Changes at Flickr - and compliance with Online Safety changes

I know a lot of artists have stored their images online on Flickr in the past - often using a free account. 

HOWEVER for all those with a free account, you need to know a few things about what's changing - summarised below.

Flickr forever: Creating the safest, most inclusive photography community on the planet.
MARCH 17, 2022

Three days ago, Flickr announced on its blog that there are going to be changes.  

You can read more about this - in detail - in Flickr forever: Creating the safest, most inclusive photography community on the planet. (17th March 2022)

The changes 

Flickr forever: click here to learn how free accounts are changing for the long-term growth and health of our community.

The overall emphasis is on 

• restricting content which can be held privately and 
• encouraging people to subscribe to Pro accounts.

The changes announced this week are:

Non-public photo limits - for those with FREE accounts

we’re limiting free accounts to 50 non-public photos (e.g. photos marked as private, friends, family, or friends and family. Read more about privacy settings on Flickr here).

In other words, if you've never paid for your Flickr account, you now risk losing ALL but 50 (FIFTY) of the images you've uploaded which are not public for all.

If you want a safe place to store your photos which you do NOT want to be public, you will need to upgrade to a PRO membership - where you get unlimited storage for a monthly, annual or biannual sum. 

Guess what - the most expensive is monthly and the best value is buy two years at a time.

As they point out this announcement about deleting images may sound familiar

In 2018 we announced that free accounts containing over 1,000 photos and/or videos would have content actively deleted. In the years since, we haven’t deleted a single photo that was over the limit. Not ONE.

What they're saying now is that you can upload lots and lots of images - but all but 50 must be public. Otherwise they will be deleted.

So don't say you weren't warned!

Restricted and Moderate Content

Urban Sketchers: Gabi Campanario steps down

A major announcement by Gabi Campanario today - he's stepping down from the Board of Urban Sketchers.

Dear fellow urban sketchers,

Since setting up the Urban Sketchers nonprofit in 2009, I've been quite involved with most operational aspects of the organization, from filing government forms and dealing with bank accounts to setting up blogs, organizing events and recruiting volunteers.

As Urban Sketchers has grown and thrived, many others have contributed their time and efforts, and we've built a solid and sustainable nonprofit. That level of shared commitment and belief in our mission is why I feel comfortable that we've reached the point in our natural evolution for the founder to take the back seat. After my term expires in December, I'll no longer be part of the Executive Board.

But I'm not wandering off too far. I have offered to serve on the Advisory Board and plan to continue contributing as a blog editor and correspondent.

I'm very proud of the work we do as a nonprofit, organizing an exhilarating international Symposium every year, promoting workshops and publishing blogs.

It makes a difference in the way people see the world and connect with each other.

I hear it all the time: "Urban Sketchers has changed my life!" people tell me. And I reply the same way: "It has changed mine, too!"

Gratefully and respectfully yours,

gabi

Gabi Campanario has given so very much in terms of time and effort to Urban Sketchers that it seems remiss not to try and mark this change in some way.

Below I've got a timeline - and a few images and links - which those of you who came to Urban Sketchers late in the day may well find interesting, while the rest of us reflect on just how long it has been since Gabi had a very good idea!

Urban Sketchers Timeline - a Gabi perspective

• 2007: Gabi begins the Urban Sketchers story - and creates a Flickr group for those interested in urban sketching.  This is the original group.

In 2007, a global community of urban sketchers began to form when Seattle-based journalist and illustrator Gabriel Campanario created an online forum “for all sketchers out there who love to draw the cities where they live and visit, from the window of their homes, from a cafe, at a park, standing by a street corner... always on location, not from photos or memory.”  Our history

•  2008: The Urban Sketchers blog was set up by Gabi - who invited others to join. I feel very privileged to say I was one of the original 100 who joined Urban Sketchers in the very early days. Here's a link to Gabi's introduction as a correspondent - Meet the correspondents: SEATTLE > Gabi Campanario - dated 29th October 2008. (The following day I was introducing myself!)

I'm updating websites AND trying to have a break AND finding time to draw

Basically I've not had a break for what seems like ages. I'm now officially pooped from back to back exhibitions and trying to get four new websites up and running after the shambolic debacle with THE HOSTING my 'resources for artists' sites.

That said I'm loving the new websites I've got up and running and they are proving to be very popular.

I find I get a lot more done on the websites if I just get my head down and 'go for it' but to do that I need to ignore other stuff - like blogging!

Plus I need to get on with some artwork for an exhibition later this year....

....and I definitely need a complete break as well!

So - blogging is likely to oscillate between non-existent and sporadic and brief - about website updates until I've made some significant progress with other things that need doing.

It's probably going to take between one and two weeks.

My one concession to art (as opposed to building websites about art!) will be I'm drawing Every Day in May (see Drawing and Sketching - Every Day in May) and posting the results to:

• this album on Flickr
• my Facebook Page: Katherine Tyrrell: 365 Tips for Drawing and Sketching
• the EDM Every Day in May Facebook Group

These are my first five. It's nice to find time to draw......

If you've not started, there's still time to catch up!

Plagiarism on Facebook

This is about people who claim other people's artwork as their own - and highlights a case study of an example on Facebook.

A couple of days ago I was sent this message.

