6 Months With Ipernity

So, it has been about six months since Flickr loved me so much that I had to leave for Ipernity. For the most part, it is a good alternative. It has many of the same features as Flickr, and one can post documents other than photos (though I primarily use it for photos, and will comment based on that), but there are some long-standing issues that I have that would make it so much better. I have brought most of these to the attention of Ipernity or the appropriate 3rd party developer, and hopefully someday they'll get fixed.

First, the good stuff:

* Works quite well as a photo sharing site. Great metadata support, commenting (and nested comments), search-ability, licensing options,
* No annoying animated gifs to invite your photos to groups.
* Well tuned in to the world outside the USA from the start.

The bad:
* No automatic geotagging on upload. If I have GPS EXIF metadata in my photos, they are not automatically placed on the map. I have asked about this, and was told it doesn't make sense to have automatic geotagging because it just adds too many points. Uh, why support it at all if you don't want us to have multiple points on the map??? This is my #1 gripe. Either support it or don't, don't wrap a lame excuse around a half-baked implementation!
* Ipernity supports additional metadata about your geo points. Click the little dot on the map, and you get more info in addition to the photo. It is cool, except that for some reason whenever I upload an image, and geotag it by hand, for some reason the location name and country are automatically filled in as France (yes, both of them) no matter where the photo was taken (or where it was slapped down on the map). This is such a simple thing! Use the IPTC location information already provided in the photo for this stuff. If it isn't there, just leave it blank! Or, if they want to get fancy, they could grab the location from the map and query the GeoNames database. It's free and creative commons licensed.

Update 21.12.2007: I uploaded some pictures with GPS metadata this morning, and after manually geotagging them, the location metadata showed up correctly - no longer is everything located in France! However, I have noticed that on the few older pictures I checked, which were right in the middle of Stuttgart, the location metadata says they are in Ghana, not Germany. Hmm...

* There is no batch editor for the location information I mention above. And one must be zoomed in quite close, and only in the geotagging part of the doc manager, before the option to edit it becomes available. Makes editing a lot of information a chore, so a lot of the time I don't even bother. Why not let me change it from the doc's "home" page"?

Update 21.12.2007:One can now edit location properties while zoomed out all the way (assuming the selected dot has only one location in it). A good start. Hopefully they'll address the other issues as well.

* Stop nagging me about not using Firefox in the DocManager. I know Firefox is great, but I chose to use OmniWeb instead. Along the same lines, when I am looking at geotagged photos, why do you insist on saying "the mini-map cannot be displayed in this browser", which is 100% false. When I change my browser identification to Firefox, it displays just fine. I know you are a small team and can't try it on everything out there, but why not give it a try? Most browsers out there are not that broken.

* This isn't Ipernity's fault, but there are no (that I know of) fun sites like Big Huge Labs' "Fd's Flickr Toys" for Ipernity.
* Again, not a fault of Ipernity, but the variety of upload tools is lacking. I really, really, like Connected Flow's "Flickr Export for Aperture" a plugin for Aperture that really makes it easy to upload photos from within my preferred photo management and editing software. Picturesync from uVerse is a decent stopgap measure, but it is an extra, clunky step along the way. And the interface, IMHO, is quite horrible. Maybe I just need to write the Aperture to Ipernity export plugin myself...

If It Seems Dreary Around Here...

...My Flickr account expires soon, and I decided not to renew it.
Too many of my friends have left due to recent troubles(see my last post), and it just isn't fun for me anymore.
I am looking for an alternative. So far,ipernity is winning. But it's hard, because the workflow tools for uploading are not there, there are no groups yet, etc.

Anyway, because of that, I decided to delete most of the photos on Flickr that aren't interesting, so that the 200 that Flickr allows in a non-paying account will at least be somewhat interesting. So far I have whittled the over 2000 photos down to 399, so about 50% more have to go. I'll wait a few days for that...

Anyway, many of the photos on my blog have been deleted since they were hosted at Flickr. I'm sorry. But it had to be done. Maybe some day I will replace the photos somewhere else. And some day, maybe, I will feel like sharing new photos again.

Flickr Going Downhill Fast

There have been numerous incidents at Flickr lately that indicates that the cool little photo sharing site it used to be is no more, probably due to the Yahoo! acquisition or else a victim of its immense popularity.

• One of Thomas Hawk's photos was deleted after Flickr recieved a bogus DMCA takedown notice.
  
• Flickr censors photographer Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir (by deleting a photo with all of its helpful comments from Flickr members) who had complained about a company that stole one of her photos from Flickr and had made thousands of pounds selling the prints on E-bay.


• Flickr member Violet Blue had most of her photostream censored by Flickr. Read her side of the story here.
  

All of these incidents annoyed me, and every time, Flickr staff had explanations and apologies and assured people that it would be addressed so that it can't happen again. Of course, all of these people are pretty vocal and high-profile. I am sure this crap is happening every day with the nobodies of Flickr, like me. I fully expect my one picture which has been #1 in explore for more than a year to take a sudden nosedive in popularity after this post.

But I didn't get too worked up over these incidents. I have invested so much time in Flickr, and even money to upgrade to a "Pro" account, and I'm basically lazy. So there was nothing really getting me too worked up. But I can't help but thinking of Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous (but often misquoted) poem (translated from German):

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

Well, yesterday this did come for me, so to speak. Flickr did something that seemed popular (and extremely long overdue) - they added the ability to view the interface in a few languages other than English, namely French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Traditional Chinese.

But at the same time, something else happened. From the Flickr Help page:

What is SafeSearch?
SafeSearch is a feature that allows you to control what turns up in your searches on Flickr, and it's on for everyone by default.

Note: If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe
content based on your local Terms of Service so won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off.

Huh? What? So now I am forced to look at only what is deemed "Safe". Thanks. I thought I was an adult in a free country and could choose my own path in life. But Flickr doesn't see it that way, and has decided that everyone in Germany, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore have no freedom of choice. That's censorship. And, unlike the other examples above - it affects huge swaths of the world population.

The matter is made worse by the not one but two complete crap responses from Flickr founder Steward Butterfield. There is absolutely no explanation or reason for this. We'll see how this plays out, but I can see that my days on Flickr are probably numbered.

Update: Someone from the Flickr Staff finally told us why (which was the biggest problem). Only two days late. And still completely bogus, as anyone can sign up for a US. Yahoo account and get around it. And anyone in Austria or Switzerland is restricted in the same way as Germany. Or that moderation in Flickr is self-moderation. Or... I could go on for a while. It wasn't well thought out, and it isn't well implemented for the stated goals.