Zmarties

Taken, processed, and uploaded as part of Hack Day London

Labels: flickr

Whilst thinking about Searching Picasa Web Albums I did a bit of investigation into the most popular tags on flickr.

flickr provide a tag cloud, but that is just a visualization of the data, and I couldn't see that they provide the data in a direct form anywhere on the site. However, with the aid of the flickr API I was able to take all the words in the tag cloud, and feed them to the API, to get a count of how many matching tags there were for each word. In addition, I also fed those same words to the "free text" search API call, which looks for the word in more than just the tag field - considereing comments and descriptions for example.

The table below shows 3 columns - the tag I searched for, the number of tags of that word found, and the number of photos found using a free text search. The table is ordered by popularity of tags.

wedding	1697455	2269471
party	1475681	2350563
family	1160057	1557739
travel	1113576	1275557
friends	1093997	1649955
japan	1074281	1167494
vacation	1020423	1162147
london	927172	1100791
beach	864728	1493985
california	837012	960129
birthday	829670	1371859
trip	817324	1786838
nyc	774884	879161
summer	732387	1122946
nature	728059	816467
italy	686976	776812
france	669406	759215
me	664111	2886782
paris	662024	786996
art	643563	1104574
flowers	627830	1439335
sanfrancisco	618604	620523
europe	610237	708284
china	604334	707039
flower	596891	1439327
newyork	572049	575557
water	565749	973599
people	552582	975146
music	551493	740282
cameraphone	544369	634883
australia	543923	611789
christmas	537883	834827
usa	531563	619628
sky	527376	756538
germany	526931	595724
new	526549	2723772
canada	512067	612492
night	510466	1210035
cat	504840	852699
holiday	501819	703551
park	498178	1820673
bw	495568	514618
dog	486692	859611
food	478691	684164
snow	478068	643189
baby	463882	837637
sunset	462862	752411
city	446866	1294211
chicago	445639	529140
spain	441158	491290
taiwan	437633	461265
july	435057	1033708
blue	431367	862404
tokyo	427181	505507
england	425920	510575
mexico	406752	535804
winter	403827	579849
portrait	396759	644632
green	394571	671410
red	393719	848593
fun	392680	688356
india	386409	446473
architecture	383526	423993
garden	382303	981077
macro	380663	428872
spring	373441	759260
thailand	368331	411644
uk	362555	468979
seattle	357614	421000
festival	357137	658357
concert	350224	471579
canon	349327	580369
house	347404	1236984
berlin	343694	403534
hawaii	340744	384573
street	339503	1036943
lake	324783	937873
zoo	324442	460997
florida	322534	387322
june	321243	729667
may	316693	903231
white	313703	867135
vancouver	312657	383569
kids	312551	635702
tree	312542	1019630
clouds	307407	479446
toronto	304648	359194
barcelona	293035	341533
geotagged	292631	294655
home	291227	778635
sea	288469	546365
day	287287	2136618
texas	284851	360478
scotland	284615	309559
car	281730	788266
light	281436	909673
halloween	280515	362042
camping	279238	654077
church	273001	535265
animals	270757	542946
trees	270098	1019628
washington	266921	470046
river	266128	668903
nikon	265291	393117
april	262835	581807
boston	261935	330032
girl	258663	857847
ireland	258647	305876
graffiti	257081	283560
amsterdam	256794	307304
rock	256142	795001
landscape	254799	343825
blackandwhite	252987	253364
cats	252971	852700
newyorkcity	250213	250430
san	247739	1271943
rome	246027	286082
roadtrip	245326	255484
urban	244511	321849
honeymoon	241904	271611
ocean	240941	359337
dc	235053	363788
newzealand	232776	233573
march	231491	532229
black	231180	708269
museum	230643	562979
york	230193	868773
hiking	226067	398781
island	224110	844505
mountains	223030	759360
yellow	221515	347290
sydney	221447	278644
sun	218685	503464
hongkong	216193	222298
show	216155	850535
graduation	214681	306454
color	213967	579521
film	210509	351853
mountain	210046	759360
animal	208416	542946
losangeles	207932	208309
school	205891	550486
moblog	205613	210954
photo	205047	2308835
dogs	203610	859613

Labels: flickr, picasa

The oneletter and onedigit groups at flickr provide the raw data for a rather quirky photo font, where you can put together words formed out of photos of individual characters.

The task is of course made a lot easier by additional software, such as the online spell with flickr which provides an easy interactive way to select the photos to use. (Simply type in the words you want to form, then click on individual letters to change to an alternative image).

Labels: flickr

Flickr has announced that it is reading IPTC information from images - in fact this was announced before the news about Flash, but only on the Flickr news feed, (which rather stupidly requires a login) rather than on the Flickr Blog (which anyone can read).

The discussion page on the feature documents the rules they are using as:

1. IPTC keywords, when available, are added as tags.
2. If there is no title specified (i.e., we were going to fall back on the image filename) and there is a IPTC *headline*, then we use that.
3. If there is no description provided with the upload, then we use the IPTC *caption* when available.
4. If there is no EXIF date, then use the IPTC *created date* when available.
5. Add the contents of *city*, *province state* and *country* as tags when available.

However, the developer then goes on to say

"we are IPTC neophytes and we probably looked at an old spec. We will review the spec you pointed out and review for changes to make. Do you have any partcular recommendations for mappings?"

so things could well change as the feature is worked upon.

Labels: flickr, iptc

Flickr is dropping Flash in favour of Javascript (DHTML, AJAX - call it what you will) for the simple act of displaying annnotated photo.

This is great news, fixing a major usability problem that plagued Flickr - obviously the level of complaints had got so loud they could not be ignored.

Update: Changed to clarify that is just the photo display function that is dropping Flash entirely. Flash will unfortunately continue to be used on other pages. There is detailed coverage of the change at Ajax Summit: Eric Costello of Flickr Presentation which gives the story direct from Eric Costello, a Flickr UI developer.

Labels: flickr

I've been viewing Flickr for a while now, but have always found it hampered by its reliance on Flash for parts of its UI.

My solution up to now has been simple - I don't have Flash installed in my browser, so I get the fallback simple display of a jpg image, with all its advantages of ability to save, set as background image, zoom the image etc. The minor downside has been the loss of annotation functionality.

Now I have a further choice - via Firefox and GreaseMonkey, Lickr is a userscript which disables the Flash image feature, and replaces it with HTML driven code to do the same thing. This is great, and I hope that the Flickr team take the author up on his suggestion of using the code which he has very helpfully provided under a BSD licence.

Labels: flickr

Jim Bumgardner has produced a interesting tool which searches for images via colour. The current implementation is in Flash, and via a colour wheel and intensity slider allows the user to select a colour for which matching images are displayed.

The images used in the demo are all acquired from the Squared Circle group at flickr, which makes the demo all the more impressive. By concentrating on a group of images that are all the same format (square!) and of a diverse but themed subject (a circle that fills the image), this search mechanism can really concentrate on the aspect that does differ widely across the group - their colour.

Labels: flickr