Who views my photos, why, how often, what brings them here?
Every day or so I check with Flickr to see what is being viewed the most, and what has been viewed the most overall.
Oddly, my most viewed image has more than ten times the views of the next most viewed, and to me is a fairly boring bland photo. Linking to it here would only drive the view count up higher, so I won’t!
From Bruce Schneir’s Schneier on Security, possibly one of the best articles I’ve ever read on the increasing harassment of anyone who dares to wield a camera in a public place:
… The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid.
Is it my suspicious mind, or does the following Flickr Mail seem a little bit dodgy?
Hello
In a dutch magazine we would like to publish your photo of the ambulance in victoria. You have it verry small online, is it possible to send me a large size of the photo. We would like to publish it on 20cm wide. So we need it verry large. We can offer you a fee of 50,- euro for the photo.
I’ve been importing my photos into Adobe Photoshop Album over the last few years, entering titles and tagging the images. The titles go into the images in the EXIF header, but the tags and other information is held in Adobe’s proprietary database. I can extract the EXIF:ImageDescription with python or perl, and some of the other image viewers will display it … some, but not all. My latest experiments have been with Google’s picasa, or more specifically, the beta version from http://picasaweb.
So far I’ve used the following cameras (reverse chronological order):
Samsung Galaxy S10 The two year replacement stretched out to nearly three… again… but the S8 was replaced by an S10 and as usual we got the S10 just after the next model had been released and made it to all the stores. I suspect the corporate procurement uses up the old models, but at no cost to me it does just fine for what I want!
Okay, I’ve collected the CD of my last two rolls of film, that’s the last of my 21 rolls of APS film completed, and not before time too! QFL have excelled themselves this time. No, not by missing a frame or some other stuff up like that, this time they’ve sent me back the CD, two empty APS cartridges, and the exposed film rolled up, squashed and loose in the envelope!
Another week and another three rolls of film completed. Even more amazingly, after two trips back to QFL, they’ve successfully rescanned all the photos — including the missing two — on the 379-986 roll from a fortnight ago. More date stamps, more titles, resizing and uploading and then #711-119, #855-129 and #902-122 will be here. Only two rolls left!
The end is in sight! Three rolls back on one CD, and the CD that I returned last week to be rescanned — I’ll get to that one in a minute. The 2000 Bike NSW Big Ride, a few weeks in Johannesburg, and the miscellaneous cruft that fills in the spaces in between. Once again, there’s date stamps and titles to be manually appended, then they’ll be available for perusal — #647-551, #374-343 and #700-204 — and then there’ll only be five rolls to go.
Over half-way complete in the APS-digitising project. Three more rolls completed, that’s thirteen rolls scanned and eight remaining. Annoying though, QFL ignored the request to scan the three films onto one CD, according to the chemist it is completely arbitrary whether they read any instructions at all! The hair on the scanner that I saw a week ago is still there, now that is bugging me. Captions and dates now needed for 201-383, 379-986 and 647-548.
More progress on digitising the APS films. Three more rolls of film done, ten done, eleven to go. Now for the laborious task of re-dating them, since the scanning process puts the scan date into the EXIF header, not the photo date that is present in the APS magnetic strip. Once I’ve added captions and the location information for the ones I’m fairly sure about, they’ll appear in my albums: [500-484], [931-348] and [931-369].
I was so pleased to have finally labelled and dated the CDs of photos from Portugal and Spain that I posted an assortment from Portugal on Fotothing. Confusion now as a result though, one that I labelled as being of Convento de Cristo, Tomar, one of the Portuguese members believes is of Leiria. I was in Tomar on the 27th, and the date printed on the back of the photo when it was developed says the 27th….
Courtesy of some very helpful ImageMagick hints by Anthony Thyssen, a bit of magic to create a “stack of polaroids” effect. Here it is applied to one of my all-time favourite photos.
Good news or the bad news? Good news is that I’ve got my photos back from Kodak, although the prints don’t seem to be the same quality as I’d expect, and the CD seems to come from a third party… Are they subcontracting out their work? Is digital photography biting them that hard? Bad news seems to be that all the time and date information that the APS camera records on each frame has been omitted from the prints and the scans.
Finally; the last frame has been shot on my last roll of APS film, roll #866-142. I’m still not sure whether it was a good purchase or not, the camera was pricey, the APS film and developing doubly so! Fast talking by the salesmen in the shop convinced me to go with the APS rather than an only marginaly larger 35mm camera…. Twenty-one rolls of film in seven years, and I only worked out late in the process to pay extra and get the photos on CD at development time — I still haven’t got around to getting the rest of the rolls scanned from the negatives, mañana mañana….
