Archive for January, 2016
One-Off
January 26th, 2016It didn’t make the News at Ten but a seismic news event has just occurred in the picture industry,
Corbis, the picture library set up by Bill Gates, has been sold to Visual China Group and henceforth will be distributed by their former arch rival Getty Images.
I’m not really an industry commentator, more of an industry worker, but I can see this will have a massive effect on the picture buying world, and not necessarily all bad. If you want an industry commentator, Will Carleton of Photo Archive News is the tops.
Minnows like fotoLibra can’t possibly compete with this megabehemoth on price or range. We have nearly a million images, a number which when we went into business a dozen or so years ago would have made us a monster.
And unless we stop paying contributors — we have no intention of so doing — we can’t compete on price with microstock agencies or with special deals done by Messrs. Corbis and Getty.
Where we can make a difference is with unique one-off images, photographs which can’t be taken again, the reason we set up fotoLibra in the first place. We wanted to access the photographs in your attic, your shoe box inheritance, the stories of all our lives.
Of course we were swamped by the digital revolution, but we struggle gamely on. We do tell all you fotoLibra contributors that historic images are really popular and remember, anything taken before the year 2000 can be uploaded to fotoLibra without any charge. At all. Ever.
If it’s in a box in your attic, you’re paying its rent. If it’s in a digital file on fotoLibra, it could be helping to pay yours.
We sold a photograph to News at Ten last week. It was an old photograph of a castle before the recent floods. Getty and Corbis hold huge curated collections, not one-offs like that.
Who’d a thought it?
DNS — The Fuller Story
January 18th, 2016The fotoLibra site was down from about noon on Sunday 17th January to this morning, Monday 18th. Apologies for that. The problem was down to domain name system renewal propagation, which has now been sorted out.
When we started fotoLibra back in 2004 we got the fotoLibra.com website, and we had to pay some company in America to point people towards it — to make sure that an IP address, a series of numbers, in our case 77.240.1.218, would resolve into fotoLibra.com. We paid them for two years. Hey — we didn’t know if we’d still be around in 6 weeks, let alone two years.
Two years later we were pretty confident. Things were going well. So we renewed the DNS service for another ten years.
And promptly forgot all about it.
Yesterday, when we logged on to fotoLibra and saw a holding page offering the domain name fotoLibra.com for sale, our first reaction was outrage. The second was self-blame. We contacted Network Solutions to demand to know why we hadn’t been told. They assured us they had sent renewal notices on November 30th, December 11th, December 28th and January 11th.
They were not able to reveal the email address to which the renewal notices had been sent. I see all correspondence through the email box we registered with Network Solutions, and I saw nothing. Of course, it could have landed in Junk. I get about 600 junk emails every day and before deleting them I speed scan the senders to ensure I haven’t missed anything I recognise.
Which reminds me — if you contact fotoLibra and you haven’t had a reply within 24 hours (longer at weekends) please send your email again, because it may have fallen into the Junk folder.
Anyway, because they hadn’t heard from us, they cut us off. I was watching Harlequins vs the Cardiff Blues when our technical development manager rang. “The site’s down. DNS service not renewed.”
It was then we discovered that our broadband service was also down. I couldn’t get on line, I couldn’t see the site. I rang our ISP, the wonderful Zen Internet, to hear a recorded message to say the Crouch End district was suffering an outage. Outage? Outrage!
So the elderly 3G phone was pressed into service, and I finally, after long delays and several hours picking through a tiny keyboard, managed to renew our domain name system. User names, contact details and passwords all seem to have changed over the years, but we managed.
Then comes something called DNS Propagation. It takes time to circulate info across the world wide web, and as I write the fotoLibra site is up and running on my computer here in London, on Network Solutions’ computers in the States, but not on Yvonne’s computer across the room from me.
It will all have resolved itself by 9pm GMT at the very latest.
I’m very sorry about this. It’s not my fault but I feel I’m to blame. To stop this happening a second time, please could you all make a note in your diaries to email me in December 2025 to remind me to renew our DNS through Network Solutions?
Many thanks!
A Welsh Leaf
January 5th, 2016
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
A Welsh Leaf
I was sent this wonderful image. I don’t know who sent it; the email address it purported to come from bounced back.
Through the magic of TinEye and PicScout I can probably track down the source, once I post it online.
But it’s not mine to post.
Whoever took the photograph should be proud. He or she has a good eye. I see a Welsh dragon in the shadow, which is why I’ve titled this ‘A Welsh Leaf’. (Everything looks like a nail to a hammer.) And the proud photographer probably added all sorts of information in the metadata, some automatically input by her DSLR or smartphone camera, some which she might have added to describe the image, caption it, keyword it, to help people to find it, buy it, share it, credit it.
But apart from its incomprehensible auto-created filename — 208655-1000-14471607882761860-R3L8T8D-1000-gjVfnT8.jpg — all the metadata you’d expect to be associated with this image has been stripped away. I don’t know who took this photograph, where, or when.
Why? Facebook, to name just one of the many social networks that automatically flail an image of its metadata (Google+ is the honorable exception), doesn’t deign to answer questions put to them, leaving users to speculate uselessly. The most popular theories aired online are
- To preserve users’ privacy
- To save space
- To lock people in
- To obtain licensing rights
Well we can discard #1 immediately, as acquiring your personal details is the whole purpose of a social network site — although it might have a scintilla of truth in that they’d be very reluctant to share anything with another social network, and if they left the EXIF and metadata intact then everyone could see it.
#2 makes a tiny bit of sense. Metadata can scarcely take up more than 1% of an image’s filesize, but these guys make their profits through nanopercentages. With 400 million images uploaded daily to Facebook, each say 50Kb, that’s 400 gigabytes they could save each day.
#3 Locking people in? They’ve got you by the short ‘n’ curlies already, but they might want to try and cement the relationship.
Which brings us to #4.
In Facebook’s Terms & Conditions, read by at least 1% of users, they assert that
“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license (my bold) to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”
What does this actually mean? It means they can do whatever they want with your images, and they can sell that right on to whomsoever they please. Money. Power.
It doesn’t matter that the image is lo-res at 72 ppi; they’re only interested in digital usages.
If you upload Jane Jones’s image under a Creative Commons licence to your Facebook page, and supply the appropriate credit, you are doing no wrong. But Facebook will strip the metadata and under the T&Cs you agreed to, you have granted them a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any intellectual property content that you post.
So who does Jane Jones sue? Certainly not Facebook. Even the government daren’t sue Facebook.
They ignore copyright laws with impunity. They ignore tax laws with impunity. Corporations such as this are striving to become supranational, to become greater than the law, more powerful than independent states.
And stripping the metadata is the broken pane of glass that allows them to get away with it. They’re taking the locks off your doors. It shouldn’t be allowed. It shouldn’t be possible.
A Happy New Year to you all.