fotoLibra Blog

In fotoLibra’s offices in London and Harlech we use Zen as our service provider, and we have no complaints about them at all. In fact we can heartily recommend them, having used them for the past five years.

They’ve just upgraded our broadband service from 8Mbps to “up to 20Mbps”, which is very exciting.

Before they upgraded us I tested our speeds. It averaged 4.79Mbps download, and 0.36Mbps upload. That’s ADSL for you; if we had straightforward Digital Subscriber Lines like they do in Germany instead of Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Lines,we’d be able to upload and download at the same speed.

That’s why downloading an image from fotoLibra is over 13 times faster than uploading an image to us. We’re sorry, but unless you’ve got DSL there’s not a lot we can do about it.

Back to our “up to 20Mbps” upgrade. It came on stream this morning, so I tested our speeds again.

6.23Mbps download, 0.67Mbps upload. Not as thrilling as I’d hoped. That’s 31% of the potential speed. We were getting 60% of our potential speed on the previous deal. Why should the percentage decrease so greatly?

Still, it’s a little faster, so that is a good thing.

But have you noticed that “UP TO” always actually means “LESS THAN”?

We received the following email this morning:

As the owner of this rare car, I would request that this image be deleted from this site on the grounds of privacy.

If my car was parked outside my house and it was captured on Google’s street maps facility, at least they respect an individual’s privacy by blurring out vehicle licence plates. This aspect also extents to images in the media such as newspapers and TV broadcasts.

Additionally, I was not approached or contacted regarding the inclusion of my car for a third parties financial gain.

I agreed to appear at this show because the organiser of this event is a personal friend.

Please respect my request – thank you.

This is a perfectly polite and reasoned request. But what is at stake here? We’re under no obligation to take down images because the subject of the photograph objects to his property being depicted. If he doesn’t want his car to be seen he shouldn’t take it out in public.

Yes, the photograph was posted on fotoLibra for the purpose of financial gain. We haven’t yet found someone who is planning a calendar of AC cars, but we always live in hope.

You can’t stop anyone taking and publishing a photograph of your house, and it’s a lot easier to find out who lives in a house than who owns a car. Just check the electoral roll, or the census. We as private individuals can’t find out who owns this car by looking at the registration plate (which we’ve pixelated out here).

©Geoff Alan France / fotoLibra

But private parking companies can get a driver’s name and address simply by submitting the vehicle registration number to the DVLA and filling in a form confirming that they are pursuing an alleged parking offence.

The DVLA charges £2.50 a time for details from its ‘confidential’ database of 38m drivers. Income from this lucrative sideline in selling our personal data has risen every year from £4.7million in 2004-5 to £9.2m for 2009-10.

The owner of the car might find more reason to complain about this collaboration than about an enthusiastic photograph in a picture library.

What do you think?

I was pointed to a couple of blog postings yesterday, one called The Myth of DPI and the other titled Why DPI Does Not Matter.

Their arguments are logical and faultless. Their reasoning is sound. The message they are trying to get across is correct. But they are both wrong.

So why are they wrong?

Because they are writing about images on the web, and mentioning DPI. When you set the image size and resolution in Adobe Photoshop you never have the option of choosing the DPI of an image. This is what you get if you choose inches as your preferred units:

and this is what you get if you choose metric:

The option you have is of choosing “pixels/inch” or “pixels/cm”. Not “dots/inch” or “dots/cm”. Adobe Photoshop is concerned about your digital file. It doesn’t give a monkeys what you intend to do with it later. So it offers you ppi, NOT dpi, which is used in printing terminology. 300 pixels per inch equals 118.11 pixels per centimetre.

Our earnest bloggers are absolutely right in that ppi is irrelevant when you’re showing images on a screen. But dpi is relevant when you print those images, because then you can figure out how large you can print the image before those annoying little pixellations get in the way and become visible. 300 dots per inch is generally enough for the human eye to be tricked into seeing continous tone.

fotoLibra has always demanded that images uploaded to its site should be 300 ppi, for two perfectly valid reasons — and one utterly compelling one. You can read about them here.

I agree with my friends Ben Gremillion and Svein Wisnaes that resolution counts for nothing on the web. So it generally doesn’t matter, until you come to selling your photographs. When you are selling photographs to book publishers who need to print them at 300 dots per inch, it’s common courtesy to supply them at 300 pixels per inch.

Otherwise they might buy them from someone who took the trouble to go the extra step.

