharing platform, but really, are there many people where Yahoo is the center of their sharing world? I don’t know of any such people…

After enabling everything (and scanning Flickr’s Facebook FAQ to make sure I hadn’t missed something), I uploaded a photo to Flickr. About 10 minutes later, there it was on Facebook:

They’ve pulled the image title, description, and some tags with a link to view more of my photostream.

Go forth and re-integrate Flickr and Facebook.

It Works, But WTF?

Is this a good thing? Did Yahoo just spend a bunch of effort to fix something that wasn’t broken? Is Yahoo Pulse relevant? What if they’d done something truly interesting like allowed for cross-site photo comments instead of two silos? Flickr is great for getting comments from photographers, but what about comments from the wider population on Facebook?

New Flickr + Facebook Integration Marred by Irrelevant Yahoo Clutter is a post from Social Photo Talk. Subscribe to the free Social Photo Talk e-newsletter

When you first heard about Twitter, you probably wondered why the heck anyone would care about the answer to “What are you doing right now?” If you’ve used Twitter and developed some relationships, you probably realized that the connections go way beyond folks sharing what they’re having for lunch.

I want to hear your Twitter story in a couple sentences, of what you thought it would be like when you joined and then what you’ve found Twitter to actually be once you’ve used it for a while. I’ll select a couple commenters at random; one will win a Luma Loop camera strap (size medium – $60 value) and the other will get one year of Flickr Pro ($25 value). Winners will be announced next Monday (June 7th), so leave a comment soon!

Please share… what’s been your Twitter experience when compared with your expectations?

Photo by kl-Ga, used under Creative Commons licensing

Twitter: Your Expectations vs. Reality (Comment to win!) is a post from Social Photo Talk. Subscribe to the free Social Photo Talk e-newsletter

Flickr’s blog integration has never been too hidden, but most users’ experience has probably been in using the feature to post one’s own photos. Allowing others to blog your photos can be a great way to have your work shared.

How do you allow this? The blogging permissions can be found by logging onto Flickr and then clicking on your username in the upper right corner of the site. This will take you to your account settings, and you can click the Privacy & Permissions link to reach this screen:

To the right of each item you’ll see an “Edit” link, using the highlighted setting you can choose who can blog your photos. Allow your contacts to blog your photos, or better yet, allow anyone!

You know where I find this really useful? When browsing my Flickr contacts’ photos, if I find a great one I love to share it with my Twitter followers. Since you can setup posting to Twitter from Flickr, I can use Flickr’s “Blog This” button to send a link to a photo to the thousands of folks who follow me on Twitter.

If you haven’t enabled the ability for me to do it in a couple clicks? Hoestly I usually won’t take the time to do it manually (get the link, shorten the link, open Twitter client, and post). I’ll simply move along and find someone who has made it easier for me to share.

Photo by mikecpeck, used under Creative Commons licensing

How to Let Others Share Your Flickr Photos via Blogs is a post from Social Photo Talk. Subscribe to the free Social Photo Talk e-newsletter

We talk about photographers being social and sharing work via social media, but when to comes to sharing photos, does it make more sense to share pictures on Facebook (with its wide audience and photo album and tagging features) or Flickr (with the photo-centric site offering more photo-centric features)?

Using Facebook for Photo Sharing

While Facebook is a general-purpose social network, they have a popular feature for sharing photos. Facebook allows users to create any number of photo albums. Files are automatically resized for Facebook’s interface, and the user can provide captions although Facebook doesn’t support keywords, camera information, or other metadata that is part of a typical photographer’s workflow. In theory, Facebook offers privacy settings on a per-album level, allowing one to easily choose whether photos are public, only seen by friends, by friends of friends, or private.

Facebook is a people-centric system, with photos being one of many bits of content that are ultimately associated with an individual. Facebook’s “killer feature” for photo sharing is that they pioneered the concept of visually tagging users in a photo. Once you’ve uploaded a photo to Facebook, you can “tag” your friends in the photo, which will make the photo available from that friend’s profile page as well as having the photo shared (on both your Facebook Wall and your friend’s Facebook Wall) as being tagged. With seemingly everyone having a Facebook profile, the audience is there.

