More Flickr totalitarianism

pdh

Legend
I've just noticed Flickr is now adding tags without asking to everybody's photos.
Apparently their "friendly robots" are using "advanced recognition technology" to decide what extra tags to add to your photos, and there doesn;t seem to be any way of opting out of this.

fairly soon, I'll be making all my flickr stream closed, I'm not being Flickr's bitch any more, so, sorry chaps, all my photos will disappear from TPL.
 
Exactly.
You were able to add a tag to my photo because I permit that from some of my contacts, but I have (NONE OF US HAVE) any control over what Flickr chooses to add, and there's no means to mass delete these autotags (or "craptags" as they have been dubbed in the flickr help forums) - they don;t even appear on one's global tag list anywhere.

the cynic in me suggests that by introducing global tagging with no opt-out before the tools they are "considering adding" to help manage craptags, Flickr is banking on users either not noticing or passively complying.

The other inner cynic suggests that this is only a means to shove Flickr views up via image searches from other engines such as Google and (of course) Yahoo.

My immediate response is to want to lock my entire photostream as unsearchable and private ...
 
I don't like to say I told you so... But...

Tags are metadata. You can't monetise images without metadata.

"If you are not paying for the product, you are the product"
 
You're not telling me anything I didn't know already Bill, or indeed anything I haven't already talked about, here and elsewhere.

However this is a "new level" of interference which is not just about how the photos are presented visually, but how they are presented verbally. It's a camel's back moment for me I suspect.

I'm happy (or at least willing) to accept Flickr monetising off my images so long as I have complete control about all aspects of how they might be searched for in terms of description, title or any other metadata ... but ... well, I think I've made myself clear.
 
yes. I did it awhile ago. I have started making select photos public again.

Get to the batch organizer. at the bottom panel, click on select all, then drag them into the top pane. Then hit up the "permissions" drop down menu. Choose the top selection "who can see, comment, etc" and there you will find the option to make them all private.
 
I've had all my stuff marked 'private' right from the start but recently I've gained some 'followers' or whatever - WTF???
Heck, it's free, I've only got some casual stuff parked there, nothing depends on it and if the whole freakin' circus goes down the drain tomorrow I couldn't care less.
 
Not true roger, I have over 7000 images on Flickr and the only way to remove the craptags is one by one - a massive task
 
It's going to be really funny watching some of my photos tagged with "Fortran".

Just the ones that I do my own Demosaic routines and add my own metadata.

R2D2 watch out.
 
Just had a bit of a scroll through to see what they'd added.

'Lens'
'Electronics'

It doesn't have either :)

16862077616_f0f0704748_z.jpg


Interestingly though, they did tag this one with 'lake', and I'd genuinely love to know how they knew it was a photo of a lake? I didn't tag or label it with anything...

16692674079_c06332b6df_z.jpg


Anyway, at the end of the day there's an awful lot of truth to this. I think it's an interesting product of today's mentality that we think a 'free' service should be at our beck and call; flickr is a commercial enterprise, of course they're going to try and make money. It you don't want to be involved with that then pay for a service that does what you want.
"If you are not paying for the product, you are the product"
 
nickthetasmaniac said:
Anyway, at the end of the day there's an awful lot of truth to this. I think it's an interesting product of today's mentality that we think a 'free' service should be at our beck and call; flickr is a commercial enterprise, of course they're going to try and make money. It you don't want to be involved with that then pay for a service that does what you want.

What's interesting is that the financial success of this model of monetising has shifted the ground of the argument so far to the capitalistic libertarian position.

Thus anyone who suggests the model is flawed or unethical or believes end users should consider themselves as other than passive in the face of it, is dismissed as foolish or unrealistic, not by the companies but by other customers.

And so, not only do the turkeys vote for Christmas, they do the butchers' marketing for them ...
 
For goodness sake Ray don't be so literal minded. It's perfectly obvious how I am using the phrase and why.

It really does seem that any attempt on this forum to discuss anything other than lenses or, menu systems, or to offer the phrase "great capture" is doomed to crash into a wall of obfuscation.
 
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