A little tool for all you flickr lovers a Profile Widget banner generator. Throw in which ever photos you wish to display - such as most recent, most interesting, random recent, and random interesting, select if you want a photo count included and bobs your badger as we say around here. The banner will automatically update itself every hour.

It shows a selection of ten of your photos and some statistics about your Flickr usage. And that's about it to produce a rather nice looking banner that comes in one size - 500 x 100. What I couldn't get it to do though was display a banner without the stats. Code is provided to place the banner on your website. [The image above is just a jpeg and doesn't use the generated code.]

one direction. July 8, Mexico City Downtown. People march in the Mexican capital to support López Obrador for president. by cybergus

Again another great submission to our fickr group. But this is NOT the digital photo of the day. There is no EXIF data which is the only 'rule' for which we reject photos.

For an image to appear under Digital Photo of The Day you have to add your photo to our flickr group. As we put under each photo as the editors note "We have already featured some outstanding photography here on the Digital Photography Weblog and we are looking for more. Have a great shot? Then submit it for consideration to our Flickr Group." We do not accept email submissions of photographs. You can sumit up to 10 photos each month for consideration but remember it MUST be of top notch quality, offer a talking/discussion point and be interesting. Lighting, composition, cropping and focusing are what we look at.

Not sure if this has much lasting interest but Flickr Inspector supplies details of a registered flickr user. It is not an offical flickr site, not that you would know from the logo mind.

Details supplied incluide user id, how long user has been registered and displays the most 'interesting' photos from that user. There is a 'score', not sure how this is calculated but it gives website owners a code snippet to display it on a webpage. User data, a big tag cloud and other snippets are also displayed.

Flickr Inspector was designed by Nils Windisch from Germany. He describes flickr inspector as "a non-commercial website, that displays publicly available data about single flickr users. flickr itself is probably the most amazing photo sharing site. this is by no means an official tool by the makers of flickr (or yahoo), it's just what i, nils k. windisch aka netomer programmed in my free time to enhance user experience."

My flickr inspector details - including some terrible photos taken with a camera phone - can be seen here.

Regular readers will know that I have a bit of a thing with food. Oh and wine. My reintroduction to photogaphy was via food. Myself and food blogger Sam (Pecks and Posh) run a little monthly challenge, foodography, on flickr that covers the food and drink sphere of still life photography. If you would like to join in the current theme is Wine Bottle and Glass.

A simple enough subject you would have thought. I rummaged through various back issues of photo and food magazines and found little; even the selection of wine websites - retailers and producers - that I looked at was under-whelmed with the lack of creativity in their images. Plenty of plain and boring full bottles with label in full view but no inspiring 'life style' images that really sold the wine to me. Hence the creation of this flickr group.

The San Francisco Chronicle has added a new feature to their 96 Hours section which is published each Thursday - they take an image from Flickr for publication. They really want local photographers and images but I guess any passing tourist would suffice.

"...we'll feature some Flickr work that catches our eye. The preference will be for Bay Area photographers, and/or work that has a Bay Area theme, but we won't be overly dogmatic about that. Want us to check out your pictures? Tag them SF Chronicle 96 Hours."

The first image has been selected; a dramatic view of some bridge they have there.

The focus is food on Still Life With... last months theme of black and white brought out some interesting images where texture and shading appear to work best on individual ingredients rather than complete dishes. But judge for yourself at flickr.

July has broken so a new theme - Sugar. I am thinking sugar cubes, bowls of sugar, sugar cane even perhaps fancy sugar work. "You can do with this what you like, but sugar should be what your viewer thinks when they see the photo..."

Lara reguests that if you do participate in the group that you have a look at the other submissons and leave some comments. "We're all looking for feedback, and I think each of us has our own perspective on what makes a good photo... we want to hear your opinion!"

 

I am not good at black and white images. It might be because it is colour that first attracted me to photography in the first place - I think and see in colour and not in terms of tone and shade. Of course I can fully appreciate those that have more success.

I was interested, therefore, in Still Life With... 's latest flickr theme. Some of the images so far submitted to the group are stunning. I love the reflections on Sam's picture of a knife and cheese and the pears by stieglitz. (Any thoughts on my efforts?)

Still Life With... is all about food photography. Everyday we see glorious images of food in full colour. Do they work in black and white as well?

Plenty of changes have come on-line today at Flickr.

It mainly seems to offer imporved dispaly of images (ie more to a page) and a better organisation section. Drop down menus appear across the top of the page and from the buddy icons. They have improved the search facility but adding booleans (AND, OR, NOT) and so forth. The search box appears on every page now too.

So nothing outstanding, as many have been hoping for, but useful tweaks. Not sure I like the drop down menus...

 

Flickr users outside America can now have their photographs printed and 'put on a plane' by QOOP; as the flickr blog announced today.

Worldwide shipping for all their products - these range from standar 4"x6" prints and full-bleed minibooks through to a mosaic print out on a t-shirt and giant glossy posters in various sizes (such as 20"x24", 20"x30", 24"x36" and 30"x40").

You need to go to the QOOP website, set permisson for your photos to go through to QOOP and that is it!

Prices appear in US dollars it would seem and I cannot see any details, pre-order, of shipping costs.

This may be my favorite Flickr hack to date. Like me, Paul Bausch of onfocus thinks the "More Properties" page EXIF display is one of Flickr's best features. In large part because it lets you compare the results people are getting with different equipment. Also like me, he sometimes has trouble remembering exactly what a Homebrew Digital XYZZY Mark 3.14R is when he's looking at picture taken with one. Unlike me, he woke up one morning and decided to do something about it. The result was Flickr Camera Images, a Greasemonkey script that query's Amazon's product listing for the camera mentioned and displays an image of the camera. Clicking on the image will take you to the product image page. If you're a Firefox user--and our logs say about half of you are--swing by and grab it. If you haven't started playing with Greasemonkey yet, you can learn about it at Dive Into Greasemonkey.

[via Exposure]

If still life photography is your 'thang', and we are talking food here again, then there are two flickr based challenges that might get those creative juices flowing.

Still Life With... has posted a recipe on her blog (yep you have to make the dish) and set out the challenge to create a photo better than this one. Appearing on the New York Times (registration required) the hideous styling has been dubbed the 'ugliest photo of food ever'. Can you do better? It is going to be tricky arranging the cucumber, tuna, salad and croutons in a pleasing and appetising manner but anything should be better than the NYT picture! [flickr group]

The other group is run by myself and Sam of food blog Becks and Posh. The challenge this month is to create a series of three different images to highlight a brand. Obvioulsy you have to select the brand - it cold be Coca Cola, a brand of knives, a range of sauces anything really. But with three creatively different images with the brand name to the fore plus an area of space for the later addition of advertising copy it should get those creative juices running. [flickr group]

 

It seems that in addition to boring all of you on a (more-or-less) regular basis, I've taken on a second--or I suppose fourth--job: playing bogeyman to paranoid Flickrites. This isn't my first try at scaring the unaware, but I thought I was headed for retirement. It seems, though, that someone has found one of my old Flickr hacks and posted it to the Flickr help forums. Aside from bringing to our attention some formatting artifacts introduced by the server change in December, the post points up one eternal truth: most users of any technology don't understand it. But then I don't understand most Flicker users, so I guess it all evens out. Why would you use a photo sharing site if you don't want to, well, share your photos? One of life's great mysteries, right up there with the sound of one hand clapping.

All joking aside, if you really care whether other people can access your images, here are some useful rules of thumb: