I have lots of images in my Flickr account, over 35k uploaded from April 2005 until now. Searching them by date isn’t made easy: you first have to do a search and then in the advanced filters set a date range. The resulting search URL however is straightforward, and contains my user id, and both the start and end date to search in unix time. To make it easy for myself I made a tiny tool that has a locally hosted webform where I enter a start and end date to search, and turns that into the right search URL which it shows as clickable hyper link. Meaning with two clicks I have the images I searc ..read more

Early last year I wrote about how I don’t track you here, but others might. Third party sites whose content I re-use here by embedding them have the ability to track you to a certain extent. Earlier I already stopped using Slideshare and Scribd completely as a consequence, self-hosting my slide decks from now on. For photos and videos the story is slightly different. Where it’s not essential that a video can be viewed inside my posting, I simply link to it with a screenshot, thus avoiding that YouTube or Vimeo tracks you on my page. In other cases I still embed the video. For images I have bee ..read more

Last week Flickr, under its new ownership, migrated their backend from Yahoo’s datacenters onto Amazon’s AWS. While reading through some old blog posts, I noticed that in the older postings Flickr photos were no longer shown, and were replaced with a browser error message. It turns out that the player that existed at some point for showing Flickr images as an iframe in posts is now no longer in use. It probably lived somewhere on Yahoo’s servers, and didn’t come along to AWS. More recently embedded Flickr images are fine as they are based on the actual URI of a Flickr image, which hasn’t ch ..read more

This week NBC published an article exploring the source of training data sets for facial recognition. It makes the claim that we ourselves are providing, without consent, the data that may well be used to put us under surveillance. In January IBM made a database available for research into facial recognition algorithms. The database contains some 1 million face descriptions that can be used as a training set. Called “Diversity in Faces” the stated aim is to reduce bias in current facial recognition abilities. Such bias is rampant often due to too small and too heterogenous (compared to the gl ..read more

This is good news from Flickr. Flickr is amending their changes, to ensure that Creative Commons licensed photos will not be deleted from free accounts that are over their limit. (via Jeremy Cherfas) Flickr recently announced they would be deleting the oldest photos of free accounts that have more photos than the new limit of 1000 images. This caused concern as some of those free accounts might be old, disused accounts, where there are images with open licenses that are being used elsewhere. Flickr allows search for images with open licenses, and makes it easy to embed those in your own online ..read more

At the end of this month my Flickr Pro account will come up for renewal. It turns out that they doubled the price last summer (from 25 to 50 USD/year). Recently Flickr also announced that free accounts will be limited starting January 1st, 2019. The new limit will be at 1000 photos, and accounts with more images will see their oldest images deleted. I have been a Flickr Pro member since early 2005, and store some 25.000 photos there, making up 75GB. I took a paid account in 2005 because back then they had a 200 photo cap for free accounts, and I easily reached that limit. With a rate change li ..read more

Many tech companies are rushing to arrange compliance with GDPR, Europe’s new data protection regulations. What I have seen landing in my inbox thus far is not encouraging. Like with Facebook, other platforms clearly struggle, or hope to get away, with partially or completely ignoring the concepts of informed consent and unforced consent and proving consent. One would suspect the latter as Facebooks removal of 1.5 billion users from EU jurisdiction, is a clear step to reduce potential exposure. Where consent by the data subject is the basis for data collection: Informed consent means consent n ..read more

I’ve been using Flickr to store photos since March 2005. It’s at the same time an easy way to embed photos in my blog without using up storage space in the hosting account, and an online remote back-up. Over the years I’ve uploaded some 24.000 photos, though I’ve been using Flickr less in the last 2 years. My account is from just before the moment Yahoo bought Flickr from its founders, which was also in March 2005, and it forced me to create a Yahoo account for it in 2007. Yahoo never seemed to have much vision for Flickr, but as an early user (Flickrs was founded in 2004) the original functi ..read more