Category Archives: social media

Vimeo relaunches with new features

By Michal | Published 24/01/2012

Vimeo, the video-sharing site that’s not YouTube, revealed a new look today and a whole list of new features and updates.

The first thing you notice is that all videos are now big and looking lovely. It’s like switching from Flickr to 500px, if you know what I mean. I like it.

In a move slightly resembling the recent YouTube relaunch, Vimeo now displays a stream of the latest videos from your contacts and groups on your landing page. It’s called My Feed. Right next to it is a new Activity tab, which will remind you what you’ve done, watched or liked recently – or what your contacts have. But I particularly like the new Discover tab, which I’ll be visiting often to see what others have created. Discovering new – curated or otherwise recommended – videos on the site has always been my favourite activity as as a viewer on Vimeo, so I’m glad this option has been made a bit more prominent.

Prolific uploaders will be pleased to know Vimeo now supports multiple file uploads, which in theory means you should be able to add several files to your upload queue simultaneously. I haven’t tested the feature yet, so the most important question still remains open: has the upload speed improved too? Last time I uploaded something it was painfully slow and I guess my broadband provider was only partly to blame. But the video below seems to suggest the process should be less painful now.

There are also new options for those who prefer to download rather than upload. As you may know, Vimeo creates several versions of the file you upload (including ones optimised for mobile devices), but until today if you wanted to download the video, you could only get the (in many cases gigantic) original file, provided the owner enabled downloads.

Now you can choose from four versions: a mobile file, a SD .MP4 file, an HD .MP4 file or you can download the original file. That should be pretty useful.

Vimeo is still working on the new look, so not all features are perfect, for example, my embed options were not available at the time of writing.

Regardless of all that, it’s still my favourite video sharing site and a brilliant source of inspiration. See here for the full list of new features.

Also posted in video | Tagged video, vimeo, youtube | Leave a comment

My Google+ request

By Michal | Published 20/10/2011

Google+ has become an online Mecca for photographers in a very short time. While many people still don’t ‘get’ Google+ (it’s a topic for a separate post), many photographers have embraced the new network and – in some cases at least – decided to abandon Flickr for good.

Those who abandon or move from Flickr usually claim the service has become stale, doesn’t evolve or innovate and doesn’t listen to its users.

Google, on the other hand, has so far implemented a whole range of improvements to its relatively new service. They seem to listen to – and indeed request – users’ feedback, and I noticed many photographers (and not only) have been more then happy to submit theirs.

So here is my request. I’ve already submitted this directly to Google using their rather brilliant feedback facility on Google+, I also posted this on my Google+ profile. It’s been bugging me for a long time – and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

My photo albums. Why not allow users to decide which albums – and how many – to display in their profiles. By default, if you visit somebody’s Photos on Google+, you’ll see just four albums: images from posts, profile pics, and the two latest public ones created on Google+/Picasa. If there are more albums, and usually there are, they can be accessed via a link.

Now, we all know that we should probably spend more time browsing thought the remaining albums, but in reality I think most people will have a quick scan through one or some of the initial albums when visiting somebody’s profile, while the rest will remain unseen.

It’s possible to rotate two of the four albums by changing their date in Picasa, but Google has recently replaced Picasa with Photos in the top bar (although the old link, if you bookmarked it, still works) and most people probably don’t bother.

Is Google planning to address this? Can we get the ability to decide how many albums to display in our profiles and in which order? Can this order also be decided based on factors like user preference, activity, number of images, as well as date?

There. Maybe somebody will listen. I’m sure I’m not the only one requesting this functionality. Although I know Google is already innundated with Google+ feature requests… (almost 2300 at the time of writing).

Good luck.

Also posted in photography | Tagged flickr, Google+ | Leave a comment

My changing habits

By Michal | Published 31/08/2011

I’ve been travelling a bit recently, so to make up for the long silence on this blog, I’ll be writing a few travel-related posts on here over the next couple of weeks. Things I’ve learned, noticed and photographed. Maybe a video or two too, but don’t hold your breath.

One thing that has become very obvious is my relationship with all the social platforms I’ve been using to post my images.