I needed to brush up on my SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) awareness so I thought I’d buy an ebook on the subject, instead of waiting around for the print version to arrive.

Because if anything’s got a short shelf life it’s going to be a book about how to improve your web site.

As I’m a member of a thriving LinkedIn community called “Ebooks, Ebook Readers, Digital Books and Digital Content Publishing” I thought I’d solicit the help of my fellow members and so I asked them “Can anyone recommend a good ebook about SEO? ANY ebook on SEO seems to be hard to find.”

They responded generously. I chose “SEO Warrior” by John Jerkowicz, for two reasons: it was the most recently published book on the subject (see comment above about short shelf lives) and it was published by O’Reilly, a trusted name in computer publishing.

It was suggested by Jill Tomich, the CEO of eBookPie, together with a link through to the page on her site where I could buy it: http://bit.ly/bLhQ7F. This was great. Just what I wanted. It was only $30.69.

But something made me pause. When I got my iPhone, I bought the O’Reilly “Missing Manual for the iPhone”. And it cost me £2.99. So I went to the iTunes store and found 600+ O’Reilly titles ranging from free (free is a price point) to £3.49. And there was “SEO Warrior” for £2.99.

Reader, I bought it.

Now everyone knows that O’Reilly are smart guys. Perhaps they can explain to me the following price structure for “SEO Warrior”:
Recommended retail price, USA:$44.99, UK £34.50
Print copy, Amazon USA: $29.69
Print copy, Amazon UK: £18.41
eBook, eBookPie USA: $30.69
eBook, iTunes App Store UK: £2.99

As an App developer myself (Aaron’s Time Machine: New York will very shortly be released) I know that Apple take 30% from the sale of any app. So what’s the thinking behind O’Reilly selling the same product (OK, in different formats) at prices ranging between $44.99 and $4.69? A near tenfold difference? How does the author feel about his royalty?

Please tell me. I’m really curious.

Yes, I feel bad about not buying it from Jill Tomich’s site, as she was so kind as to point me to it. But not as bad as I’d have felt if I’d paid $30 for the ebook and an hour later found it being sold for £3.

I’ve lifted the following verbatim from Jacqui Norman’s regular newsletter to fotoLibra members.

“This strange poem, discovered on a fotoLibra server, lists in strict sequence the most commonly used keywords for the images in the fotoLibra archive. It’s more likely to have been on an Apple XServe than an HP Proliant, but all we know for sure is that this is the precise unedited and unaltered order of frequency of all keywords. Words appear individually; where they appear as if they could be linked, such as in
yellow
stone
east
africa
they’re not; that’s just the way the mop flops. Oh yes — and we inserted the punctuation and line breaks where we felt it to be right.

Of the water — England — and sea blue nature: UK!
White sky in park, travel, architecture: Britain!
Red landscape, river, beach, city tourism, north united, holiday trees.
A green south coast (formula Europe).
National great, grand black Wales.
London building garden, British west;
Flower, lake, old bird tourist art.
Summer kingdom, prix heritage, flowers tree to boat on wildlife people.
One Church — Scotland! Street winter history, new vacation bridge.
Mountains young, view wild, sand countryside, house (yellow stone) —
East Africa?
USA?
Clouds, snow, mountain, transport, country sport, car, animal island, town colour — Italy! Boats, sun …
America: light tower, road holidays, sunset world.
Castle: English man attraction portrait. Autumn birds, buildings spring, fishing; grass, air — life.
Animals rocks harbour, from up plant rock Spain food plants. Woman by colourful France at natural historic walking religion; village leisure leaves China bay forest seaside girl.
American sunny night (racing culture) ocean gardens — coastal brown — scenic day valley war with motor.
Ireland: ancient David beauty, wall orange.
Traditional beautiful wood female children, aircraft farm woodland royal field; pink color, hill high — reflection.
Sunday states steam evening is market for lifestyle. Close religious centre!
Head flying, canal weather, abstract ice coastline.
Cold railway district. Environment islands? Scene bright.
Horizontal rural Yorkshire; Canada; Asia; European child.

Stunning, isn’t it? Eat your heart out, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Can an Apple XServe be nominated for Poet Laureate?”

Talking about poetry, last year the local council in Gwynedd put on a series of Poetry Appreciation night classes, so along went Jacqui Norman. Only women showed up. Typical.

Jacqui had a word with the organizer, who this season announced the same course renamed as Advanced Poetry Appreciation. It’s now packed out with men.

