Video on Flickr

PixelTrawler

I was disappointed this morning to see video on Flickr .

I really hope it doesnt turn into another youtube. I really liked the fact there was no videos and it was all about the photography.

Depending on how strictly they control the video, video draws a different crowd and going by youtube, different comments.

I'd hate to see Flickr degenerate into another clone...

Merrion

90 seconds only, and only uploadable by pro accounts - should just be enough to keep the numpties from posting their favourite Simpsons clips...

Cabaal

Merrion wrote: »

90 seconds only, and only uploadable by pro accounts - should just be enough to keep the numpties from posting their favourite Simpsons clips...

that may help but I'd still like it to just stay images myself, no need for it to have videos imho

this is good news for us people just posting photos

We’re doubling the size of photos that can be uploaded — 20MB per photo for pro members and 10MB per photo for members with free accounts.

Noopti

I agree, why the video?
I know they need to make money, and maybe adding a video feature will enhance their revenue, but Flickr is a photography website and by diluting it's primary function they could end up devaluing it.

20mb photos?
That is some size limit! But is there a reason why someone would want to upload such high res photos, I would be afraid of having such high res photos available to the public, which could easily be used in large print.
I could be good for storage I suppose, if you restrict access.

Cabaal

Noopti wrote: »

20mb photos?
That is some size limit! But is there a reason why someone would want to upload such high res photos, I would be afraid of having such high res photos available to the public, which could easily be used in large print.
I could be good for storage I suppose, if you restrict access.

I tend to upload higher res images as its handy to have them, but then I restrict access to them so its not an issue

pete4130

I noticed the video aspect this morning too. Was a bit disappointed by it. It's Yahoo, not like they are short of money. I don't see the point in having a site for photography with alot of quality images (content and IQ) by diluting it with low quality, low res videos.

PixelTrawler

This could be the start of a rocky road for Flickr
If microsoft do a hostile takeover of yahoo, who knows where the future lies.

Placebo

just heard about this today. I'm afraid it would be yahoo, trying to compete with youtube

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alfiegoodrich/2400234716/

Paulw

New Flickr group if anyone is interested.

shepthedog

Cant say I am too impressed with this. The beauty of flickr was/is that is was just for photos and nothing else.. No crap, advertising etc.. It leaves it open for junk videos/spam vids..

Beef

Yeah - crazy decision. I know I said this before but if I wasn't so lazy in terms of relocating all my photos I'd be gone from flickr before now... Where's the need for videos!?

Fenster

As a dad with lots of short videos of my daughter, I'm very happy with this, indeed. Saves me hosting my own flash videos!

m_stan

I agree. Its a good thing. So people, please stop inviting me to the anti-video groups!

Valentia

AS if Flickr wasn't slow enough. Isn't there enough shaggin' places for those inane video clips. Anyway, what do you expect from philistines like Yahoo.

Placebo

Fenster wrote: »

As a dad with lots of short videos of my daughter, I'm very happy with this, indeed. Saves me hosting my own flash videos!

flickr has turned into a resource for sharing multimedia [pictures] publicly.
It was never intended for personal storage use. I understand you may want to share these videos with your friends and family but email services such as hotmail allow for loads of space these days and you could easily save the video for email use when uploading from camera to pc.

Fenster

I both have a web hosting service for my files and the tools to convert videos to flash formats. I'm just incredibly lazy about going about it.

More importantly, I've paid for a pro account and I use my Flickr content fully within their terms of service. It's not anyone's business what I do with it beyond that!

Placebo

When you save the video on to your pc, you're given the option of saving it as a compressed format. Its more work having to wait while it converts on-line.
I dont want to stumble upon random videos just because some one is lazy. No ones stopping you from using the sites full functionality, this is a debate about this new extra functionality. Frankly no one wants to see videos of your daughter, no offence intended.

Personally I think this is an utter disgrace.I can't believe Yahoo actually went ahead with this.As said before Flickr is the premier photography site on the net and Yahoo should realise this,instead they're trying to change it into something it's not.

There's a petition against it on one of the groups http://www.flickr.com/groups/no_video_on_flickr/discuss/72157604451870444/
It already has over a thousand signatures but I don't think a faceless corporation like yahoo will change their stance no matter how strongly it's opposed

m_stan

Placebo wrote: »

Frankly no one wants to see videos of your daughter, no offence intended.

That's one hell of a stupid comment. Do you know the posters relatives and friends ? Have you conducted a survey of the entire human race ? What leads you to make such a widespread generalisation ?