Facebook’s terms of service essentially give them a license to do anything they want with your content. I mentioned this last week when looking at recent Facebook issues. Facebook provides no options for a photographer to indicate licensing or usage terms.

Using Flickr for Photo Sharing

Flickr is more of a single-purpose social network than Facebook, but that single purpose is photo sharing, and it does it very well. Users can organizes photos into a variety of groups (sets, collections, and galleries), with the ability to restrict visibility to groups of Flickr contacts. Having been designed for photographers, Flickr supports a wide range of metadata. Keywords are the most obvious (Flickr calls them tags), but Flickr also provides (unless the individual user has disabled the feature) the ability to see the camera’s EXIF data including camera model, shutter speed, aperture, and other supporting information.

Beyond the rich metadata features, Flickr’s other big strength is in its communities. There are Flickr groups (consisting of photo libraries and discussion forums) for nearly any topic imaginable. Whether it’s a piece of equipment, a theme, a location, a color, or any other of thousands of classifications, there’s a Flickr group of fellow enthusiasts devoted to that topic. As photographers we often talk about specialization into a niche, and Flickr allows us to easily connect with others in that space. In the past year, Flickr added the ability to tag people in photos, but it’s a much less-used feature than Facebook’s offering.

Flickr’s terms of service are more restrictive, only granting permisson for the photos to be used on the Flickr website and within whichever license a photographer chooses. Flickr allows photographers to designate photos as “All Rights Reserved” or licensed under a few different Creative Commons Licenses.

What Are You Doing?

Last night I asked (both on Twitter and Facebook) how folks choose whether to share photos on Facebook vs. Flickr. Here’s a sampling of responses:

• “I never put any photos on FB. I (as far as I know) own my photos on Flickr…so most of the Flickr Wins.” – @harrisja
• “Facebook for my family. Flickr for everybody else…though that seems to no longer be the case with the privacy changes.” – @scottyiseri
• “I almost never post photos on FB because they can take them and use them for whatever. Plus I hate FB more w each passing day” – @ephanypdx
• “Flickr photos get a wider audience thanks to group etc.” – Steve Eshom
• ” I use various services, from my phone, I post on both, as well as Tumblr. From my camera – mostly to Flickr – and I’ve linked my FB account. Anything I make public at Flickr is noted on my wall.” – Gary Walter

My Conclusions/Recommendations: Facebook for People; Flickr for Everything Else

Which to use? Why? Looking at it from the perspective of a photographer who wants to get the most exposure (to the right audience), my general recommendation is to use Facebook primarily for photos of your friends, family, and other small groups of contacts (where you can use the tagging features to spread your work to a very targeted group) and to use Flickr for more general photos, large public events, and fine art. Of course you can always cross-publish, but for the best use of each platform, I default to Flickr for most things with Facebook for the more personal connections.

How about you? How do you decide where to post?

Photo by mikebaird, used under Creative Commons licensing

Facebook vs. Flickr: Where to Share? is a post from Social Photo Talk. Subscribe to the free Social Photo Talk e-newsletter

If you photograph businesses, company events, retail openings, parties, or the like, are you keeping those photos under lock and key or are you encouraging your clients to share? Hopefully you’re encouraging some sharing. If you don’t allow (and even encourage) folks to share your work, you’re probably going to be replaced by a photographer who will… or even replaced by the amateur snapshots or cell phone photos of the business’ customers.

I’m not advocating that you give away all of your work for free; take sharing into consideration as you price a job. Will the company want to use your work on its Facebook page? The answer is yes, they should. Are they going to use the pictures on their blog? On their Flickr stream?

How about something even less traditional? What if you license the photos such that the organization not only uses the images on their social networking presences, but allows and encourages their fans to take the images and use them on their own blogs, Facebook pages, or the like?

Sharing is hot. Social media and social networking are all the rage at the moment, and a lot of businesses and other organizations are struggling with how they can “be social.” As a photographer, you can help them. When you license your work, include sharing. Help your clients to help themselves.