This morning The Times, The Telegraph and The Independent all had front page solus photographs of Steve Jobs holding up the new iPad. If only fotoLibra could have just one day’s worth a year of the publicity Apple gets!

iPad is a much better name than iSlate. Whoever thought iSlate would win out?

So Apple’s latest gottahave has finally been released. It’s as lovely as anticipated and it does several of the things that were expected. No phone, no camera, not even a little one buried in the frame looking at you so you can do video conferencing. Not needed because there’s no phone. But I suppose as it’s an internet browser it can Skype, so it could be used as a phone?

Of course I want one, and I want it now.

But what will I do with it? What basic need does it fulfil?

Most of us in the sedentary Western world live a three screens life — mobile, laptop, TV. When I’m not reading, I’m usually to be found staring at one of these objects. What I’m not so certain about is how much I hanker after a four screens life.

Which was always a good argument against Amazon’s Kindle, that clunky black and white book sales outlet. The new iPad blows the Kindle out of the water. It is incomparably more desirable. Put the two together and they look as if they’ve come from different centuries (which they probably have). Of course the iPad’s bookstore feature only works in the US, as Kindle’s did until very recently.

When all the brouhaha and hyperbole have been swept away, what have we got with the iPad? It’s a big screen iPod Touch with some software packages thrown in. It’s a big iPhone — without the phone.

I can live without it. For now.

But when Version 2.0 comes out …

Amazon announced a Kindle app for the iPhone a while ago; I’ve just got round to downloading it.

Now I’m a fan of ebooks. It’s a great concept, and therein lies the future — but I still have reservations. I don’t think there will be a tipping point from print to ebooks any time soon.

It won’t happen as quickly as many gurus hope it will, because
1. New ebook readers are announced daily. One format must achieve dominance, by which I mean 80%+ of the market.
2. That format has to do everything: colour, sound, movies, the lot
3. They are furiously expensive
4. We’re not there yet

Amazon famously announced that on Christmas Day more ebooks were downloaded than than they sold printed books. The future had arrived.

Well, durrr. Who is going to be on line buying books on Christmas Day? And who is more likely to be sitting in their solitary flat with the turkey pizza shoved under the door, endlessly scanning the internet for stuff to download?

Weren’t 8 out of 10 of their top selling ebooks all giveaways? How many of the print titles were free? I think we’ve been handed some spurious statistics here, and it’s been repeated all over the place.

The chatterati WANT ebooks to succeed. And of course they will. But a lot of people have got to get their acts together pretty damn quickly if it’s going to happen any time soon.

What prompted this? Well, I downloaded the Kindle app, and then I downloaded an ebook from Amazon.

And this is what I saw:

Well, I’m sorry — I gave up right away. There are graphic standards to keep to in this world, and I refuse to dumb down to

THE INFORMAL EXE-
CUTION OF SOUPBO-
NE PEW

which is beyond pathetic as any sort of commercial offering.

Keep trying, chaps. I’m sure you’ll make it eventually.

The ebooks that Neil Smith and I have produced for Aaron’s Apps are attractive, readable, innovative, colourful, non-linear, a new way of presenting a guide book, a new way of presenting history, and (though of course I’m saying all this myself) a genuinely new way of reading a book. These are guide books that follow YOU about, not the other way around. One huge illustration, eight feet by six feet, 160 pages which you can read in any order, and a nifty way to locate yourself in a city 200 years ago, as easily as today. Impossible to replicate in a printed book.

Now THAT’s what I call an ebook. The world should be beating a path to our door.

The US Patent Office has just granted a patent to Ryan Hickman of Mountain View, California (read Google) for identifying features in an online view of a real property and then replacing those features.

So if you see a poster or a billboard in Google Street View, it may not actually be there — it may have been replaced by a competitor’s advertisement. When you’re on the street, you see a big Pepsi ad, but online it’s magically transformed into a Coke ad.

I can see this would be great for cinemas and theatres, being able to update the features they’re showing, but otherwise this smacks a little of Big Brother to me. It will benefit large corporations. They will elbow out smaller businesses, like Waitrose and Tesco opening up next to the perfectly good Budgens in Crouch End.

I can’t help supporting the underdog. I am one.

Here’s the text of the granted patent. Read it and work out the implications, the ramifications, the possibilities. Rub your hands if you are in corporate life and get prepared to give yet more money to Google.