Until recently, it’s been just Flickr and this blog. And Twitter, but it mostly helped me - among other things - direct others to my images on other platforms, rather than publish the images themselves. (Facebook to a degree too, although I never upload my photos directly to Facebook as a rule, except for some mobile pictures).

Nowadays however, I increasingly use Flickr to post an image or two from a particular session – maybe a few more, if they’re good enough – but publish larger galleries on Google+.

Flickr hasn’t moved on for years. As a basic sharing tool it’s still good, despite the permanent chorus of complaints. Yes, it’s clunky, inflexible, but still serves its purpose.

500px.com is stunning, but it also doesn’t have certain features I’d like, like albums. I also don’t think my images are artistic enough to feature there. I’m simply not interested in this kind of photography.

Google+ however combines the social aspect of Flickr with ease of use and certain functionality that’s missing from Flickr. It’s easier to upload – and share – an entire album or just a single image from it. It’s more lively and I find it easier to connect with other photographers on there than I do on Flickr. I wrote about Google + soon after I joined and I guess most of that is still true.

Yes, I know, it does come with its own baggage (real name issues, multiple Google account fuck-ups, copyright issues etc.), but for now it’s winning over Flickr for me. Your experience may differ.

BTW, if you click on the above image, you can see the rest of my Valencia set on Google+. And while there, why not say hello….

Also posted in photography | Tagged Google+, photography, Valencia | Leave a comment

Google+ for photographers

By Michal | Published 05/07/2011

Should you move your portfolio? Will Google+ kill Flickr? Is it better than Facebook? Well, who knows.

All we know for now is that Google+ has been open to a chosen few for just over a week and generated a lot of excitement – or frustration, if you haven’t been able to join it yet.

Let’s agree about one thing. The service is impressive, but predicting the death of Flickr and Facebook at this stage might be a bit premature. This is the very beginning – Google+ has barely left its starting blocks. Let the service grow and gain critical mass first.

So I won’t tell you whether this is the next big thing for photographers, whether it’s going to revolutionise the way we share images or any other crystal-ball crap. Instead, let me list the things I do like about Google+ (from a photographer’s perspective) after a week of playing with the service.

1. Picasa integration. I never thought I would go back to Picasa, but here I am. I used it ages ago as a desktop application well before it was bought by Google. Then, when it became a part of the Google app package, I used it occassionally, mostly to share some private photos with friends and family.

But now Picasa – soon to be known as “Google Photos, formerly known as Picasa” – has become a very attractive proposition for G+ users. Here is why:

Unlimited storage. If you are Google+ user, you can store an unlimited number of images up to 2048x2048px in size. Anything larger than that will count towards your standard 1Gb storage. Also videos up to 15 minutes long will enjoy unlimited storage. Anything longer than that will again dent your 1Gb limit. There are no guarantees of course that this won’t change in the future, but for now this is pretty awesome.
Editing. If you have been using Picasa, you’ve probably seen or used Picnik for basic image adjustments. Google+’s adjustments are even more basic and are limited to rotating the image and applying six basic filters. So you’re probably better off working on your images before uploading them to your albums. But still, compared to Facebook, your editing options are slightly more robust.
Tagging people. You can tag people, who will then be notified and will have the ability to remove the tag. If someone else tags you in a photo, you can reject or approve the tag, but if you do approve, the image will be associated with your profile, i.e. visible to people in your circles.
Comments. A simple but smart solution – comments display not underneath the image, but in a column to the right of it, which means you don’t have to scroll down to read them.
Lightbox. When you go to an album, Picasa smartly redistrubutes the images within it on the page so that they form a nice mosaic. Like it or not, it’s neat. Clicking on a single image opens it in the lightbox (“on black”, in Flickr-speak) and offers a nice clutter-free experience. Frome here you can navigate to other images in the same album and perform all the actions described above.
Data. Each G+ photo comes with some basic EXIF data (if available), the date the image was taken and a clickable histogram.

2. Mini-portfolio. That’s my name for it. Not sure what the technical term is, but when you create or update your profile, you have the ability to upload 5 images that will be displayed underneath your name every time someone reads your profile info.

Quite powerful if you want to highlight your best work or, say, define your photographic style in five thumbnails.

