In the privacy of our homes

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Trevor Hartsell

The best thing about working at Flickr is that my coworkers all love the site and product ideas can come from anyone.

Recently, the Flickr staff had to work from home while our office was disassembled and relocated a few floors down. A chance to sleep in and start the weekend early? Or get together with a few ambitious coworkers and hack together a new feature?

We met at Nolan’s house, ate a farmer’s breakfast, and brainstormed.

We wanted to build something fun, which a few of us could start working on that morning and have a demo ready by the end of the day. Something suited to the talents and interests of the people in the room. Secret Faves? Risqué Explore?

Bert wanted to help people geotag more photos, but he wanted more sophisticated privacy controls first. I’d been using a simple web app that I built with the Flickr API to manage the geo privacy of my photos, and it seemed like something more people should have access to.

So we had a need. We had a proof of concept. We had enough highly caffeinated engineers to fill a small dinner table. “Let’s build geofences.”

What the beep is a geofence?

You probably know what geotagging is. It’s nerd-speak for putting your photos on a map. Flickr pioneered geotagging about five years ago, and our members have geotagged around 300 million photos and videos.

We’ve always offered the same privacy settings for location data that we offer for commenting, tagging, and who can see your photos. You have default settings for your account, which are applied to all new uploads, and which you can override on a photo-by-photo basis.

This works well for most metadata. I have a few photos that I don’t want people to comment on or add notes to, but for the most part, one setting fits all my needs.

But geo is special. I often override my default geo privacy. Every time I upload a photo taken at my house, I mark it “Contacts only”. Same for my grandma’s house. And that dark place with the goats and candles? Sorry, it’s private.

Managing geo privacy by hand is tedious and error prone. Geofences make it easier.

geofences

Geofences are special locations that deserve their own geo privacy settings. Simply draw a circle on a map, choose a geo privacy setting for that area, and you’re done. Existing photos in that location are updated with your new setting, and any time you geotag a photo in that area, it gets that setting too.

Geofences are applied at upload time, or when you geotag a photo after uploading it. It doesn’t matter how you upload or tag your photos: The Organizr, the map on your photo page, and the API all use geofences.

If you’re ready to dive in, visit your account geo privacy page and make your first geofence.

Boring details

When dealing with privacy, we need to be conservative, reliable, and have clearly defined rules. The geofences concept is simple, but the edge cases can be confusing.

no geofences, common use case
No geofencesCommon use case

What happens when you have overlapping geofences?
What if you move a photo from outside a geofence to inside one?
Where does your default geo privacy setting fit in?

The vast majority of Flickr members will never encounter these edge cases. But when they do, Flickr plays it safe and chooses the most private setting from the following options:

The member’s default geo privacy
The current geo privacy of the photo (if it was already geotagged)
Any geofences for the new location

If your account default is more private than your geofences, the geofences won’t take effect. If you have overlapping geofences for a point, the most private one will take effect. If you move a photo whose location was private into a contacts-only geofence, it will stay private.

overlapping geofences, more private account default
Overlapping geofencesMore private account default

As a reminder, here’s the ranking of our privacy settings:

Note that friends and family are at the same level in the hierarchy. Your family shouldn’t see locations marked as friends only, and vice versa.

With that in mind, what should Flickr do when someone geotags a photo where friends and family overlap? Maybe he wants both friends and family to see it, or maybe he wants neither friends nor family to see it. To really be safe, we must make that location completely private.

Friends and family overlap

Go forth and geotag

A few years ago, privacy controls like this would have been overkill. Geo data was new and underused, and the answer to privacy concerns was often, “you upload it, you deal with it.”

But today, physical places are important to how we use the web. Sometimes you want everyone to know exactly where you took a photo. And sometimes you don’t.

Engage Kitten Hose

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Kay Kremerskothen

A little while ago we released some new API methods that enabled real-time updates for new photo uploads to be pushed out via a PubSub-like subscription system. Initially you could only subscribe to photos from your contacts and favorites from your contacts. Which was pretty neat, but that barely scratches the surface of stuff that happens on Flickr that people might be interested in. So we added some more stuff to subscribe to. Calling flickr.push.getTopics now gets you:

<rsp stat="ok">
  <topics>
    <topic name="contacts_photos" display_name="photos from your contacts" />
    <topic name="contacts_faves" display_name="favorites from your contacts" />
    <topic name="photos_of_contacts" display_name="photos of your contacts" />
    <topic name="photos_of_me" display_name="photos of you" />
    <topic name="my_photos" display_name="your photos" />
    <topic name="my_faves" display_name="your favorites" />
    <topic name="geo" display_name="photos from an area (geo)" />
    <topic name="commons" display_name="photos from the Flickr Commons" />
    <topic name="tags" display_name="photos with a tag (or tags)" />
  </topics>
</rsp>

The details for the extra arguments required by the new topic types are part of the flickr.push.subscribe API method documentation.

The my_photos and my_faves topic types are exactly like contacts_photos and contacts_faves, just scoped to your account. The photos_of_me and photos_of_contacts topic types create subscriptions that receive events when you or your contacts are tagged in a photo. The really interesting ones though are the next 3: commons, geo, and tags.

The Commons

One of the great new subscription types is for photos from the Flickr Commons. Set the topic type to commons, and set the nsids argument to a comma-separated list of NSIDs of Commons institutions you’re interested in (get them by calling flickr.push.getInstitutions) or just leave nsids empty to get all uploads and updates from the Commons.

Geo Subscriptions

With the geo topic type you can subscribe to photos from a particular area, specified as either a set of WOE IDs (also, here), a set of Flickr Place IDs, or by a point and a radius. The radial query is the obvious choice for creating subscriptions that aren’t well-known areas, or say, user-specified by dragging a circle on a map. WOE IDs on the other hand are incredibly useful since they represent many well-known geographic features. For example, London, England: WOE ID 44418.

Or, if you’re like me and completely mad about aviation and anything that flies, there are convenient WOE IDs for airports. Go somewhere like this, grab a bunch of airport codes for interesting places, use the Y! GeoPlanet APIs or the flickr.places.find method) to resolve the airport codes into WOE IDs and put them into a comma-separated list in the woe_ids argument of flickr.push.subscribe and watch the aviation photos roll in. For example:

Hong Kong International, China (HKG): 24875607
Innsbruck Airport, Austria (INN): 12510823
Keflavik International Airport, Iceland (KEF): 12513445
Le Bourget Airport, Paris (LBG): 22137770
Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Malaysia (KUL): 28752278
etc.

Warning: Code Alert!

In case you missed it, last month Kellan devoted a little Sunday-morning hack time to whipping up a little example of how to get started with the Flickr real-time APIs. It’s got a little bit about authentication, how to subscribe, processing a feed, and even some PHP. Thanks Kellan!

Join Us at the NYC Photo Hack Day!

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Ross Harmes

Are you a developer with a great idea for a photo hack?

Are you going to be in New York on August 20th and 21st?

If so, join us at the Photo Hack Day! Our very own Paul Mison will be on hand to give a presentation on the Flickr API and to answer any questions you have while hacking. The winner will have their hack featured on the NASDAQ billboard in Times Square (among other prizes), and all participants will get a year of free Flickr Pro. Sign up to reserve your spot at the event, which will be held at General Assembly in Manhattan.

If you’re participating in the Hack Day, Flickr engineers will be available to help on IRC: #flickrapi on chat.us.freenode.net. You can also go to developer.flickr.com for more information on the API and developing with Flickr photos. We will be announcing some new and improved APIs in advance of the Hack Day, so watch this space!

code.flickr.com

Monthly Archives: August 2011