Naughty Inuits Provoke Surly Alligators / journal / hicksdesign

01/05/06

Naughty Inuits Provoke Surly Alligators

I love Flickr me. It’s so easy to use, it’s API means there are many tools to use with it and there is great community there. Its quick and fun, which is why I tend to post so much screenshot based stuff there, rather than here on my blog.

But screenshots are not what Flickr is about. Flickr is about photos. Got that? Its a photo sharing site. If you don’t post photos you get what’s called a ‘NIPSA’, which stands for ‘Not In Public Search Areas’. You’re hidden away from public view – your images no longer show up on the homepage (not that they ever stay there long!), or in tag searches. You’re not informed when you’ve been NIPSA’d, one day you discover for yourself.

I’ve been waiting to see when my Flickr account became NIPSA’s (Not In Public Search Areas), and its finally happened. I presume the process is a manual one, and that there is someone at Flickr looking through streams, counting the ratios of photos to ‘non-photos’. Quite what that ratio is I know not.

The whole subject of when is a photo a non-photo is dealt very well in this blog post, so I don’t need to repeat it here. Suffice to say the distinction is a grey area to everyone but Flickr.

I can see this from both sides. If you create a photo sharing site, then you’d jolly well want to see it continue as such, and not be sullied. However, as a paid-up user, the policy seems a harsh one to me, and I think that they should embrace the fact that the community has found Flickr even more useful than they intended it to be. Showing what they’re listening to, discussing site designs or showing sketches and illustrations.

Being NIPSA’d isn’t the end of the world though. It’s a shame, but it doesn’t mean Flickr are bad people, or that the service isn’t worthwhile – far from it. From the responses given to Drawn.ca over their use of Flickr for showing illustrations, it looks like non-photos will be accommodated sometime in the future. I’ve also seen suggestions for a Pictr or Illustratr type sister site to Flickr, which sounds great, as long as the community isn’t divided up.

In the meantime, a notification email from the Flickr team to let you know you’ve been NIPSA’d would be polite! ;o)

Technorati Tags Tags: ban, flickr, photos, rants

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Comments are now closed, but you can still have a jolly time reading what others have left:

Anton said 895 days ago:

Bah humbug.
This whole concept just sort of ruffles me a bit (as you probably no doubtedly know why).
This is a form of content control – since a jpeg is still a jpeg.
Imagine if Blogger began manually approving only certain types of Blog-worthy material, and that things like fictional writing were off-limits.
People would be all up in arms about it!

Small Paul said 895 days ago:

You’d think they’d pop in an option for savvy users to mark their photos “non-photos”. I’ve got a keyword in iPhoto (unsurprisingly, “non-photo”) that I use to keep my own photos and other things sorted that way.

Ramin said 895 days ago:

I personally want flickr to be solely about photos. when i go on there and search for a certain tag I want to see photos not illustrations and such. Especially when there are sites out there like DeviantArt that special in such things.

If Pictr or Illustratr do come about, unlike your suggestion i would prefer the community to be divided. It would mean that things would be simpler and less confusing, and if I want to view some illustrations people have done then I can simply visit those sites.

Just my opinion though.

Eric Meyer said 895 days ago:

Seems like Flickr is headed the direction Friendster went… which opens the door for the MySpace of image sharing.

Eddie Sowden said 895 days ago:

I love the title of this post. Pure genius.

I think you should be able to categorise your pictures. Then on the search you should be able to search by type. Or just make it a compulsory tag.

P.J. Onori said 895 days ago:

I have to agree with you on this one – Flickr was designed for photos and anything else begins to dliute the pool on content. Good subject to bring up.

Adam Schilling said 895 days ago:

Hm … the whole thing seems ridiculous to me. I actually like checking out other people’s screenshots – and it was part of the reason I handed flickr my hard-earned cash for a Pro account in the first place!

Once you’ve been NIPSA’d, can you return to ‘Public Search Area status’ by some means?