3. InstaGram. If you’re using InstaGram and wish you could display your images on a larger screen, why not transfer all IG images to Picasa/Google+?

So far I’ve come across two different IG solutions, one which allows you to import your InstaGram archive into Picasa and another one, which updates your existing InstaGram Picasa album with every new IG image you take.

Both solutions are a bit clumsy at this stage, but remember the service is brand new and we’ll probably have to rely on many hacks before a more seamless integration of external services becomes a reality.

I realise that this post will probably feel dated a few months from now. Google+ is very likely to evolve and become very powerful very quickly. It may even become a threat to other photo-sharing services, but it’s much too early to predict to what degree, if at all.

So instead of playing with your crystal ball, spend some time discovering how you can use Google+ to your advantage now.

Also posted in photography | Tagged Google+, photography, social media | Leave a comment

Two new(ish) Instagram features I like

By Michal | Published 06/06/2011

I say new(ish) as one of them is definitely new, but the other one might have been around for a while and I have only just spotted it.

Since its inception Instagram has been adding one feature here one feature there and slowly has become really robust. The latest update gives users the ability to see which images they’ve liked on Instagram. Until now you liked something and within five minutes it was forgotten. Unless you remembered the photographer’s name, or unless the image was tagged, you couldn’t find it again. Now you can. If you update to the latest version (v1.18.17), you gain an extra option called “Photos you’ve liked”. They are displayed as a grid, but it’s easy to switch to a feed view as well. Instagram displays the latest 32 photos you liked, but you can obviously load more. A simple addition, but it makes Instagram more appealing and sticky.

The other feature I only noticed this morning shortly before I updated the app, so I assume it’s been there for a some time. When I looked at my News tab – which so far consisted of messages telling me someone was following me, liked a photo or left a comment on it – it also told me one of my Twitter friends had just joined Instagram. Which was quite useful again and much easier than scrolling the same list every few weeks or so just to see who else has joined Instagram in the meantime.

Now all they need to do is to create a nice web interface – some images do look better on a bigger screen, don’t you think? Or, since they’ve already made their API available to third-party developers, they can buy one of the many existing web apps created to display and interact with Instagram images.

My favourite one so far is Extragr.am (that’s where the above screengrab of my IG images comes from) and it’s a really easy way of navigating your (and your friends’) images on a bigger screen.

If you are on Instagram, do follow me – I’m michald on there. It’s worth it

Also posted in software | Tagged instagram, iphone, iphoneography | Leave a comment

500px.com – where quality meets simplicity

By Michal | Published 09/05/2011

Remember when you saw Boston.com’s The Big Picture gallery for the first time? Did you like the big format? I did. I also wished more sites went for big bold images. Including photo sharing sites like Flickr, which only added some much-needed functionality like the ability to view large version on black background, last year. But the rest of the site has remained largely unchanged. Which may be bad news for us users, but great news for those who want to create the next Flickr.

Like 500px.com, a Canadian photo-sharing website which has been around for a long time (hence the name – when they started 500-pixel images were considered optimal for web display), but in its latest incarnation – relaunched two years ago – it began attracting photographers with passion, people who put a lot into their photography and people who produce and admire big, bold and good quality images.

The site was born thanks to Ian Sobolev and Oleg Gutsol, who seem to have created a holiday snaps-free zone, an elegant place where photographers can share their work, critique others’ output, but also create portfolios, blogs and interact with each other. No messageboards, no camera reviews – just photography of the highest calibre. I caught up with Oleg, who is also the site’s Technical Director, to find out more about the site, its purpose and plans.

I asked Oleg to define 500px.com’s unique selling point:
There is a number of things, but to point out just one, I would say it’s the quality of the photos on 500px.

The quality is indeed high. Many images look very artistic. Is your site aimed at artists then?
I believe everybody is an artist. Everybody sees the world differently and that vision is unique. Everybody can pick up a camera and take a photo. Our site is for people interested in photography, people who want to share their artistic vision with the world.

