flickr

Flickr’s confusing authorization prompt

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Twitter, FaceBook, and many other sites are using OAuth or some variation for user authorization. With OAuth, rather than storing a username or password, you request a token from the website, which you shore and use to access the site in the future. If you’re not already logged in to that site, you’ll see a login page. If you’re already logged in, you’ll get a prompt asking whether you want to authorize that application.

For most sites, the authorization prompt has clearly marked buttons telling you to proceed if you specifically asked that application for authorization or cancel if you got there some other way. With Twitter, for example, the cancel & proceed buttons are red & green.

Flickr (which actually uses its own variation), on the other hand, gives you two paragraphs of text, which you have to read very carefully, and two identical next buttons. Not a good design.

Screen Shot 2011-06-17 at 10.43.48 AM.png

Uploading iPhone 3GS Videos to Flickr

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If you’ve attempted to upload any video from an iPhone 3GS to Flickr, you’ve probably seen Flickr’s “Unable to process this video” screen no matter how you uploaded it. The iPhone’s MOV files aren’t supported by Flickr due to the codec it uses. A very simple solution is to export it as AVI from QuickTime Pro or any other media converter. You can then upload the exported AVI movies to Flickr.

WP-O-Matic FAIL

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If you follow me on twitter, you probably saw about 32 tweets spew from my blog, thanks to WP-O-Matic blowing chunks all over my blog, which Twitter Tools dutifully reported as new posts.

I’m attempting to set up automatic photo blogging from my Flickr photo stream. Flickr produces RSS feeds for each tag, so I’m using the tag photoblog to have those images posted here automatically by subscribing to the resulting feed. Unfortunately, Flickr’s tag feed URL has several characters such as ‘?’ or ‘&’ that WP-O-Matic choke on. As a result, instead of seeing my tag feed, WP-O-Matic saw my entire photo stream. Furthermore, although I limited it to post only 5 items, it decided to post each item multiple times.

A work-around for the URL problem is to use a URL shortener such as tinyurl to generate a clean URL for WP-O-Matic. I’ve made it create new items as drafts instead of publishing immediately, so it shouldn’t happen again.

The D90 is selling fast

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I like to check Flickr’s camera finder page every few days to see how popular the D90 is. As I write this, the D90 is ranked 15 of 102 Nikon models. Less than a week ago, it wasn’t even listed. Yesterday it was #19, a jump of 4 places in one day.

Here’s a shot I took today with my 50mm lens at f1.8. I love being able to use auto focus with that lens.

New Orchid

Aperture tip: track photos uploaded to Flickr

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I don’t know if this is documented anywhere, but I found that it’s possible to create a smart album to track photos that have been uploaded to Flickr using the FlickrExport plugin.

Smart Settings: Uploaded to Flickr (Photowalk 2)
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

FlickrExport adds a metadata tag with the Flickr URL when it uploads a photo. When you create a smart album, one criteria you can use is ‘other metadata’, which you can select from the ‘+’ popup in the top right of the window. One of the metadata options will be ‘Flickr URL’. Choosing Flickr URL is not empty will select all photos which have been uploaded to Flickr. Alternately, ‘is empty’ will select photos which haven’t been uploaded. Combining these options with star ratings make it easy to choose photos to upload when you have a lot of them.

Using that trick I managed to finish going through the rest of my photowalk photos and uploaded many more today.

Beach Access