I Hardly Know Her is a minimalist Flickr viewer. Simply give it permission to access your Flickr stream and you can use it to view your Flickr photos without distraction, You can see my Flickr photostream at http://ihardlyknowher.com/mike_c/big.
A new way to look at your Flickr photos
Photography
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May 302010
Uploading iPhone 3GS Videos to Flickr
Photography, iPhone
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Jul 052009
If you’ve attempted to upload any video from an iPhone 3GS to Flickr, you’ve probably seen Flickr’s “Unable to process this video” screen no matter how you uploaded it. The iPhone’s MOV files aren’t supported by Flickr due to the codec it uses. A very simple solution is to export it as AVI from QuickTime Pro or any other media converter. You can then upload the exported AVI movies to Flickr.
WP-O-Matic FAIL
WordPress
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Feb 222009
If you follow me on twitter, you probably saw about 32 tweets spew from my blog, thanks to WP-O-Matic blowing chunks all over my blog, which Twitter Tools dutifully reported as new posts.
I’m attempting to set up automatic photo blogging from my Flickr photo stream. Flickr produces RSS feeds for each tag, so I’m using the tag photoblog to have those images posted here automatically by subscribing to the resulting feed. Unfortunately, Flickr’s tag feed URL has several characters such as ‘?’ or ‘&’ that WP-O-Matic choke on. As a result, instead of seeing my tag feed, WP-O-Matic saw my entire photo stream. Furthermore, although I limited it to post only 5 items, it decided to post each item multiple times.
A work-around for the URL problem is to use a URL shortener such as tinyurl to generate a clean URL for WP-O-Matic. I’ve made it create new items as drafts instead of publishing immediately, so it shouldn’t happen again.
Happy Birthday, Flickr
Photography
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Feb 102009
Today is Flickr’s fifth birthday! To mark the occasion, here is the very first photo I uploaded to Flickr on June 30, 2004 (I actually took that picture in 2003 with my Canon A100).
Pandas & Rainbows
Fun Stuff
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Oct 052008
The latest meme seems to be pandas vomiting rainbows, first seen at Flickr’s explore page.
The D90 is selling fast
Programming
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Sep 282008
I like to check Flickr’s camera finder page every few days to see how popular the D90 is. As I write this, the D90 is ranked 15 of 102 Nikon models. Less than a week ago, it wasn’t even listed. Yesterday it was #19, a jump of 4 places in one day.
Here’s a shot I took today with my 50mm lens at f1.8. I love being able to use auto focus with that lens.
Start Wearing Purple
Music, Photography
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Sep 182008
Flickr Blog introduced Yahoo’s new Start Wearing Purple campaign. I sure hope they got permission from Gogol Bordello to use that name.
Aug 242008
I don’t know if this is documented anywhere, but I found that it’s possible to create a smart album to track photos that have been uploaded to Flickr using the FlickrExport plugin.
FlickrExport adds a metadata tag with the Flickr URL when it uploads a photo. When you create a smart album, one criteria you can use is ‘other metadata’, which you can select from the ‘+’ popup in the top right of the window. One of the metadata options will be ‘Flickr URL’. Choosing Flickr URL is not empty will select all photos which have been uploaded to Flickr. Alternately, ‘is empty’ will select photos which haven’t been uploaded. Combining these options with star ratings make it easy to choose photos to upload when you have a lot of them.
Using that trick I managed to finish going through the rest of my photowalk photos and uploaded many more today.
Aug 232008
I spent the weekend modifying ObjectiveFlickr to work on the iPhone, which was mostly a matter of changing the response handling code that depends on NSXMLDocument. I was pretty much able to plug in my MCFlickrParser class, which I use in LOLCats, to create a NSDictionary structured very much like the XML document.
Yesterday I was informed about FlickrKit, which already works on the iPhone. FlickrKit seems more advanced, but it’s also a lot larger than ObjectiveFlickr. I created simple Flickr browsers using both frameworks. The FlickrKit version is 704k, while the ObjectiveFlickr version is only 148k. I’ve only tried it on the simulator and the performance seems about the same for both.
I will probably stick with OF for this project, since I would like to support Zooomr as well as Flickr and OF already seems to support Zooomr.
LOLCats 1.1 is available
Programming, iPhone
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Aug 102008
UPDATE: Minutes after I posted this, I got a notice from Apple that the update has been approved and is now ready for sale.
Apple still hasn’t approved my update to LOLCats. Still no response from Apple for the second update, which I feel is pretty urgent, since it reduces the possibility of inappropriate images appearing, which I’ve received several complaints about.
I’m now getting close to another update, which adds Zooomr support.
Meanwhile, I’m working on a second Flickr-related application. I had expected to share a lot of code with LOLCats, but it turns out I’ve only reused one class, my Flickr parser.
