This is user-generated content in all its multi-faceted glory. ![]() But even in the few hundred images that I scanned there were some truly extraordinary images - striking photographs that, until Flickr, would probably have languished in a shoebox but are now published for the world to see. Most of them, as you would expect, are just ordinary snapshots - records of holidays, weddings, stag nights, parties shots of sunsets, rainbows, ruminating cattle, green fields, ruined castles and cliffs the odd photograph of granny with a telegraph pole apparently growing out of her head, or group pictures in which everyone's legs have been cut off at the calf. (Eighteen months ago, a similar search found only 85,000.) ![]() I've just searched for photos tagged with 'Ireland' and come up with 1,052,368 images. At present, between three and five million photographs are uploaded to the service every day.Įarly on in its development, Flickr introduced a feature enabling users to attach 'tags' to their photographs. On 12 November last year, Flickr images passed the 2 billion mark. This then made it easy for bloggers and users of social networking sites to create links to their Flickr 'photostreams'. So they were quick to publish the application programming interface (API), the technical details other programmers needed to link into Flickr's databases. Secondly, it required no complex technical infrastructure, and could be marketed virally as users began to circulate Flickr links in email and instant messages.įlickr's designers also displayed a shrewd grasp of the essence of Web 2.0 thinking - namely that the big rewards come from making it easy for other developers to hook into your stuff. In the end, the photo-sharing took on a life of its own and the gaming project was quietly shelved. Its co-founders, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, were designing Game Neverending, a massive multi-player online game, and realised that they would need a photo-sharing module. In the first place, it was an unintended outcome of another project. And it's gone on like that ever since.įlickr is a classic Web 2.0 story. By the end of March 2005, the number was up to 7.9 million. On 26 February 2004, it held 7,445 photos. It was a brilliant idea - a killer web application whose usefulness was immediately apparent. So suddenly instead of crashing your friends' inboxes and choking their bandwidth by sending them images as email attachments, you could send them a link and they could see for themselves. It launched, an image-hosting service that enabled users to upload their pictures, have them automatically resized and given a unique URL, and displayed on the web for all to see. Very few digital pictures were printed most were uploaded to a PC, where they mouldered on a hard drive and were rarely viewed thereafter.īut in late February 2004, a small Vancouver-based start-up changed all that. Until four years ago, a predictable response would have been a shrug. If (rawEvt.target &, every day, billions of digital photographs are taken. pass the files handler into the loadFiles function Then, we bind an event handler to its change event. Here we start with an that accepts multiple files and knows it only accepts images and videos. JS: Y.all('input').on('change', handleBrowse) Let’s begin with our simple fallback, a – yes –. Workmen laying the cornerstone, construction of the McKim Building by Boston Public Library This allows people drag files directly into a browser window from the iPhotos, Lightrooms, and Windows Explorers of the world. Not only can we use XHR to POST files and provide all the other fancy info we’ve long needed Flash for, but now we can pair this with something much better than an : drag and drop. These days we can thankfully do this work without plugins. This workhorse has been providing per-file upload statuses, batch file selection, and robust error handling for the last four years through Flash’s file system APIs. To address many of this simple control’s limitations we debuted a Flash-based file uploader in 2008. ![]() This plops the old standby file button on your page and POSTs the file’s contents to your server upon form submission. The oldest and most low-tech solution is the venerable. “But,” you ask yourself, “how do I get those photos into the browser in the first place?” ![]() You, the enterprising programmer, know about parsing EXIF from photos in the browser and even how and why to power this parsing with web workers.
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