I discovered 500px.com a couple of months ago. Since then I’ve noticed more and more people started sharing images from it. Why do you think it’s happening?
Indeed, more and more people visit 500px lately and we are receiving pretty good feedback from them. I think this has to do, in part, with the desire to experience the beauty of the world, see the unknown, the unseen. Humans are drawn to and fascinated by beautiful things, and a photograph is a great medium to capture and convey beauty. Also, people want to share what they see on our site, which can be easily done in our age of social networking, so the word about us spreads fast. The other factor I would mention is the community itself — there is this certain distinct vibe to our site that attracts people, I think it has to do with our users. We have very talented, friendly, loyal, tolerant, open and helpful people on 500px. Also, we (the 500px team) try to keep friendly relationships with our users, we know some of them personally. And we are always approachable and try to help anybody who has questions, problems or concerns. We stay on top of our twitter feeds and emails, at time we get a bit overwhelmed, but we aim to respond to everybody as soon as possible.

The first thing you notice about your site is its elegance, simplicity and large format images. In fact, a few days ago someone tweeted: “I’ve used Flickr all my life and Im still not used to it. I’ve used 500px for 3 days and I am so familiar with it. It’s so satisfying.”
Yes, we want the site to look good and we want the photos to look good. It’s 2011 and photos should be displayed large, not scaled down to a bento box size. Nowadays we have big monitors and cheap file storage, so we can definitely afford to show large photos.

So do you think one day you’ll be bigger than Flickr? Is that your aim?
Flickr is a great photo website and a large successful company. Their team did an awesome job at creating the destination for all your personal photos.Our goal is to be the destination for the best photos in the world, and if that becomes bigger than Flickr — great. My dream is for 500px to become the best and the biggest photo website online. But quality comes first, size comes second. Although sometime ago I put a Flickr sticker on my fridge to remind me daily of the Goliath we are dealing with

Explain your voting system. Do you think people vote for the images they really like or for the people they know and like. This is what often happens on other photo-sharing sites.
Our voting system is pretty simple — you can either like or dislike the photo, you can cast one vote for each photo and you cannot change you vote afterwards. You cannot vote for your own photos.
Also, we want to promote positive feedback, so the number of negative votes you can cast a day is limited. Most of our users vote for photos they like, it’s just hard to resist giving a positive vote for a good photo There is a small number of people that vote for their friends’ photographs, but the community at large is very well balanced, so if anybody asks their friends to vote up a photo that is not so good — the others will quickly notice and some will dislike it, which will bring the score of the photo down. Very few people try to cheat our system and we catch and stop this activity very quickly.
Overall I can say that if your photo is good — it will rise to the top, even if you are new and don’t have any friends on 500px to help you vote it up. At the same time — if your photo is not so great — it will be nearly impossible to cheat its way up to the top, I have never seen this happen.

You are much more than just a photo sharing site – $50/year gives users so much more. Are photographers who currently use sites like WordPress for their portfolios more likely to switch to 500px.com?
Most of the things we have on 500px are free, but we also offer premium services — our Awesome accounts. They are $50 per year and give you the ability to create you own portfolio website, multiple galleries, various design themes, custom domain, Google Analytics, higher resolution RSS feeds and faster customer support. With our Awesome accounts we want to take away the trouble of designing, hosting and maintaining your own photo website. Periodically, we add new themes to our premium accounts, later this year we will integrate blogs and custom pages into portfolios as well. I think the ease of setting up your personal website on 500px platform may take some people off WordPress.

Are you planning international expansion?
Yes, we want our services to be available internationally. We have already started the translation process and 500px is currently available in English, German and Russian. We are adding French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Chinese translations next.

So where are your current users from?
Our users come from all over the world, the top 10 most active countries are: US, Russia, Germany, Canada, UK, Romania, France, Italy, Turkey and China.

What’s next for 500px.com?
Next is getting a lot of things done We recently moved to a new office and are expanding our team. There are many new features planned — new themes, a mobile version of the site, public API, more flexible portfolio customization, export plugins for popular image editing programs like Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture, and many more. Stay with us and you will see for yourself

I most certainly will. If you are on 500px Oleg’s fantastic images can be found on his page: http://500px.com/cyberguss, and his 500px portfolio can be found here. Oleg is also on Twitter as is the site itself, of course. My own profile can be found here: http://500px.com/michald.

Also posted in photography | Tagged 500px, online gallery, photography | 1 Comment

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