@Eric: Eek! Don’t say it!

paul haine said 895 days ago:

To get around it, you could take a photo of yourself looking at your screen, and then when you want to post a screenshot just edit the screenshot in the photo.

In fact, make sure you get your whole family around the screen, all pointing at it and looking amazed, like you’re on the cover of some awful weekly ‘how to use your internet’ magazine.

Craig C. said 895 days ago:

While I can respect Flickr’s wish to focus their intentions on photosharing, the blacklisting of non-photo content smacks of censorship. After all, who gets to determine what is or isn’t a photo? Is a digital photograph of an illustration any more acceptable than a digital illustration? Can I scan my drawings but not export vector art from Illustrator? A flatbed scanner is just a kind of camera isn’t it, or is “photography” restricted only to handheld photographic devices? Should the official definition of “photo” be further restricted to only allow unaltered, genuine photographs, barring extensive Photoshop compositing? In which case, am I still allowed to adjust the color balance and contrast of my digital snapshots, or does that alter the original image to the point that it’s now “digital art” and not a photo? No more fake tilt-shift models I guess, NIPSA the lot of em. What about all those abstract camera-tosses? That’s just a bunch of smeary colors, really. I can’t prove it’s a genuine photo of a subject, so I guess it goes in the NIPSA pile.

When carried to its logical extremes the NIPSAfication of images becomes an obvious slippery slope.

And yet, if the purpose of NIPSAfying non-photo images is to maintain the qualifty and integrity of searches, I’m all for it in principle. But Flickr can leave it in the hands of the community and avoid the stink of censorship. Give us a checkbox when we upload our files to flag them as non-photos, and a checkbox on tag searches to include or exclude non-photos from the results. Then everybody wins.

#10

julian said 895 days ago:

Not a lot of people know this, but if you go through all of your non photos, click the little “Mark this photo as may-offend” link on them, then use Help by email to tell the staff you’ve done this and asking for them to take you off the NISPA list, they should do just that.

The “may-offend” link will NISPA the photos themselves, but if your stream isn’t on the misfit list, the rest of your photos should be unaffected.

Oh and if you check out public tags that your stuff would be under, there should be a little box on the left asking why your stuff isn’t showing up. If it’s not there, then either you’ve not been NISPA’d and their DB’s are playing up, or something is wrong with the box and you should mention that if you send them a Help by email.

#11

matthew said 895 days ago:

polite? Man, you are english! :) I remember trying to host some web imagery from flickr a couple of years ago without realizing there was an issue, and I was notified and asked to remove the imagery (or maybe it was removed for me?) can’t remember. Anyhow, I wonder if that’s not a big part of why they have these rules, so that they don’t end up hosting website (imagery) instead of photos?

#12

Chris McElligott said 895 days ago:

I try to keep my ratio of screenshots to photo’s intac, it’s pretty easy. For example when posting in the “Now Playing Pool” take a photo of your iPod instead of posting a screenshot of iTunes.

#13

Faruk Ates said 894 days ago:

Jon, they can simply check on the presence of EXIF data in each file you upload. No EXIF? Probably not a photo then. Very high ratio of EXIF-less files? Inspect, or simply NIPSAfy automatically.

“But Flickr can leave it in the hands of the community and avoid the stink of censorship. Give us a checkbox when we upload our files to flag them as non-photos, and a checkbox on tag searches to include or exclude non-photos from the results. Then everybody wins.”

I second this completely. I would love to see them leave it up to us to search for all files or just true photos. Keeping fans away with such NIPSA-tactics will only cause them harm.

#14

Jon Hicks said 894 days ago:

If you want to be reconsidered, you have to first remove all non-photos from your stream, and then ask for a review. Then if they agree, you ‘get back on’.

