Posts Tagged ‘Flickr’
$ocial Media
March 15th, 2016
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Not being a great user of social media personally, I find it mildly offensive when people bump into me in the street because they’re too intent on reading their screens.
However when I was their age, I used to bump into people as I hurried down the street with my nose buried in a book — so where’s the difference?
The difference is that the boors who bump into me today are communicating with their own user-defined communities, which definitely does not include portly old gentlemen meandering down the street.
But as the great New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner pointed out, ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’e a dog.’ So I don’t know if these hurrying, bustling, busy people might be picture editors, photographers, or any other members of a community which could be interested in fotoLibra, in the wonderful variety of images we hold, and in the great opportunities for reaching picture buyers around the world.
Shortly after we started up fotoLibra we approached what we recognised as social media blithely and without fear. We set up this fotoLibra Pro Blog, we set up Facebook and LinkedIn identities, we fed them with content and … not a lot happened. So we asked around, and people told us “Oh, you should be on
- Picasa
- Google +
- Tumblr
- Snapchat
- Flickr
and so on and so on and so on.
Keeping a visible profile on a dozen or or so social media sites (all American, of course) is hard maintenance for a small English-speaking (as opposed to American-speaking) business. In fact it’s almost a full-time job.
But it’s not impossible. So I started checking them out. The first one I looked at was Picasa.They closed it down today, Tuesday 15th March, after 13 years.
That would have been annoying, pumping thought and effort into something which has the cord yanked just as you get it up and running.
All these SocMed sites seem to follow the same pattern — smart young entrepreneurs start them up, they achieve quick success, a larger corporation buys them out, it doesn’t have the same drive and vision as the founders, the division lurches from new initiative to desperate new initiative until the enterprise is quietly remaindered. Whatever happened to Bebo? Myspace? They still exist, albeit as husks of their former selves. Friends Reunited? It was closed down 18 days ago.
When Facebook went public, 18% of the listed value of the company would buy you Belgravia. At the time, I commented I’d rather have Belgravia. Now more teenagers are signing up to Snapchat than Facebook, and who knows what they’ll be joining in 25 years time? Whereas Belgravia will still be there.
All this was partly prompted by coming across a New York photographer who started taking photos in 2008, now has 400,000 followers on Facebook and no, she doesn’t post naked selfies. I am lost in envy and admiration. My NYC chums have never heard of her. fotoLibra rather fewer followers on Facebook. Our challenge is to multiply ours a thousandfold.
Whether the SocMeds are on the rise, or in graceful decline, the more people who are aware of what fotoLibra offers, the better it will be for contributors, picture buyers and of course us.
We’re asking around again. Naturally, all advice will be gratefully received!
The Dictatorship of Social Media
March 14th, 2013
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
This isn’t an anti-American, anti-government or anti-big business rant, it’s simply a plea for fairer play.
We continually stress the need for our photographers to add good and relevant keywords to their images, what we in the trade call the metadata. There are several reasons for this, and by far the most important to us is that without sensible, accurate keywords the most wonderful photograph in the world will never be found and therefore never sold.
The second most important reason is that once the picture sets off on its pilgrimage around the world it will be carrying with it its own passport or ID card, so that everyone who encounters it will know who it is and where it came from. If you have a home to go to you’ll never be an orphan.
Yet the British government is contemplating passing legislation on “orphan works” that could enable the use of a photographer’s intellectual property without prior permission and without a full and diligent search for the copyright holder. In “Digital Opportunity“, a report by Professor Ian Hargreaves, orphan works are defined as ‘works to which access is effectively barred because the copyright holder cannot be traced’.
No problem for our plucky little photographs. They’re armed with their passports and ID cards from the Fortunate Kingdom of Metadataland.
But what if, on their travels around the world, they venture into the Despotic Dictatorship of Facebookistan? Or the Democratic People’s Republic of Twitterbia? Or the Confederated States of Flickrania? Or any of the SocMed Pact empires?
Also no problem — for Facebookistan, Twitterbia and Flickrania, that is. They will automatically strip the photographs of their identity. The Fortunate Kingdom of Metadataland passport will be routinely removed and destroyed. Our photographs’ individuality will be erased. They are then free to carry on their journey without let or hindrance, but now descamisados; rootless, unidentifiable and orphaned.
This is what will happen if you upload a photograph to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr, as well as to Pictify, Photobucket and a host of other websites. Your metadata, your EXIF data and everything else that identifies the image will be discarded. It will become an Orphan Work.
Send a picture to the BBC after a winsome presenter pleads with you to upload your funniest animal photographs and you’ll find that suddenly the world’s cuddliest corporation will own your image outright in perpetuity without recompense.
Why?
Because they can, I guess. If you can steal, and the law permits you to get away with it, then it would be dumb not to steal.
According to a study by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), major social networks like Facebook, Twitter or Flickr remove copyright information and other useful embedded data from pictures posted by their users.
Some sites don’t automatically deprive images of their data. Google+ and Tumblr come away with less blood on their hands. fotoLibra even ADDS to your metadata, to make it safer still.
Remember the fuss in December when Instagram altered its terms & conditions so that on January 16th the one billion images uploaded to their site would become their absolute property, with no recompense to the photographers? The outcry was massive, and grudgingly they had to back down. But no apology was ever forthcoming and their lawyers were still screaming and spitting defiance and denying malfeasance after the deadline had been and gone.
Have a look at IPTC’s photo metadata test results for Social Media sites. I’m afraid they don’t surprise me one bit.
There must be some affordable way of embedding metadata in a digital image which would destroy that image if it were removed or tampered with.
It’ll have to wait for a better coder than me.
fotoLibra in the Telegraph
June 16th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
We’ve always wanted to see fotoLibra featured in the Daily Telegraph, because we know that Telegraph readers would love the fotoLibra site.
But for 3 years it’s proved impossible — they never responded to my imprecations, never answered letters, emails or phone calls. I used to be a good publicist, but it is hard to publicise one’s own baby.
So imagine the hurt and despair I felt when Dan Smith forwarded me a link to a Telegraph story about how anybody could make money from their photographs. Exactly what I’d been banging on about for years. And here was our story — but instead of being about fotoLibra, it was about American giants Flickr and GettyImages. And they were offering a selective deal, nowhere near as good as fotoLibra’s open offer.
But because fotoLibra is British, and small, we’re not sexy copy. Unlike Digital Railroad, we never raised $15 million, and also unlike Digital Railroad we’re still in business, selling our members’ pictures and paying them.
The Telegraph relented, and the übercritical but nonetheless wonderful Bash Khan blogged about fotoLibra today: http://is.gd/13kr7
Bash is in the Top Ten of London Tweeters, a dubious honour but an honour nevertheless. She is far from fawning in her assessment of fotoLibra. I accept it, because I know I’m the major part of the problem. I write too much, and people prefer to read less. And what I see as cutting edge design is suddenly three years old.
Chin up! We can improve. And we will. Let me know of any sites whose design you admire. And we’ll try to copy them slavishly.