My $10 Photobook arrives

My discount Snapfish photobook arrive in the mail yesterday. I have prepared and ordered photobooks via Snapfish before so I was confident it would be good and in fact it was great. Mainly because it forced me to documented in a physical way something that had up to then only existed in the virtual world.

This little book is mainly based on images that became popular (lots of views and favorites) via flickr’s Explore feature. There are a lot of purist and armchair warrior's that criticise this interestingness based logarithmic selection feature, that‘s ok they are entitled to, providing they explain their reasons (which few do). However I feel a little pride in having photos selected (sometimes I don’t understand the appeal of a specific image) so having them in a physical format is even more satisfying.

The real important observation for me, there is no longer any reason why you can’t take some of your photographs, particular those ones your are proud of and crate a personal photobook. Giving them a more permanent place to exist, because on the glutted stream of social media “photographs” they will soon be forgotten and lost. If your worried about cost. Prepare then now (particularly select the collection of photos to use and the rough layout) and then just wait for a decent discount offer.

Interestingly I’d forgotten about Scout

Last weekend snapfish had a good discount on making photobooks. I’ve been using the small 20 by 20cm size as suitable to pull together small collections that are personally meaningful (eg a series of a previous 365 project). The culling of my flickr photo was still fresh in my mind so I figured it was time to prepare a book about my more popular photos on flickr (not necessarily my favourites) Most of them had been in Explore, flickr’s very useful way to display the top 500 photos on any day using an algorithm they call “Interestingness”. From my perspective the difficulty was know what has or has not been included (other than lots of views and likes). Anyway I went to prepare the booklet and realized I had culled a lot of the photos, probably about 15) that had made it into Explore (oh well such is life) they weren’t so interesting to me. I was able to prepare most of the book in record time directly downloading photos to snapfish from flickr albums with pnly a few uploads from my archive. I called the book “Confessions of a flickr freeloader” (since I have always had a free account and the book is being printed right now.

After all that was finished I realised I should have used Scout from BigHugeLABS, which will pull out your photos that have been included in scout and produce a poster (like the one below) with accompanying links to those images. Its really neat, or might have been.

1. #5/365 The Big Decision looms, 2. More Recycling, 3. INKtober Sulphur Crested Cockatoo, 4. Towards the old Exhibition Building, 5. Before sunset, 6. Inspired by Max Dupain's Iconic Sunbaker photo, 7. Day 1 :: Finishing Up, 8. Photographer crush on Fisherman's Bridge at Canal Rocks, 9. Flinder's Bay rock pool, 10. #338 Last light, 11. #330 Am I Spending Too Much Time On Instagram, 12. Autostitch panorama sunset II, 13. #106_IGP4642-Australia Rock II, 14. _IGP2361_2_3_norfolk_gaol_gate, 15. waiting for the comet, 16. Always look on the bright side..., 17. 27-mar_04, 18. P5233079

Day 1 in a week of daily photos

Along with other listeners to the Family Photographer Podcast I am undertaking to post one photo a day on flickr.

My first photo beat the gun a little and was about my finishing up my current painting project. A semi Abstract Canvas painted in watercolour (That’s not an obvious thing to do by the way) Whereas the theme for the first day was beginning, oh well I got that wrong.

Even before most other folks had has a chance to post something interesting (actually interestingness might be a better term) started to happen. The notification system (which I hate and keep trying to disable) started beeping and  most where from Instagram where I also posted a slightly different phot in three parts. Soon there where ten likes  Then I noticed a different beep and now some of the notification where from flickr people favouriting this image. The next 20 minutes saw them equally adding likes and favourites and even comments. I suspected I was on explorer on flickr and I was soon able to confirm this (see screen capture on the right). It didn’t take long to reach 1000 views and 40 favourites. Instagram activity soon fell away. My conclusion is fame last about half and hour on Instagram if your lucky but scoring interestingness in explorer on flickr with last a day or so.

The only remaining unanswered question is how many likes on Instagram equal a favourite on flikr?

More Patches on my flickr Explore scout badge

1. P5233079, 2. 27-mar_04, 3. Always look on the bright side..., 4. waiting for the comet, 5. _IGP2361_2_3_norfolk_gaol_gate, 6. #106_IGP4642-Australia Rock II, 7. Autostitch panorama sunset II, 8. #167 Autumn Leaves

Flickr actually don’t choose the photos to be included in Flickr Explore manually, they are based on a combination of flickrs interestingness algorthmn,  which does in part quanitify populaity, activity within the flickr community and trending tags. The result is an ever changing collection of very original, interesting and astounding images. Its an honour to be included occasionally.

Scout, by big , huge labs, is a nice little app that keeps track of any of your photos included in the explore stream and makes a small “badge” of those images of yours (or a given username) that have made it into explore.

April Fool's Day bonus (scout poster)

April Fool's Day bonus (scout poster), originally uploaded by imageo.

If you have always wanted one of those really cool scout posters of you flickr photostream. Fd's flickr toys have an april fools day bonus, you can get a set with "all" your photostream organized by interestingness, but I think it is just for one day! So hurry.

Thanks fd.

Normally the scout only shows you photos that habe made it into flickr explore's top 500 photo list

PhotoFriday : Best of 2006

These handheld photos of the moon are really my favourites photos of the year.

For PhotoFriday topic : Best of 2006

Tribute to Steve Irwin (low isles), originally uploaded by imageo.

This was both the most interesting and most viewed in flickr photostream of 2006. Most probably because it was titled a "Tribute to Steve Irwin", luckily Germain Greer drew all the flack and my views slipped through largerly unnoticed