I’m not so sure this counts as censorship, but it is close. I certainly don’t want to mark photos as ‘may offend’ when they are harmless screenshots of browsers. Maybe if there was a ‘may bore’ link…

#15

matthew said 894 days ago:

Seems a bit odd for the Flickr admins to be deciding what is and isnt valid on a COMMUNITY site. Surely thats the job of the community.

#16

Maaike said 894 days ago:

??Jon, they can simply check on the presence of EXIF data in each file you upload. No EXIF? Probably not a photo then??

They actually do that? That would be a mistake, because sometimes image manipulation software takes away the EXIF data – for example Photoshop’s ‘safe for web’. Not to mention scanned analog photo’s…

#17

the Brightside said 894 days ago:

I’m with Maaike—removing or NIPSA-fying photographs based on EXIF data is not a viable solution for Flickr, as there are plenty of film scans that don’t have EXIF data but are still photographs. Plenty of my photographs fall into that category (scans with no EXIF).

#18

Brian said 894 days ago:

Yeah. Its disappointing. Personally I don’t bother with off site hosting of my images. I don’t trust ‘em. And there are so many issues like this post addressed.

#19

Miyuki said 894 days ago:

Wow, I had no idea. Very intriguing info.

I myself post more photos than drawings on Flickr, mainly because I can’t take good photos to save my life, however I have wondered about all the non-photographic material proliferating the system. Having said that, I think the problem is that there are no comparable online communities that effectively share images (both photographic and non) as well as Flickr does. For example, deviantArt which is mentioned above in another comment, has no support for tags nor RSS. Hence the reason why I chose Flickr to share my drawings online.

Loved the hilarious title, by the way. This Canuck got a good laugh!

#20

Will said 894 days ago:

Yet another reason I’ve never had any interest in using Flickr…

#21

matthew said 893 days ago:

Is there any kind of statement on flickr about this, faq, blog, t&c etc?

#22

Jon Hicks said 893 days ago:

@ Matthew

This page

http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne

states:

“With some exceptions, it’s OK to post other images, but if the majority of your photostream contains content other than photographs (like illustrations, screenshots, diagrams, etc.) it’s very likely that your account will be marked Not in Public Site Areas (NIPSA). ”

However only 91 images out of 539 on my photostream are non-photos, which isn’t a majority by any means!

#23

stephen said 893 days ago:

Yet flickr.com allows unsavoury photography (I hope I don’t need to explain this !) to be uploaded by people with no self-dignity.
Am I the only person who hears these two words,
“double standards”?

#24

Kelvin said 893 days ago:

David Hockney would love this.

#25

Digilee said 892 days ago:

There are plenty of other places around like/ worse/ better than flickr and seeing as they are going to be bought out by M$ soon I’m already moving things away from there.

#26

Amit Karmakar said 890 days ago:

Flickr is j-u-s-t another photo sharing tool with RSS awareness and pre 1998 markup. My suggestion: keep your photos on your site as much as possible even if just bare screenshots. Flick is not the end of the world. They sure were good when they started out. Besides, many companies add flickr.com in their deny list as people tend to waste time looking up photos. And websites thats use photos coming out of flickr obviously dont look all that charming.

#27

Nano Taboada said 888 days ago:

While I’m aware about Flickr’s guidelines and the NIPSA constraint, I still can’t understand the whole point, since actually there are a huge amount of pictures tagged as ‘screenshot’, in fact there’s even screenshot clusters, (e.g. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/screenshot/clusters/) screengrab clusters, so on, so forth, sounds like a kind of a double standard to me, or maybe is my lack of knowledge about the application internals, but, either way, i think if they really want to enforce that policy, for everybody, and not for just some people, it’d be as simple as, in principle, let’s say, not allowing certain tags clearly related with non pictorial material, what do you think?

#28

Jakob Heuser said 888 days ago:

I use “may offend” for my images to keep them out of the public streams. In doing so, everyone wins. They really should call the “May Offend” link “Voluntarily Hide From Public” or something, because that’s what it does. I figure it’s a small effort on my part and in exchange I still contribute to their community.