Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"For over six years, you’ve made Flickr the place to be for photos. Billions of photos of the places you’ve been, the things you’ve seen, and the people in your lives. It’s an amazing photographic record that continues to amaze us. So as part of our Ongoing Quest to Make Flickr More WonderfulTM, we’d like to introduce… a new photo page!"

I'm not sure how many of our readers use Flickr, but I do, despite the ironical fact that it's not such a great platform for ACTUALLY viewing photos. The default click to enlarge a photo from a thumbnail brings you to a photo that's... 500 pixels wide. In a time when 1680x1050 screens are cheap and common, and most last generation panels being 1280 pixels wide, 500 pixels is not very big. Flickr doesn't help by having a fairly cluttered layout (not customisable as far as I know) that jams info alongside the photo instead of below it.

So Flickr's big announcement is now, they will be moving forward to a new larger default size for photos! It will be in glorious...

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"There are several great options that cost money—like SmugMug, for instance—but unless you're a major shutterbug, a free service might fit your modest needs and usage pattern better. Here we round up three of the top options for free image hosting around the Web—Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket."

There are a lot of services that can be had online for free. From email to webhosting to videos, the quality of free hosting services can vary greatly from one to another. And while a lot of us are on a budget, we want to make sure we get the most out of our dollar freebies. Image hosting is no stranger to free services and the industry has had quite a while to mature. Each of the three featured by Ars Technica have their strengths and weakness, but if you find yourself becoming a serious photog, consider a paid service but whatever you do, do NOT rely on any image hosting service as an archive for your photos. As numerous people have learned, even large companies can change their mind and start charging for hosting images, or shut down their service altogether.

"What is this? A new feature of Windows 7 is "Search Federation" - the ability to search remote document repositories such as Flickr through the native Windows search interface. This is a custom Windows 7 "Search Connector" which can be installed to communicate to the Flickr OpenSearch translator implemented on this site."

I was reading the one and only computer magazine that I subscribe to this morning - Maximum PC - and they mentioned this tip for Windows 7 that would allow you to directly search Flickr for images from within Windows Explorer. It seemed like a neat idea, and a quick Google search brought me to the site that has created the tool for making this possible. I installed the tool, and typed in my first query - dogs - and waited. The result? An error message stating "The location cannot be searched because it no longer exists or is temporarily unavailable." Well that's no fun! I cracked open the connector bits in notepad, found the search URL that was being used, and tested it with a hard-cored search string. It worked. So I'm a bit baffled as to why this won't work for me. Anyone else have better luck with this than me?

"Today we’re pleased to announce a redesign of our search results page. The changes we’ve introduced make it easier to browse through the billions of photos and videos on Flickr, and to connect to the communities that help make sense of all those photos."

Flicker has updated their search tool, hopefully making it easier to find just the image you are looking for. I especially like the fact that they've made it easier to search for and get data regarding Creative Commons licensed images.

"Video for all? Previously limited to our Pro members, video on Flickr is now available for all. Our free account members can now share 2 videos a month (you’ll need to install Uploadr version 3.1.4 — now available from the Flickr Tools page). So, this is a perfect time for you to check out video mode on your camera."

flickr has now updated their services so that free and Pro members alike can upload and share videos. HD Video viewing has been expanded to everyone, though flickr is apparently re-processing all HD video to make it look "more beauteous." I like flickr. It's simple, easy and great for sharing and seeing everyone else's photos. Having all your image and video content in one place has to be a big plus and may help keep people from splitting their content with other sites like YouTube.