This is probably a strange/annoying message, but anyway here goes. I have a friend on Facebook who has set up an artists page, no harm there, however, I have a really good visual memory and I noticed that some of the images she was claiming as her work were from other artists. I reverse searched some more of her images and it turns out loads of them are lifted from other places. It seems an odd thing to do, and I should probably unfriend her, have you come across this kind of thing?

I've heard about this before but not actually seen it so I asked for more details and was sent some links to several examples of the copying

Here's just one of the posts by the "Facebook friend" (whose name I have removed) who's purporting to be 'playing about with watercolour in the garden'

A post by a plagiarist on Facebook

However she is actually "busted" because.....

.....here's the original watercolour painted by Paul Wang, in Singapore, and posted to Flickr. I was pretty sure it was one of Paul's before I found his page as he has a very distinctive and attractive style of painting in watercolour.

Paul Wang - Sketching Georgetown Penang
2nd sketch for the day. So glad to be attending this sketching event organized by the USK Penang sketchers
Copyright Paul Wang - all rights reserved

One of the problems with Flickr is it makes your images available to others unless you adjust your settings. On the whole, if you're minded to be sociable with your images - and share them - the chances are that they may well be stolen.

Although not everybody who steals claims to have painted them!

I also found the image again on Tumblr and on what I think is a spanish site (twice) with different "motivational" messages  in Spanish - one translates as

spotted with colors and scratches, what our mind is without color and shape

Why do people copy other people's images?

I have no idea what makes people claim other people's art as their own and think they can get away with it.

I can only guess the inclination to steal and dissemble is related to:

The way you respond to comments on your blog POLL RESULTS

How do you respond to comments on your blog?
Making A Mark Poll - February 2012
85 responses

The Making A Mark Poll for February was about "How do you respond to the comment on your blog?" we receive on our blogs.  People could tick all the types of responses they used.

The good news - everybody does it a bit differently!

• 85 people responded and identified a total of 149 responses and it's evident that there's a diverse range of practices employed.  
• Most art bloggers tend to use between 1 and 3 responses to comments - averaging out at 1.75.
• The most popular response - respond to every comment.  54% of bloggers respond to every comment on their blog (sometimes) - ie they only accounted for a third of the responses
• Other popular responses:
• one response to all comments (21% of bloggers and 12% of responses)
• one response to similar comments (18% of bloggers and 10% of responses)
• respond if the blogger has time (18% of bloggers and 10% of responses)
• Very few people never respond at all

The poll produced an interesting set of comments.  Here are just a few of them.

I appreciate the time it takes for someone to stop and respond and I think responding back helps keep the conversation going and readers engaged.
Lisa Call (Abstract Contemporary Textile Art) 

Blogs like yours, Gurney Journey, Lines and Colors, Stapelton Kearns etc. I don't expect a personal response to every post comment. It's a lot of work (time) to put together blogs of this sort so should we expect it? No.
David J Teter (Avid Art)

I love the way in flickr you can scroll through ‘recent activity’ and see if someone responds to one of your comments. So I am more likely to respond to a comment in flickr than I would on my blog as it is more trackable
Liz Steel (Liz and Borromini and a lot of other blogs!)

I really appreciate the support, encouragement and friendship of the people who read my blog. WordPress makes it easy to respond to comments with their "threaded comments" feature.
Jana Bouc Urban Sketchers S.F. Bay Area / Jana's Journal

and my own contribution

My one big rule is that if the person is new and I don't know them to make sure I go and take a look at their blog and then see if I can find a post to comment on.

I've not been good at following that one of late and must get back into practising good habits!

Pinterest: How to prevent your Flickr images from being pinned

This post explains how to prevent your Flickr images from being pinned - by changing your site preferences

Lots of people like to share images on sites they control - like their website, blog or Flickr account.  What many of them are less keen on - and I'm one of them - is the sharing of those images by other people, without asking on sites that we have no knowledge of.  People's views vary - this post is for people like me!

Flickr introduces 'no pin' meta tag sitewide

Flickr inserted the 'no pin' meta tag into its site very soon after it was published by Pinterest.  

The 'no pin' meta tag was introduced by Pinterest on 20 February 2012 (What if I don't want images from my site to be pinned?) following the viral outcry, approaching a viral storm, about the level and extent of copyright infringement being promoted by Pinterest.  Some are characterising the way the site works as promoting piracy.  Given the recent interest in the USA in the changes to the copyright laws all of a sudden people are getting interested in copyright issues!

The Flickr Help Forum post Adding Pinterest's "nopin" meta tag indicates that Flickr had introduced the meta tag to the Flickr site no later than 22 February.

It's important to note that the principle is that the meta tag follows the stated preferences of the Flickr user.  Hence it ONLY applies if:

• you have opted out of sharing 
• it is not a public photo (ie you have made your photos private).

This is an image of the Your Account page - for my Flickr account which is mainly used as an archive for my images (ie 99.9% of the 13,779 items in the account is not shared!)

Change your Flickr Account to say 'No' to sharing

What you have to do to prevent sharing of Flickr images

This is what you need to do if you would prefer your images to be seen on Flickr - but NOT shared elsewhere.  I've tested this with images I have on view on an account where I have disabled sharing.