Flickr – Ciaran Laval

November 5, 2018

Flickr Flounders

Flickr recently announced some changes to their free account offering, in a blog post Why we’re changing Flickr free accounts Flickr announced “Beginning January 8, 2019, Free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos and videos. If you need unlimited storage, you’ll need to upgrade to Flickr Pro.”

If you have a free account on Flickr and have more than 1,000 images, Flickr will start deleting them for you in February until you are down to the new limit.

The Flickr blog post also states something that is a tad misleading “It’s also more closely aligned to Flickr’s past (before 2013, Free members were limited to 200 photos), and we liked the idea of returning to our roots but with free space for five times as many photos as before”.

This isn’t strictly accurate, whereas only 200 images would appear in your photostream, you were not restricted to 200 images, the images were not deleted, they could stlll exist in groups or remain embedded on blogs and forums and if you upgraded to pro you would be able to freely access them again. This actually acted as an incentive to go pro, the curtain would be withdrawn from your Flickr photos and everything would be there.

An unfortunate set of circumstances have led to this situation, the main one being Yahoo’s ridiculous 1TB of free storage offer back in 2013. That really devalued Flickr pro, but it also encouraged people to freely upload.

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September 3, 2015

Second Life Blog Enhanced With New Snapshot Widget

So there I was, minding my own business, reading the official Second Life blog page. Something did not feel quite right and initially I didn’t quite grasp what it was. The colour scheme was the same, there were no shocking new blog posts and then I noticed a section that must be fairly new; “Latest Photos Inworld“.

The widget that contains the photos is a clickable and there are a couple of places you can click. Those places are on a picture itself or by clicking “View All“. The only real difference is that by clicking on a picture, that picture becomes the centre of the next screen, whereas when you click “View All“, the first picture in the series will be the centre.

Hopefully you can see the above image. One picture in the centre and a series of pictures at the bottom. There are a few things you can do from here.

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July 10, 2015

How To Fix Flickr’s Embedding Mess (Whilst We Await Flickr Providing A Solution)

Flickr have, in their infinite wisdom, decided to change the HTML code in their sharing photos option. They used to have an option to embed, or grab the HTML, now, if the new features has been rolled out to your account, you can only HTML embed by default, once the script has loaded properly, you’ll see a flickr logo, the name of the person whose photostream the image is from, the name of the photo and the description.

The reason for this is explained in a forum post, [Official Thread] New version of Flickr’s embed code :

Today we’re excited to start rolling out a new version of our HTML embed code, with more visible attribution of the photo owner and enhanced features.

This new code brings the features of the “iframe” web embeds and the compatibility of standard HTML image embeds together into a single code.

The way we’re accomplishing this is through “progressive enhancement.” This means that at the core of the new embed, we start with the same HTML image tag that has always been on Flickr, and if supported, we load the more sophisticated, enhanced embed. If the “fancy” embed isn’t supported or something goes wrong, the standard image will still load.

We’ve already been using the new embed code for months on the Flickr Blog… maybe you’ve noticed? Now we’re ready to roll this feature out to everyone, and we’d love your feedback.

The feedback has arrived, and the natives aren’t exactly jumping with joy. The problems are numerous, but they include images not aligning correctly, slowing down site loading, people complaining that it all distracts from the image, the fact that some people don’t name their photos and more. Do not despair if you have had these changes foisted upon you and you don’t like them, it’s only code and code can be edited. First of all, let’s take a look at that new code. Continue reading “How To Fix Flickr’s Embedding Mess (Whilst We Await Flickr Providing A Solution)”

May 6, 2015

Temporary Problems May Be Encountered When Using SLShare With Facebook

Linden Lab have blogged regarding an issue with Facebook and SL Share : An Update on SLShare Service Issues. The post explains that Facebook have recently announced that they are depreciating an old Open Graph API. The implication with this change is that all apps running version 1.0, need to update to version 2.0.

Linden Lab are on the ball with this and have updated their SL Share app to version 2.0, but things aren’t complete on Facebook’s end, which may mean there are problems for a couple of week. The blog post states :

This means that when using SLShare (updating status, photo uploads, and check-ins from the Viewer) you may experience some temporary problems. Please be assured that we are aware of this and any issues you encounter should be resolved once the migration period is complete.

Thank you for your patience!

So the message is clear, there may be a bit of quirkiness for a couple of weeks when using SL Share with Facebook. Now I’ll be honest, I’ve never used SLShare, but for those who are wondering what it is, SLShare is a way of sharing your Second Life experiences on social media, such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter and it looks rather straight forward.

The first thing to do is to ensure the toolbar buttons for SLShare are available, to do this go to me or avatar (depending upon with viewer you’re using) and then toolbar buttons :

Then the toolbar buttons show up and you can drag and drop these onto your toolbars in the viewer. Hopefully, if you squint you can see there are buttons for Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.

Note that my buttons for Facebook, Flickr and Twitter are dull, that’s because they are already on my toolbar.

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December 15, 2014December 15, 2014

Second Life Could Do With More Widgets

I’ve mentioned this before but here we go again. Second Life could do with more ways for people to share information about events, places and sims by allowing people to easily embed that information into blog posts.

Flickr allows you to embed or copy the code of a picture easily so that you can included it in a blog post :

YouTube makes it easy for you to share or embed videos :

These quick and easy ways of sharing content from social media sites help to not only promote your own content, they help to promote the brand of the platform you publish on. Second Life is a little lacking in this area when it comes to sharing content from Second Life on blogs. Let’s look at some more social media examples.

Continue reading “Second Life Could Do With More Widgets”