FocalPower…the blog

There has been quite a bit of buzz in the past day around Flickr, their API, and your privacy settings on your Flickr account thanks to a wonderful article by Jim Goldstein about How Every Flickr Photo Ended Up on Sale this Weekend.  Jim goes into great detail on his post, that is worth the read, to discuss how the privacy settings on your Flickr account are not being enforced by Flickr with regards to their API.  (the 120 comments on his posting, as of this posting, are also interesting to peruse).  Jim’s post also created a parallel discussion on Thomas Hawk’s blog posting.

What I find most surprising is how everyone seemed to loose site of the real issue here.  It’s not about a technical discussion on how Flickr should implement their API or each photographer’s opinion on how they license their work.  It’s about a large name in the photography (Flickr/Yahoo) and the fact that they don’t respect their customers enough to protect their work.  I can only image how this will propogate forward with the new arrangement between Flickr and Getty Images.  Will your “selection” by a Getty Editor to have your Flickr photos be licensed through Getty automatically change your Creative Commons licensed work to All Rights Reserved so Getty can make money off your work

If I’m using a service that claims to protect my work by allowing me to not let anyone but myself to download the images, then the service should do that.  In all access methods to the images.  When Flickr found out that this protection was not being extended to the API, they should have fixed it for the sake of their customers rather than ignore it for the sake of their API development community.  SmugMug had a similar security issue be raised in the recent past which they quickly fixed…this is how a responsible company should act toward their customers, maybe this is why SmugMug is actually turning a profit while Flickr never could?

(Note: I’m stopping short of talking about how I think Yahoo’s ownership and corporate problems might be related to the current state of Flickr and their customer focus.)

One of the frustrating points that the FocalPower team had with photo sharing/hosting was the the lack of focus on the photographer for the sake of the photo sharing/hosting provider. This has been one of the facets behind the FocalPower solution since the day we started building it.  We feel that control should be given back to the photographers.  If they photographer wants to protect their photo assets and legal rights, then the systems they use should help them in this cause, not hinder them.  Likewise, if the photographer is more concerned with their images being accessible to the larger audience to use under the Creative Common’s licensing, make it easy for the photographer to enable this and track the effect that this has.  Opening up your work to Creative Commons is done for a multiplicity of reasons, one of which is to help spread your brand…hence the with Attribution license.  I always found it shocking that Flickr allowed you to license your work this way but then let anyone take the work without providing you attribution…why couldn’t they provide that attribution for you?  Why make the photographer work harder?

These are some of the issues that we are working to address here at FocalPower.  So keep an eye out as we wrap up our development effort and move toward an open beta of our Photo Asset Management system later this year.

Update: Scott Bourne has a wonderful post on this topic over at the TWIP Blog.  A great view of this topic from a long time professional photographer.

Every year for for Christmas, my siblings and I usually get a family present for my parents. This year my brother headed up the present project and bough my parents a digital picture frame. Next came the scurry to gather together a bunch of photos from all the kid’s families to pre-load on the picture frame.

So this morning he calls me to see what photos he could download from my website for the picture frame. Funny how these things always happen at the last minute…but since I have a large collection of images on my personal photography website, I figured it shouldn’t be a problem to grant him access to download some originals.

Wrong.

Once again, my frustration shot up with the lack of flexibility of current photo hosting services that are available. This frustration started about two years ago and was the driving force behind starting FocalPower. In this particular instance, why was it that all of the photos that I have uploaded to my hosting service are locked into a single organizational system and doesn’t allow me to get them to those who need them?

My photos are organized for public display as my photographic portfolio to showcase my work as well as allow print purchases. However, I couldn’t grant my brother access to download a high resolution version of the images he wanted to for my parent’s Christmas present! If I granted him access, I gave it to the entire world. So I had to spend a couple hours redoing a lot of work that I already did. What a waste of my time!

At FocalPower, we think this is wrong. Once you do the work processing and uploading your photos, your photo hosting system should be flexible enough for you to meet all your sharing needs. Not just the basic needs of most systems today. The needs of the sophisticated photographer, the advanced enthusiast and the professional.

The FocalPower elves (i.e., Dave and I) are working on addressing just this problem…and a few others…professional grade photo hosting.

The FocalPower photo hosting system (being delivered in a closed alpha just after the Holidays) will prevent me from having to redo all my work. Once the photos are uploaded, they can be organized in different ways for different audiences. One organization for public display on my photography website; auto determined high resolution viewing of my images for maximum impact while maintaining my photographic brand. And when I need to grant special access to photos (like for my brother, or say a client), I can create a second organization without having to upload my photos again…a wonderful time saver. Within a couple of minutes, I will be able to create another organization system to meet any need that may arise in the future.

So, while us elves finish the final touches for the closed alpha, the FocalPower team hopes everyone enjoys a relaxing Holidays! After taking a short break for the holiday’s ourselves, we’ll be delivering a shiny new photo hosting system to our Alpha Users!

Happy Holidays from the FocalPower Elves!

Managing photos online has been a challenge since the start. The one thing that the online photo sharing sites did right was to keep the organization of photos simple (the old KISS principal, Keep it Simple Stupid, still rules). When sharing photos online, you need to be able to upload a photo once and then use it where ever you want. This is the beauty of the flat storage structure. Rather than deciding first how you want to organize your photos, just dump them into a big bucket and organize them later. Even better, configure smart tools to auto organize them based upon the meta data contained within the photos.

Being a Professional Photographer today means wearing many hats; many hats in the operation of your business and, even more importantly, in the way you present your business to the world. Unless you are well known for a specific type of photography, you will need to follow the concept of multiple streams of income and offer your services into multiple vertical markets. Thus, a portfolio that showcases your work for each vertical is needed. However, many times a single photo can fall into multiple portfolios. This is where the power of the flat storage structure shines…after you upload the photo once, you can place it into as many portfolios as you want. The organizational structure is virtual and lives side by side with the actual photos (versus the photos physically living inside your organizational structure).

Likewise, just being a photographer—professional, semi-professional, or enthusiast—requires fun and creativity to keep the spark alive. Many times this means creating something new or just capturing a moment as it presents itself. And many times this also means having a photo or two which are worth sharing but don’t fall into your organization structure (or at least not yet). Again, the flat storage structure allows you to just toss it in the bucket and share those photos just by themselves. Damn the organization….full speed ahead!

Ahh, but the pain of manually organizing hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of photos! Technology to the rescue…to the rescue of time wasted doing something manually that computers can do much faster and dynamically. Smart tools that allow you to create portfolios on the fly based upon meta data contained within the photos. This is where the investment in a strong and consistently executed work flow comes in. Always keyword your photos. Always add as much IPTC meta data possible about where the photo was taken, what the photo depicts, etc. Once that data in there, it can be leveraged in the future to save you time and give you dynamic control over your images. A portfolio that dynamically changes as you add new photos to your bucket. The ability to quickly create new portfolios to display your work in new and fresh ways. This is when the fun begins!

Make sure that the photography tools you choose are flexible and utilize technology to save you time and not lock you into something that can’t be changed easily in the future. Your time is the most valuable asset you have…closely followed by your skill and photographs!