I blame my uncle! Last weekend when we visited and got to see Graeme on his flying visit to Australia he had a shiny new camera. Not just any shiny new camera either — the same model IXUS 700 I’ve been debating with myself…. The last fortnight has been extra difficult too, with the old camera in for repair at Canon, and me with no camera. Prices seem to range from a RRP of $885 down to $660, with half a dozen businesses selling them for around $570 via eBay in Australia as “Pay in Australia, shipped from Hong Kong to you and identified as ‘gift’ for customs to avoid GST.
OK, I’m guilty. I took a camera into the local shopping centre! A bizarre rule I know, but nearly every single shopping mall in the country seems to have sprouted signs in the last few years banning cameras. (I’m not sure what you are meant to do if you buy one inside).
Additionally, in some fit of wisdom, the management of the Oakleigh Centro have decided that keeping the doors open at night is a security hazard, and since everyone knows that the entire population of Australia drives everywhere in their cars, they lock all the doors except the one into the car-park and the one that is diametrically opposite the train and bus station on the far side of the building.
Poking around on Flickr, there seems to be some consensus on tagging images with the Australian postcode in the form pcNNNNN, I guess it’ll have to do until there are tools around that can put the location information into the EXIF headers in a defined way, read it back out, and pass the results around. Plain tags just don’t have enough context — is Victoria a girl’s name, a state in Australia, or a city in British Columbia in Canada?
Hardly a finish! More like a bit of a start. Some jiggery-pokery and I’ve got an XSL style sheet that generates passable pages for my most recent photos. The business of having them all in folders that represented individual films worked OK for the scanned APS films, but got a bit cumbersome with the digital images. It was also getting to be ridiculous maintaining parallel folder structures for photos and for everything else.
Daylight saving started yesterday, another round of clock changes. Although after April’s decision the camera is one less that needs to be touched. Just what is the preferred way of timestamping images though? The EXIF data doesn’t seem to have any provision for timezone information. 2004-10-29T22:50:42 or 2004-10-30T08:50:42+1000? I think I’ll stick with UTC inside all my photos, and fiddle it to and from local timezones in the RDF… Surely I’m not the only person who’s thought of this?
I added a few photos to Fotothing, then had a look around. Two things struck me; firstly, how beautiful a lot of peoples’ photos are, secondly, how much fun I could have with a digital SLR and a macro lens! Additionally, limecat is a magnificent character.
Collected the photos from Kodak today, 40 images, $29 for processing and CD — no wonder I don’t use the APS film camera much anymore! A fascinating collection of pictures; though, spanning November 2001 to December 2003. It’ll definitely stretch the memory having to go through them all and annotate each one.
Inspired by the CD of wedding photos that we recieved from Gabby, I’ve started working my way through Ritchie’s rolls of film… Time consuming… and disk consuming! Eventually I guess I’ll finish…
Ouch! Canon’s ZoomBrowser program crashed while starting this morning and deleted the entire database of photos on the laptop. Luckily it didn’t touch the photos themselves, just the database of details. Thanks Mr Canon — good thing I don’t use it to record titles, dates, etc…
Up the road to the markets this morning — and first steps in taking the photos of all the pubs. Unfortunately, the best place to photograph most of them is half-way across the nearest main road, or risk having passing traffic blocking the view. Royal Oak, DHR, the Spready, three down, twenty four to go… Down to the Burnley post office to pick up a parcel, oh no! What has happened to the Grand?
Decided today to take a photo of each of Richmond’s pubs. Earlier in the week I’d seen a collection of photographs of English pub signs somewhere on the web, and I remembered how Jo and I had challenged each other to name all the current Richmond pubs — 17 I think — or was it 27… Vaguely starting from nearest home and spiralling outwards:
A little update to my photos URL rewriting and I should finally have the PHP index displaying working correctly. At least it seems to be for the folders of pictures from the digital camera. More work seems to be needed for the APS folders.
I checked out the photos that I picked up yesterday with a view to putting them here on the site. Well, there’s some good news and some bad news…. Good news is that most of them scanned OK; bad news is that instead of one roll of 25 and three rolls of 40 prints I’ve got one roll of 25, two copies of 39 of one roll, all 40 of the next, and only 36 of the last roll.
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.
