A screenshot of Flickr thumbnails ordered by month, flora for May, June & July.

As someone with an interest in natural history, I often look forward to seasonal occurrences, the first cuckoo or blackthorn blossom.

I also keep track of some of these things here on my blog and on Flickr. I find searching both places useful for all sorts of reasons, but not for figuring out what to expect or remembering when I’ve heard the first cuckoo.

A while back I, sort of solved the problem here by making a page that allows me to search the blog and order the results by the date without the years.

I’ve been playing about with Flickr searches in the same way and now have a simple page which searches for a tag and order the page by months, ignoring the years. The page loads the tag flora by default. If you give it a t parameter, it will search for that instead: ?t=butterfly. I’ve also brefly tested a u parameter for username. This needs to be a user’s NSID (71428177@N00 not troutcolor), it defaults to mine.

It also also loads the first 500 images, which is a bridge I’ll need to cross for some tags soon.

I like Flickr’s style:

we want to get photos and video into and out of the system in as many ways as we can: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users’ home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their content. And we want to be able to push them out in as many ways as possible: on the Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email, by posting to outside blogs or ways we haven’t thought of yet. What else are we going to use those smart refrigerators for?

About Flickr

I’ve just made a wee ‘blog’ from my flickr photos with the tag fblog: fBlog. It is only one webpage, not really a blog, but it didn’t take long. Sitting on my Raspberry Pi.

I do wonder if someone could make a clever flickr app that would mimic the best parts of instagram…

Liked Jonomancer — Don't Lie To Me About Web 2.0 (accordion-druid.tumblr.com)
“First there was web 1.0, which was, like, geocities pages and stuff, and it was decentralized. Then there was web 2.0, which was the centralized silos of social media - facebook, twitter, etc. Now Web3 is gonna re-decentralize everything by letting you own your own data on the blockchain…” No! Stop there! Web 2.0 was not social media! You’re rewriting history that’s less than 20 years old! Web 2.0 was:...

My own memory (and blog) tells me Web 2.0 was blogs, wikis, delicious, flickr & rss before it was twitter & facebook. I remember thinking it was the power to pull and aggregate without a great deal of technical know how that was exciting. Back in 2007 I didn’t welcome Facebook. I am pretty pleased with my forsight:

Facebook seems fine, fun etc but it misses the serendipity and easy linking and mashing of data. From my, admittedly very limited experience, it seems you can pull information into facebook but not get too much out.

Although Facebook seems neither fine or fun nowadays.

More from Jonomancer

if you want to make the dream of “buy your Minecraft skin as an NFT and bring it with you to wear in Fortnight!” work (why is this the example every article uses?) you would need to get all the games involved to decide to implement equivalent items, or some kind of framework of item portability, and if you could do that then you wouldn’t need the blockchain!

Jonomancer — Don’t Lie To Me About Web 2.0

It doesn’t seem that web3 will solve our problem fast.

For me Flickr still provides a great example of an open-silo. Flickr not owned by users (although I am happy to pay for my bit), but makes it easy to share, license, mashup and remix in what I think is web 2.0 fashion.

A year ago yesterday I posted  2020 in a photo which was the result of a ds106 daily create. I ran my video of a year’s flickr photos through and script that averaged them and a slitscan processing process. Details on that post.

I decided to try the process with this years. I am not sure if the results are interesting or not. I did enjoy the process. This years photos stopped in October.

Here is the video again

and the results:

Here is the montage of all the pictures. I wonder if there are any other ways to play with the years set?

Since 2014 I’ve been making “movies” with my flickr photos for the year. I make them with a script which downloads the years photos puts them together into a movie and, use to, add music. The Music bit is broken (https) so I downloaded some manually.

This year pretty much stopped in October, then I got covid in November and have not been out much since.

I also average the photos ( below) and montage them for the featured image. This year I made a version of the script to download wee square images for the montage (average & montage scripts here).

I enjoy both the process and watching my photos flickr by. I like the fact that I can easily tweek bit of the script or run the video creation again quickly to try out different speeds, music etc.