Ruu_Old

Don't really like this or the direction it could take. /me closes flickr account.

Placebo

m_stan wrote: »

That's one hell of a stupid comment. Do you know the posters relatives and friends ? Have you conducted a survey of the entire human race ? What leads you to make such a widespread generalisation ?

So you go on to youtube to watch videos of random children? Thats stupid to me. I already mentioned an alternative of sharing to a small group of people such as family and friends. Flickr has always been a platform for young and professional enthusiast to showcase their work.

m_stan

yes, and the same applies to video. each to their own, but some people clearly welcome the addition of another medium to a service they pay for. you dont have to look at anything you dont want to.

youtubes sharing capabilites suffer from woefully bad user experience - the sharing process is long and cumbersome. if flickr make this easier, then I'm all for it and it's another site my friends and family dont have to subscribe to.

there are plenty of people in my contact network that want to see videos of my kids on flickr and not have to sign up for youtube so I dont see why that wont be true for other users.

Placebo

Videos and photo enthusiast reach to complete different audiences. If you think that one common platform will suffice for all your online multimedia needs than you're wrong.Youtube appeals to young teenagers that upload music mixes and videos from their phone. While the minority use it for uploading home made tutorials, alot of it is junk. Flickr allowing this service will welcome a new breed of audience which in turn will mean junk photos, i can see photoshopped, mashedup junk on deviant art, i would hate to filter through all of this to look for decent photos.

You dont use flickr mail to send e-mails, why use it to share videos ?

Ricky91t

I dunno what all the fuss is about people are very limited to size and lenght and they have to be pro's..It might lead to people giving short photography tutorials on there...

311

Will they be on a separate sister site like Vflickr or something that has to be subscribed to ?

Edit : I just found video ,it's sitting along side photos. Thats ridiculous.

el_loco_blanco

I hope it doesn't result in a pile of short ads flashing up at us every now and again! Personally I would prefer just photos but I can see the other points of view too.

Fenster

[Side and insinuating comments directed at Placebo]

Name-calling aside, I'm going to take your question at face value. There's three reasons:

She's my daughter. As a proud father, I'm obliged to show her off. Have a child and you will understand perfectly.

I have family, friends and co-workers throughout the world who follows my doings, as I do theirs. Most of them are barely web-literate and telling them to type three words (flickr bhalash caira) into a search engine is by far the easiest way to make sure they can find my content.

The sheer rib-tickling pleasure of putting my works on the internet for people to complement and comment on. If you don't think this is a reason, then quit this gods-damned forum right now.

elven

Placebo wrote: »

Flickr has always been a platform for young and professional enthusiast to showcase their work.

Maybe in your mind, but that's by no means a global truth.

While I'm not the biggest fan of the idea, I'm not sure how it's going to change anything about how I use flickr. I think a lot of people on here forget that even though they use it as a photography portfolio type thing, for a lot of people it is just an online repository for their snaps from holidays and birthday parties. We manage to avoid all that stuff just now, so I don't see it being too difficult to avoid trashy videos too - i would expect that they would come from the same sources.

Join photography based groups, connect with photographer type contacts, and I don't think the video is going to be singing and dancing in front of you as you try to browse through images - it shows up as a still thumbnail with an icon, so if you don't click on it, how is it any different?

As for the overall slowness of the site, well, I would hope that such a huge enterprise has the technology to handle such a service - otherwise, they'd be putting themselves in a very dodgy position, commercially.

Valentia

elven wrote: »

As for the overall slowness of the site, well, I would hope that such a huge enterprise has the technology to handle such a service - otherwise, they'd be putting themselves in a very dodgy position, commercially.

Alas, going on recent performance, I fear that that is precisely what will happen. That said, Boards has been like watching the disc revolve today

311

Is it possible to design a site like flickr ,with the need for a plugin to show video from a seperate network to the photo side of flickr ?

I'm a mere gas fitter ,so I don't much about these things.:(

Merrion

[OT] If Microsoft do take over Yahoo they could do worse than integrate their SeaDragon software in to it (see photosynth for what I mean)

Placebo

elven wrote: »

Maybe in your mind, but that's by no means a global truth.

