All posts by 3DM

Still photography

Flickr to charge a fee to have more than 1,000 photos

Eight months after being acquired by SmugMug, Flickr has announced current and impending changes to its free and paid accounts.

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Flickr has long offered a free plan to photographers, and we remain committed to a vibrant free offering. Free accounts will now be for a member’s 1,000 best photos or videos, regardless of size.

This means, we are no longer offering a free terabyte of storage. Unfortunately, “free” services are seldom actually free for users. Users pay with their data or with their time. We would rather the arrangement be transparent.

Free members will still be able to participate fully in our community. Free members with more than 1,000 photos uploaded to Flickr will have until Tuesday, January 8, 2019, to upgrade to Pro or download photos over the 1,000 limit. After January 8, members over the limit will no longer be able to upload new photos to Flickr.

Source: Flickr adds new ‘Pro’ features, minimizes spam, and will soon drop Yahoo login: Digital Photography Review

I have a grandfathered “pro” account that cost half as much when it was owned by Yahoo. It seems likely SmugMug will be terminating those accounts and requiring us to go to the higher priced offerings. Or choose to leave Flickr, which is what I am considering doing. New owner SmugMug will charge $1/week if you want to have more than 1,000 photos.

By eliminating free accounts, Flickr effectively kills off its large community of photo enthusiasts and is left with a sliver that will pay $50/year. Flickr then becomes an online cloud storage service and is no longer a community. Effectively, this is going to be the end of Flickr – it’s just going to be a big cloud file storage server.

While I’ve had about 7 million photo views (hard to know what a “view” even means on Flickr as the stats are seemingly random), I became active on Flickr long after its initial gold rush heyday and only have about 425 followers. But I do have perhaps 6,000 photos. I upload bulk, edited photos from events that each generate hundreds of photos so that participants can download the photos for their own uses.

This change by SmugMug is a big deal. Starting in February, free accounts with over 1,000 photos will have their photos deleted by SmugMug.

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The “free” Internet is largely going away. You may have noticed the number of paid services, even at Youtube with Youtube Red, for example. More web sites are moving towards a model of some content provided for free with additional content provided only to paid subscribers.  The large quantity of end user generated content seeking support through Patreon is already doing this too – with “watch my free videos on Youtube or see special ‘behind the scenes’ content only available to Patreon subscribers.”

These changes are a very big deal for the web. Perhaps they are necessary or perhaps they are merely greed at work.

3D, 3D Tech

Facebook introduces “no glasses” #3D photos

You’re not seeing things — that photo in your Facebook newsfeed is 3D. Launching today, 3D Facebook Photos use the depth maps from dual-lens smartphones to add dimension to an image as you move your phone. The effect is an image that pops as you scroll, without any specialty gear (unless you want to use your Oculus).

Source: 3D Facebook Photos Jump Out of the Newsfeed With A Turn of the Wrist | Digital Trends

It’s a more modern version of the 3D “wiggle” method made popular, originally, as self playing GIF files that “wiggled” back and forth between the left eye and right eye images.

3D image capture for this new feature works only on selected iPhone models having dual cameras. Facebook says other phones, presumably Android-based, will be added in the future.

Cameras

Canon EOS R reviewer is loaded with nonsense opinions

Canon introduces its new mirrorless camera, two weeks after Nikon introduced 2 mirrorless cameras, and ten years after competitors launched the mirrorless revolution in photography:

it’s official: mirrorless cameras are no longer the preserve of second-rate companies who couldn’t compete against Canon and Nikon’s DSLR duopoly, but a crucial part of the future of high-end photography. Canon and Nikon are late to the game, to be sure, but no-one can doubt that both companies’ new products are serious, wholehearted efforts to develop credible and wholly modern camera systems.

Source: Canon EOS R hands-on preview: proof that mirrorless is the future – The Verge

And the EOS R is still missing many features that have been available from those second-rate companies for years. And whose products cost a fraction of those from Canon and Nikon. That said, the Canon and Nikon products are fine, albeit, late. Their new products mark a foundation on which they will build into the future. The problem is the Canon fan boy reviewer that wrote this nonsensical first look.

The Verge writer has defined “credible” cameras, not in terms of features, but in terms of brand name. A balanced view, by comparison, may be found here.

Software

Next Adobe Creative Cloud update drops support of earlier Windows 10 and Mac OS 10.11 #AdobeCC

‘As we prepare for our next major release of Creative Cloud, we wanted to share some information on updated operating system requirements,’ says Adobe. ‘To take advantage of the latest operating system features and technologies, the next major release of Creative Cloud will not support Windows 8.1, Windows 10 v1511 and v1607, and Mac OS 10.11 (El Capitan).’

Source: Adobe won’t support older operating systems with its next major Creative Cloud update: Digital Photography Review

I canceled my Adobe CC subscription some time ago and now use combinations of Affinity Photo, ON1 RAW or Capture One, depending on the system, including some very old computers.