DarrenBarefoot.com

No, Darren’s tag chat is, I think, just based on what the photos are tagged, not on where the photographer says he or she is from. The Vancouver tag was even more dominant a year ago, if you can believe it.

One thing that amuses me is the number of year tags — 2004, 2005, 2003, etc. Uploaded photos automatically get a date assigned to them, so why do so many feel the need to tag them with the year?

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If you leave out the 7416 pictures that Roland has uploaded, because - sorry Roland - they are mostly terrible and of sub-phonecam quality, then the figures would look a bit different - 5.0 pix per capita by my reckoning.

(It was Kris Krug who mentioned Roland’s prodigious contribution first, but I’m not sure he realizes just how much that one overworked 7610 is skewing the numbers.)

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My bad, but that still means that Roland counts for around 20% of all photos tagged “vancouver”. And most of them are like this . While I will agree that those are technically “photos” in that there is a lens, a subject and a “film”, nearly all photos produced since the late 1800s have been of much higher resolution than the ones Roland is taking.

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What about Helsinki?
3987 photos, population of 560000, Gives 7.12.

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Let me be clear: I am not making artistic judgements on Roland’s pictures - this is purely about technical quality. I think it is perfectly reasonable to make value judgements on that basis. If you do follow Roland’s blog, you will realize that his pictures are uniquely crippled because of the software he is using to capture the pictures, which results in pictures of far lower quality than his phonecam is oridinarily capable of. I respect the fact that he is trying to push the limits of the technology, but given that it is clearly not ready for primetime you could argue that it is unfair of him to “pollute” a public space like Flickr with the results. (I should probably be making this comment on either my blog or Roland’s, but, hey, it ended up here.)

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hey mark and for those who don’t know me:

SHORT ANSWER:
blurry camerphone pictures are tagged YVR not Vancouver

LONG ANSWER:
i use 2 cameras for vancouver photos:

1. canon s400 - doesn’t take blurry photos (well rarely) but there’s no realtime upload to flickr, all of my vancouver photos with the s400 are tagged with “vancouver”

2. Nokia 7610 -

i) takes decent 1 megapixel pics with the built-in camera app but very painful to upload to flickr (email is painful), these are tagged with cameraphone 7610 and sometimes vancouver

ii) takes blurry 640×480 pixelated photos with an experimental app that uploads to flickr in realtime
the app is called HuginAndMugin
these photos are NOT tagged with Vancouver by default
they are tagged with YVR

So most of my photos tagged with Vancouver ARE not blurry

it’s the HuginAndMugin photos that are blurry and tagged YVR by default and not tagged with Vancouver

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OK Roland, I am going to concede defeat on this one: the 17000 pictures from Vancouver are not skewed by your blurry phonecam pictures as I originally suggested. I would as you to reconsider your experiment with HuginAndMugin, but it’s your bandwidth.

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About the year tags: good for you if all your images have EXIF. My phone doesn’t do EXIF and neither does my scanner.

Hence they get tagged with the date of the image, the date of uploading (by flickr), and (if scanned) the date of scanning.

Suggestions for tagging a photo taken in 1954, scanned in 2001, and uploaded to flickr in 2005 gratefully received because I have about 500 more of these to do.

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