It’s damned clever, though.

Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising (granted January 7, 2010)

Techniques for identifying groups of features in an online geographic view of a real property and replacing and/or augmenting the groups of features with advertisement information are described. The techniques include providing a geographic view of a property within an online property management system, identifying a region of interest in the geographic view, analyzing the geographic view to locate one or more promotional features within the geographic view positioned upon a real property region, providing a user-selectable link associated with the region of interest in the geographic view, receiving a request for the region of interest in the geographic view via the user-selectable link, receiving data to alter at least one of the behavior or the appearance of the region of interest, storing the data in association with the geographic view, and updating the region of interest within the geographic view based upon the received data.

Here’s an index to the fotoLibra Pro Blog for the whole of 2009.

As I complained 6 months ago, it takes a surprising amount of time to compile, so if there are any WordPress experts out there who know how to automate this process, we’d love to hear from you.

If you’re new to fotoLibra, welcome, and may we suggest you read through the HINTS & TIPS section, and if nothing else read Great Expectations. If you enjoy a bit of controversy, read BAPLA Shock Horror.

Comments are welcome, even on old posts, and will be read and often responded to.

HINTS & TIPS

• Three hundred pixels per inch
• Shots of Redemption
• How To Take Aerial Photographs When You Haven’t Got An Aeroplane
• Compression
• Great Expectations
• RSVP

ABOUT FOTOLIBRA

• New fotoLibra
• BOMBSHELL
• Most Popular Searches
• White Labelling
• A Third of a Million
• Picture Calls
• fotoLibra DND & Checker 2.1 Released
• Drag ‘n’ Drop Upload Checker
• The New Picture Call Tab
• SPQR
• Search Engines and fotoLibra
• Yahoo Blocks Our Emails
• It’s got to be today
• 300,000 up!

ADOBE

• Photoshop Strips Metadata
• Adobe should stop overcharging its UK and European customers

BAPLA

• BAPLA Shock Horror
• BAPLA’s response to our complaint

CUSTOMERS

• The customer is always right
• Small print
• Why Pay More?
• Lovely Clients
• Big Jobs
• Pricing conundrum

E-BOOKS & PUBLISHING

• Free iPhone App: Aaron’s Time Machine: London Lyte!
• Orphan Books
• The Killer eBook Is Nearly Here
• UK Politicians Not Entranced by eBooks
• Primary School Books
• Getting ready for e-books and Graphics
• Kindle 2
• More Kindling
• The Killer Book for e-books

IT

• MacBook Pro Battery
• Fried Green Hard Disks
• Power Outputs, Bit Depths, Damn Lies & Statistics

LAW

• Warning: Do Not Take This Picture
• A Sensible Law
• Copyright or No Copyright

MISCELLANY

• Winterval
• Reunited
• Prophecies & Prophets
• Unpleasant Comments & Spam
• Proto-foto-Libra
• Cancelled Air Show
• Giving It Away For Free
• A heritage in photography
• Farewell Kodachrome
• The perils of publishing
• Happy New Year

NETWORKING

• The sites I’ve seen
• Niche Networking

NEWS

• Well, durrr!
• fotoLibra in the Telegraph
• Danish Photographer Off The Job

PICTURE CALLS

• What can we do?

SECURITY

• Data Protection

TRADE FAIRS

• Frankfurt Appointments
• Spring Fair International
• Cheap Photographs

Apparently this snow and cold isn’t confined to Britain. Seems like it’s snowing all over the world, except in Cape Town where that nasty Graeme Smith has been putting our plucky boys to the sword. It is glorious weather down there, 28°C, a warm breeze and cloudless skies. Yum yum. Newlands, and a bottle of Rust en Vrede to keep me company … a man can dream, can’t he?

Anyway, while it’s snowing — or, even better, when the sun comes out just after the snow, please get out there and use that camera. We always need snow shots, and cutomers usually ask us for them in May or June, so please be prepared now. As most of you know, I’m no photographer myself, but make sure you mug up on how to use that white balance control on your camera so the snow looks crisp and white.

Grey snow pictures don’t sell, except for gritty realist images of buses struggling to get up hills. We always need more grit.

Away from the winter wonderland, close observers will know that fotoLibra’s former technical development manager Neil Smith and I have been writing some iPhone apps together. Aaron’s Apps now has its own web site, so please check out http://aaronsapps.com to find out about the applications we’ve released (two) and the ones we have planned (eight at the moment).