Flickr vs dA

Flickr vs dA

I decided to try out Flickr the other day. I'd used it a bit before, for searching for photos and had read about it in some news articles, so I finally decided to try it for myself.

If you don't know what Flickr is, the Wikipedia defines it as,

^{"a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs ... widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by innovative community tools, allowing photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means".[1]}

The site itself is well put together and quite intuitive and easy to use considering the number of pages and features. Being able to upload multiple images at once, then title, comment and tag them, is good and tagging in general is an interesting idea. The results from a search are overwhelming though. Just about anything you search for has 5000+ results, sometimes into the hundreds of thousands. To me, this is why proper categories (like here on dA) are better than tags.

Probably my favourite feature is the ability to add notes. You can draw a little square around part of the photo, and write some text as a little note about that particular part. The square shows up when someone mouse-overs the photo, then when they mouse-over the square, they can read the note.

That's all well and good, but by default, only your contacts can add notes to your photos. Which is a shame, because it would be a lot more useful if you could add notes to anyone's photos. The best application would be to help people to learn how to take better photos (and they really need that on Flickr, seriously). For example, you could draw a little square around a bit of dust or something and say, "Clone that out", or draw a box around the interesting part and say, "Crop to this area", or point out things like the horizon not being horizontal and so on.

I guess if anyone could add notes, people would just spam photos with stupid notes. But they could have different note 'layers' or something - notes by contacts and notes by anyone.

But while the site itself is quite good, it doesn't seem to have as strong a feeling of community as dA and the quality of the photos is just terrible. Maybe it's because people just use the site as a host for their blog photos? I suppose it's more for personal photos and snapshots, than for 'art' photos that dA is for.

I remember when I first joined dA in 2003, I thought, "This is pretty cool". Then I forgot about it for five months. But then I joined again with a new name and thought, "This is pretty cool, I might submit some of my photos". My photos weren't very good, but at the time, I was happy with them. I remember I submitted this, as my first photo and within a few minutes, I had two comments on it. Two whole comments! One of them even had something interesting to say! I was very pleased and knew I'd be submitting more. As I looked around at the great photography on the site, I was (and still am) able to be inspired with new ideas. As I submitted more and got useful feedback, I was able to improve my photography.

I've submitted about 20 photos on Flickr now and none have received any comments. The most viewed photo has been seen twice.

Perhaps Flickr has more insular communities where they only comment on each others work and not on anything else. Perhaps they've overwhelmed with the sheer number of photos on the site. Perhaps their spirits have been broken by the sheer number of terrible photos that they don't even bother looking at others. I'm not sure. But that's why I prefer dA.

Flock

In shorter news, I've started using the web browser, Flock. It's really a lot better than I was expecting. Especially since it's only version 0.5pre. It's a lot like Firefox in appearance and basic functionality, but it seems faster than Firefox, a lot prettier* (based on the default themes) and has more features (like del.icio.us, Flickr and blog intergration).

It's the little things that make a difference too. Like having crosses to close a tab ON the tab (Opera style) unlike Firefox where there's only one close tab button on the far right.

Anyway, I really like it. Hasn't even crashed once on me

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