Photo by *Sally M*, used under Creative Commons licensing

License Your Photos for Sharing; Encourage Photography Clients to Be Social is a post from Social Photo Talk. Subscribe to the free Social Photo Talk e-newsletter

One of the big announcements from Facebook last week was a universal “Like” button across the web, allowing Facebook users to easily note content they find interesting and share that content with their friends.

Since I hope you find at least some of the content here interesting, I’ve added a Facebook Like button that will appear below articles when you’re viewing a single-article page. If you find something interesting, it would be great to have you “Like” the post.

Thanks!

Image by benstein, used under Creative Commons licensing

Do You “Like” the Articles on Social Photo Talk? is a post from Social Photo Talk. Subscribe to the free Social Photo Talk e-newsletter

In about a month, the South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival will take over Austin, Texas with events focused on Film, Music, and Interactive topics. I’ll be headed down there for the Interactive portion of the event, and it would be great to get together with other photographers who are in town. I know Trey Ratcliff has talked about a photowalk, and I’m sure there will be other opportunities for us to get together and make some pictures or simply chat over a beverage and/or bar-be-que.

Are you going to SXSW? Leave a comment and let’s keep in touch.

Photo by ..:::KB:::.., used under Creative Commons licensing

Are You a Photographer Going to SXSW? is a post from Social Photo Talk. Subscribe to the free Social Photo Talk e-newsletter

Last weekend I had the honor of being the primary photographer for 30 Hour Day, a first-of-its-kind charity telethon held entirely online as opposed to traditional broadcast media. I was in the studio taking photos as well as processing and uploading selected photos to Flickr. Clients love quick turnaround, and by putting the photos online it gave telethon viewers a glimpse “behind the scenes” into the people and workings of the studio.

I got some questions both from people in the studio as well as online about my workflow and how I quickly pushed photos to Flickr and Twitter. As background information, I was shooting with a pair of cameras using CF cards. I had my MacBook Pro with a card reader and Lightroom. I use Jeffrey Friedl’s Lightroom Export plugin for Flickr. Here’s how I did it:

1. Every hour or two, I’d offload files from the CF cards onto my computer and import them into Lightroom.
2. During the import, Lightroom was automatically assigning event-specific keywords as well as adding my copyright info to the EXIF data.
3. All of the photos were then placed into a Lightroom collection for the event.
4. A generic description for the event was added to every photo – in this case “From the studio at 30 Hour Day”
5. I’d quickly go through the collection, rating each photo with one, two, or three stars. One-star photos aren’t good, two-star photos are okay but not my best work, and three-star photos are those that are candidates for uploading. Lightroom tip: if you turn on Caps Lock while rating photos, you’ll jump to the next photo as soon as you hit the number on your keyboard.
6. After rating, use the Library Filter to only show images in the collection that are three stars.
7. Go through the three-star images and make Develop adjustments to the ones I was going to publish. For the most part I wasn’t making any substantial edits, mainly white balance adjustments and the occasional exposure adjustment (either global or with the adjustment brush). I was probably spending 30 seconds (or less) per image on average.
8. After making Develop module adjustments on an image, when it was ready to publish I’d label it with the green label (using the keyboard shortcut – the 8 key – to make this quick).
9. I created a Smart Collection with the following criteria, used throughout the event as I processed photos:
   • In the 30 Hour Day collection
   • Rating at least 3 stars
   • Color label is green
   • Has not been uploaded to Flickr (this is a custom property set by the export plugin)
10. Go through each of the photos in the Smart Collection (to be uploaded) and give them a title.
11. After each batch, upload the photos to Flickr, placing them in appropriate groups.
12. While exporting, use the plugin’s option to send out a tweet – include the event’s hashtag (in this case #30hd) and a link to my Flickr photoset for the event.

With this system I was able to quickly and easily get photos online from the studio in a fast manner that also pushed the photos to Flickr and Twitter.

A Social Photo Workflow: Posting Photos from the 30 Hour Day is a post from Social Photo Talk. Subscribe to the free Social Photo Talk e-newsletter