Clear Blue Dei

Flickr, the online photo gallery is THE web 2.0 tool for putting your photos online. Many people use it and it seems that most pictures you find online are stored on Flickr. There are a few other online galleries such as Shutterfly and kodakgallery (that I used because I have a digital Kodak camera that interfaces with the Kodak Gallery).

And since I’ve used Kodak Gallery mostly, I have just recently started uploading some pictures to Flickr. And I just ran into a limitation of Flickr. Did you know that after you’ve uploaded more than 200 pictures, only the latest 200 pictures will show unless you upgrade to a paid Flickr account? All the pictures will be available if you upload (they don’t go away if you upload more than 200) but you can’t see them until you upgrade. It is cheap, $25/year, but 200 pictures are not many pictures so if you use Flickr much at all, you’ll need to pay for it. And clearly, most of the accounts I look at on Flickr has upgraded since they have more than 200 pictures.

I’m sure I will upgrade, but I just didn’t know that except for just trying it out, I am going to HAVE to upgrade in order to use it.

I have many, many pictures on Kodak Gallery that I want to transfer over (and that is another problem since they don’t make it easy in Kodak Gallery to bulk transfer pictures). But actually, Kodak Gallery also requires that you “pay” for it. It doesn’t have a set charge, but requires that you purchase something from them once a year. Last year we made calendars for our family for Christmas using our pictures and that took care of that requirement. Kodak Gallery is great for that, you can easily create calendars, photo mugs, note cards and all sorts of items from your pictures.

But Flickr is rapidly becoming the standard in online photo galleries and is the tool that most of the cool mashups use for their picture displays. There are all kinds of mashups that other people have created using Flickr and Sean has been experimenting with Flickr hacks from a cool book he got on how to create them. I highly recommend this book if you are interested in exploring this.

Here is a post about mashups using Flickr by Coverpop. It is one of the most amazing Flickr mashups I’ve seen. You have to check these out!

And while you are at it, check out the nice Flickr plugin for Wordpress.org blogs. You can see it in my right sidebar on this blog.

Well, I guess I got off on a tangent but the bottom line is, be aware that if you are interested in using Flickr, you will want to pay the $25 a year in order to really use it.

~Susan Mellott

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I ran across these and they blew my mind! It is called coverpop and it is a website created by Jim Bumgardner, of KrazyDad.com, to house his experimental coverpop project. Per his FAQ page: ”
A coverpop can be a unique work of art, a software toy, or a fun way to shop for stuff.

Each coverpop is an interactive mosaic, made of tiny images, such as magazine covers. These are called “micro thumbnails”. As you drag the mouse over each micro thumbnail, it pops up to a full-sized thumbnail image, and provides some information about the item. For some coverpops, you can click again to produce either a full-sized image, or to go to another website to learn more information about the item.

Some coverpops arrange the images by time, by price, or color. Other coverpops arrange the images into a photomosaic.”

If you go to main coverpop site , you will see a random choice of oneof his coverpop mosaics. You can choose from the list on the right side to see specific ones. He creates mashups using flickr, youtube, amazon and other web 2.0 apps to create really amazing mosaics that you can spend endless time browsing and playing with.

He has a set of youtube video mosaics too. And just plain mosaics that are really interesting. Here is a description of how it works and here is a brief description from that page:

“Data for each coverpop is prepared using Perl and the ImageMagick library. Space-filling is implemented (with visual feedback) using Processing (p5). The interface itself is presented in Flash/Actionscript within a PHP webpage.

I download information about all the covers using various means. I use Amazon Web Services for the Amazon-powered coverpops, and I screen-scrape websites, such as the Visco archive for the Science Fiction coverpop. This is done using a Perl program. Then I download all the thumbnails (again with Perl), and analyse them for color, using ImageMagick to reduce each image to 1×1 and recording the color of the remaining pixel.”

You can also generate banners to put on your website with various mosaics like Harry Potter on Amazon or Time’s Top 100 Novels. These are linked to amazon and you receive credit when someone buys through your site except he receives the credit every 6 times or so. I created one just to try it out (you can generate the code from his site) and put it on the bottom of my Goggle Blogger blog Along the Path to 2.0. It is at the bottom of the blog. Go take a look at it! Unfortunately I can’t put it on my Wordpress blog yet since it is hosted by Wordpress.com. I hope to correct that soon!

To learn about new coverpop or just to find out more, you can go to his blog. He has a lot more interesting things on there.

He has also co-authored a book called Flickr Hacks - Tips and Tools for Sharing Photos Online that talks about the flickr .APIs and how to do some of these things and sounds VERY interesting.

Check it out! But don’t do it until you have some time to spend because you definitely will.

~Susan Mellott

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