For this app, I need to support Flickr authorization, so it seemed easier to rewrite Flickr’s ObjectiveFlickr code, which already supports authorization. However, ObjectiveFlickr depends on XMLDocument, which isn’t available on the iPhone. I’m replacing the response handling code with my Flickr parser class. When it’s finished, I’ll release the Flickr-related code (not the entire app) as open source.
On a fun note, I purposely added the LOLCATS tag to this photo of Midnight to make it to appear in the application. As a result, the number of hits on that photo are about 100x the average for my similar photos.
Zooomr supports Flickr API
Photography, Programming, Web
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Aug 082008
Until I started poking around in Flickr’s Objective C code, I didn’t realize that Zooomr supported a variant of Flickr’s API. I found that it’s fairly easy to port code which uses Flickr to Zooomr. In less than an hour, I had LOLCats working with Zooomr. I plan to include Zooomr support in the other iPhone Flickr app I’m working on.
A note about LOLCats
iPhone
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Aug 012008
I’ve received a few complaints about some images that showed up in the LOLCats application.
Unfortunately I have very little control over which images appear (except for the one that appears in the initial loading screen, which is my own cat, Cody). I simply search Flickr for the tags ‘LOLCAT’ or ‘LOLCATS’ and present any images it returns. Since I’m not logging into Flickr, it will always do a safe search, although that depends on the images being tagged as not safe. Perhaps requesting the results sorted by relevance or interestingness may improve the results; I’ll experiment with that for the next version.
I’ve been asked to make the OFFISHUL LOLCATS application, which will use the feed from icanhascheezburger.com and several related sites. I will continue to maintain both applications.
I have a few fixes planned for an upgrade. Most importantly, it will verify Flickr’s reachability, so it won’t simply hang if it has no network connection. Since it can take long to load images over an Edge connection, I’ve also disabled user interaction while the image is loaded, since swiping during that time can cause the image to disappear.
Checking Apple’s daily stats, it ‘sold’ almost 2400 copies in one day, including 2200 in the US, 159 in Canada, 19 in Mexico, and a few in several other countries. Since this is a free app, I’m not getting paid for it, of course. Not bad for something I just wrote for fun and as a proof of concept for testing the Flickr API 
Jul 022008
After trying SmugMug for a few days, I’ve decided to keep it, although I’ll still continue to use Flickr.
SmugMug has several pros & cons in comparison with Flickr. SmugMug lets you create really beautiful galleries where you can customize both the color theme and the photo layout. The default layout shows thumbnails on the left side with a large view of a single photo on the right. You can even let your visitors choose which layout they want to use.
SmugMug does have some significant weaknesses, though. On Flickr, all of your photos appear in your photo stream and it can also be included in multiple sets or group pools. SmugMug doesn’t have a photo stream; it has albums and every photo can appear in only one album. Flickr also feels more like a community.
For general use, I prefer Flickr, but for a professional, SmugMug seems like a nicer way to show off your best photos.
Check out my SmugMug gallery at mike3k.smugmug.com, and as always my Flickr photo stream is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike_c/
Photos in my RSS feed
Web
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Apr 242008
Since I’m using FeedBurner for this blog’s feed, I’ve activated Photo Splicer, so my latest photos on Flickr will now appear in my feed.
Say No to Flickr Video
Photography, Web
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Apr 092008
As you probably know, Flickr introduced their video feature earlier this week. Unfortunately their effort is half-assed and only detracts from the site. They only allow videos of 90 seconds or less, which isn’t really useful. It’s obviously meant for the short videos you can take with many point-and-shoot cameras or cell phones, but there are plenty of other sites which do it much better.
Flickr can already be slow at times, and I’m afraid they won’t have the bandwidth to support video without making it even slower. They should keep doing what they excel at, which is being the best photo sharing site, and not try to do something where their effort is only mediocre.
There’s already a no video group and petitions. While most Flickr petitions have been pretty stupid, this is one I agree with.
New Flickr Feature: Find Friends
Web
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Apr 012008
Flickr has added a new feature, Find Friends, which can import a Yahoo Mail, GMail, or Windows Live address book and add anyone already a member of Flickr as a contact.
Nothing lasts forever
Web
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Feb 012008
I’m sure everyone has heard about Microsoft offering to buy Yahoo.
Yahoo owns two sites I use regularly, Flickr and del.icio.us. It isn’t clear how they’d be affected if Microsoft does buy Yahoo.
When we trust our data to a site like Flickr, we trust that it will always be there. I’m not predicting that they’ll disappear, but if they do, our data will also be gone.
As an alternative to Flickr, I may switch to either Zooomr or Picassa. I’ve had Picassa for a while, but I never really used it until I got my Eye-Fi card and set it up as the default upload site.
For del.icio.us, the alternative seems to be be ma.gnolia, which I signed up for a long time ago but pretty much forgot about.
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