No, FYI its not in my mind at all. Only reason flickr even took off is due to its Web 2.0 tactics such as tagging, it does not offer any out of the ordinary features besides tagging. So keeping that in mind almost no one views/favourites/tags photos from people who solely use flickr as an online repository. Therefore apart from having somewhere to link their photos from theres nothing that involves these users, no ones interacting with them. Photobucket, bebo, facebook and myspace offer the exact same services EVEN more for these types of users. SO yes flickr is designed for people to collaborate and interact with each other, not just store there images.
Draw an analogy of flickr search with google, with the heaps of websites google crawlers pick up each day it make its harder and harder to find the simplest things, same will happen with flickr, its not that the video will pop up in your face, its that it may attract deviantart type users, which means your search results will be less and less accurate.

Fenster, there were no insults intended, it was plain english, if you choose to take it in an insinuating way/manner then by all means, go crazy.
Saying that i never questioned your motives for sharing pictures of your daughter, i completely understand why one would do so, however i stated that there are other means of doing so and such personal multimedia would be best shared direct. Im sure only your close friends and family would be interested in viewing your daughters video and not all your acquaintances.

Calina

Placebo wrote: »

No, FYI its not in my mind at all. Only reason flickr even took off is due to its Web 2.0 tactics such as tagging, it does not offer any out of the ordinary features besides tagging. So keeping that in mind almost no one views/favourites/tags photos from people who solely use flickr as an online repository. Therefore apart from having somewhere to link there photos from theres nothing that involves these users, no ones interacting with them. Photobucket, bebo, facebook and myspace offer the exact same services EVEN more for these types of users. SO yes flickr is designed for people to collaborate and interact with each other, not just store there images.
Draw an apology of flickr search with google, with the heaps of websites google crawlers pick up each day it make its harder and harder to find the simplest things, same will happen with flickr, its not that the video will pop up in your face, its that it may attract deviantart type users, which means your search results will be less and less accurate.

Fenster, there were no insults intended, it was plain english, if you choose to take it in an insinuating way/manner than by all means, go crazy.
Saying that i never questioned your motives for sharing pictures of your daughter, i completely understand why one would do so, however i stated that there are other means of doing so and such personal multimedia would be best shared direct. Im sure only your close friends and family would be interested in viewing your daughters video and not all your acquaintances.

Placebo, I must confess you are making zero sense. Either flickr was designed a showcase gallery site or it is a bog standard image sharing site. Given much of the content, I would say that actually it was neither - it allowed you to work it as you want. Some people use it as a gallery site. Some people use it as a network back up site. There are no issues either which way - people use it the way they want. I have other gallery sites and I tend to use flickr as a) a source for my blogs and b) a dumping site for event photographs where the event is key and not the photograph and c) as data back up. It's not up to you or anyone to tell me what the right or wrong way to use flickr is.

It's a tool and I use it as best I want. If you really want an art sharing site then deviant is probably a better way to go. Flickr caters to all tastes on the photo front from the serious pro to the someone who just wants somewhere to store pictures of their cat.

It is not Flickr who dictate what you do with your space, it is you and people use it differently for various reasons. I think it's a little arrogant of you to tell Fenster how he should and should not be sharing pictures of his daughter - it is not up to you and he has paid a flickr pro sub just like me to have the bandwidth and space. Not only that, it is not for you to judge how he might best interact with those who are interested in his family snapshots. Flickr is not so snobby in that respect; they are open to all photographs and photographers with a few notable conditions none of which are broken by Fenster.

With respect to the addition of video, the question I am asking is this: "how does it affect how I use flickr?" and the answer to that question is "not at all". I don't shoot video at all and I couldn't care less about it. I'm not looking for somewhere to host it and I am reasonably sure I can avoid it if I really want to. My key concern would be how it might slow down the site for me, after that I am not so interested; in any case there are alternatives.

Placebo

You caught me before the edit, boards has gone slow, analogy*
I just wrote a thesis on this, il explain it in simpler terms. The site is designed for people to collaborate and communicate with each other. The people who use it as an online storage space are in the minority. They dont make use of the full functionality flickr has to offer. Its transformed into a platform for photographers which is why flickr has a camera search. Getting to my point, if flickr is to offer more services such as video and perhaps social networking, then it will attract users that just use it as an online storage platform. Which will reduce the quality of images available. I come to view photography on flickr, its the only place thats set a standard for just that. I hope this makes sense.

I think your response is affected by my remark at Fenster, fair enough, although i said no one wants to see VIDEOS of his daughter, i never mentioned photographs !

311

I often use flickr with the tagging as placebo is talking about ,it's interesting part of flickr.

Personally if there was a load of video to go through ,I just wouldn't bother.

Placebo

Before i jump out of this argument for good heres a screen shot for the people who felt the need to jump on the bandwagon without actually experiencing the changes.

