Sunday, April 10, 2016

Whose full perfection all the world amazes

The photograph was taken at Lemmenlaakso on March 26th.

Last night the temperature dropped below 0 °C, but for this afternoon the forecast promises +12 °C. There was some fog this morning when I walked at Tremanskärr swamp. The swamp is starting to melt, but a lot of it is still frozen, and there is some ice and snow left.

I looked into the view counts of my Flickr account once again, and I realized it is not just the LX100 camera which generates views. Apparently Flickr has some kind of image recognition system which adds tags to photographs, such as "outdoor", "tree", "plant", "snow", and so on. When people search for photographs, these tags are being used for searching.

I haven't used much tagging for my photographs, as I'm using Flickr for storage: a place where to keep a copy of my photographs in addition to a normal backup system. The automatically added tags seem to generate a steady stream of views. During the last 30 days the daily view count varied between 2000 and 7000 views, which is about 40 times more than it used to be.

So, a recipe for gaining views of photographs stored at Flickr:

  • use a camera that is interesting for gear enthusiasts
  • attach a lot of descriptive tags to photographs uploaded to Flick, including the model of the camera

But things may soon change once again. One could use certain popular terms such as digitalization, mass data, robotisation, automation, etc., but what seems certain is the fact that people are putting less and less effort to taking and processing photographs, and machines are taking over.

That said, I'm lagging behind in processing my photographs. There are over 3000 photographs waiting for processing, and the queue is not getting shorter. I guess I should take less photographs. Or is there software that automatically decides which photographs are worth saving?

(Posting title is from the poem Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare.)

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