flickr Slide Show
hmm.. just noticed that the slide show link doesn’t really work too well in findr. Apparently you can’t use multiple tags and the interesting setting. Findr uses “sort by interesting” to retrieve pics – you do get nice pics that way. The slide show works fine for single tags. And it works in findr personal (where “sort by most recent upload” is used). Looks like I’m going to have to get the slide show working in Flash.
So – two things I’d like changed to flickr - 1. an option to return photos’ tags on photo search – that would make findr personal usable – i.e., get rid of that initial wait. 2. slide show: multiple tags + interesting; photo number to start – e.g., start with the 10th most interesting photo.
Other than those problems, that flickr api’s pretty nice. And I love those easy to understand urls. That’s all that’s going on for the slide show – just calculate the url based on the tags clicked and open a new page. Unfortunately, I should have tested a bit more.
tagtree, findr Update
I made a new version of findr – findr personal. It loads all of a single flickr user’s pictures and creates a tag structure. Unfortunately, the initial load is painfully slow (a separate query is called to get each pic’s tags). But, there are advantages to having all the data – for example, you know how many pictures relate to each tag.
I also fixed some bugs and added a couple features, including a link to flickr’s slide show player. In certain situations, the slide player may not exactly match what you are viewing in findr but usually it will work just fine. (flickr’s slide player doesn’t load 99 pics at once, support all type of sorting, or allow for a startPage param – or maybe it does, but I couldn’t figure it out).
Also – just to confuse matters, I’ve set up a new site, tagtree.net, for all of these tag based experiments. (I’m calling the tag navigation part of findr a tagtree.) I updated findr and findr advanced on this site, but, findr personal only lives on tagtree. Eventually, I’ll probably just set up a re-direct from here. I’m not positive starting a new site is a good idea, but whatever.
tagtree.net
findr personal
findr
findr advanced
findr Trailr
I had to make a trailer for the FlashForward awards with a soundtrack.
Two versions: QuickTime (30MB) for the awards; and a swf (16MB) for your downloading convenience that looks worse (jumpy, pixelated, not as in sync with music).
I used Camtesia Studio to make the trailers. That’s a nice, easy to use product. (Although more display options on the flash vcr control would be good.)
findr Advanced
I put up a new version of findr that has two advanced controls.
- You can return photos in any order – the default is “interesting”, but now you can retrieve by “latest upload” and more.
- Added a rather slow “noise reduction” or “tag spam blocker” feature. What am I talking about? If you drill down far enough in findr you always end up with this lion. It shows up because it has so many tags. Now you can eliminate pics that have too many tags. Open Advanced Controls. Check “noise reduction”. Use the slider to set the tag threshold. Unfortunately, it is slow. So beware. Flickr does not return tags with photos on a multi-photo query. So, you need to loop through a list of photos and grab tags for each one. That said, you do get rid of the lions. To see it work try: dog –> golden retriever –> family.
I am leaving the original version of findr up as well. The advanced controls are interesting as an experiment. But — they’re not really necessary; I don’t love how they look (need to skin that combo box); they’re slow; and, most of the time, simple is better.