Attached is how it will effect users, spelling it out further: I sometimes browse through all the images of an interesting photographer[without sets], this will make it longer and more tedious. However, I'm sure flickr will implement a feature where videos might appear on a different page or toggle on/off option. Saying that they will leave it integrated for now to kick off the feature.

Enjoy

Hugh_C

I like it, it allows me display some (of the more pretentious) moving visual art I've made.



You have the choice to view it or not.

[edit] maybe it deserves a poll?

peeps78

im undecided wether this is a good or bad thing for flickr,
i doubt it will go the youtube way, i think the idea is more mini moving pictures than, like mentioned by someone else, episodes of the simpsons.
here is part of Heather Champ's (she is a core employee for flickr, and a great photographer) blog where she puts up 10 second videos.
http://hchamp.com/10seconds/
it can give you more of the atmosphere than a photo alone.

Masada

jeez im not reading this whole essay, but NO TO VIDEO on flickr!
is it really that difficult to just go to youtube and use that for videos?

Valentia

Ah damn it to hell and back!!!!! It has started. Some of my contacts, even friends on Flickr's recent uploads are videos........... FOOK that. It means I'll have to start deleting people from my list which I really would rather not have to do. What is it about video as a medium that leads itself to pretentiousness more that still photography normally does?

Why does life have to be so complicated ?

Kintarō Hattori

I've just signed the petition. I was really disappointed to see that they've added video's to flickr. As has already been said 'why dilute it?'. It made it's name as a photo website. I can't understand why they didn't open a sister site.
Youtube is an atrocious site in regards to it's user interaction so we can only hope that flickr doesn't head in the same direction.

run_Forrest_run

Valentia wrote: »

Why does life have to be so complicated ?

Because it's the only way geeks can communicate with the rest of us :rolleyes:

bigeoino

Calina wrote: »

With respect to the addition of video, the question I am asking is this: "how does it affect how I use flickr?" and the answer to that question is "not at all". I don't shoot video at all and I couldn't care less about it. I'm not looking for somewhere to host it and I am reasonably sure I can avoid it if I really want to. My key concern would be how it might slow down the site for me, after that I am not so interested; in any case there are alternatives.

Completely agree. As long as the video element doesn't impact the photography side of Flickr - either in terms of site performance or adjusting the developmental focus of the site - I have no problems.
[I haven't looked into it yet but I really hope you can't embed video in comments.... the animated gigs people seem to love are bad enough!]

Valentia wrote: »

What is it about video as a medium that leads itself to pretentiousness more that still photography normally does?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/emiliovaldes/2402765970/

Cabaal

bigeoino wrote: »

http://www.flickr.com/photos/emiliovaldes/2402765970/

Its easy for me to tell if its a photo or video I get

In order to view this Flickr video, you'll need to
install the latest version of the Adobe Flash Player.

Cabaal

Anyone who's not a fan of the videos and doesn't want them to autoplay should turn this off, http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/autoplay/?from=privacy

BanzaiBk

No Photos on Flickr Petition

Hasn't really put me up or down, if you don't like the video element don't watch them or move to pix.ie I guess. It's an interesting direction for them to take though, and so far it seems to their detriment.

Fenster

Petition for more new features:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/wedemanddonuts/

In unrelated news, I give it another day before people on Flickr start getting rickrolled.

Hugh_C

bigeoino wrote: »

http://www.flickr.com/photos/emiliovaldes/2402765970/

that rocks! A load of balls demonstrating Brownian motion - one man's pretension is another man's science

gandalf

Dammit only renewed my pro account in Feb, I do not want videos on flickr. I loved the fact it was photo only. I guess I will be moving lock stock and barrel to pix.ie so.

Signed the petition but tbh I don't see them changing their minds.

Fajitas!

Is it really that big a deal?

I mean, 90 second long videos are nothing really, it dosn't directly affect anyone, does it? Other than the fact that some of their contacts will put up some videos?

At the end of the day, it's Yahoo's site, market research probably told them this is a good thing. Chances are they've predicted this 'uproar'. The solution is, don't watch the videos. I don't think it's reason to delete contacts, or move website, is it?

As for my own personal disclaimer, I do and have done some work with moving images, mainly based through photography, stop motion, time lapse etc. There is a chance I will upload a moving image to flickr, at some point in the future.

deRanged

Fajitas! wrote: »

Is it really that big a deal?

I don't think so. I'm not seeing what the fuss is. You don't have to look at anything, just move on.