Along with the team over at Photocrati, as well as a couple teams of web designers, I contributed that insight to help design a new series of WordPress themes for photographers. I think these are now one of the best low-cost solutions on the market (I’m biased, of course). I’m not going to write a full review of the themes, since it’s hard to objectively review a product you’ve helped design. But I do want to talk about what some of the advantages are, and, yes, some of the disadvantages. I’m going to structure this like my other reviews.

Let me start by saying that we’ve converted this site and I’ve converted my own phojournalism site to the new Photocrati WordPress themes. Check them out here:

MORE INFORMATION | DEMO

OVERALL APPEARANCE

In my view, these templates are beautiful. They have just the look I like, which is a simple, elegant look that emphasizes the images. The rest of the site just kind of fades into the background. They use primarily whites, grays, and blacks for the background, which for me is less distracting from the images than greens/reds/oranges or other bright colors.

Let’s start with a few screenshots of the themes. Here they are:

They have the look of many flash sites, even though they are not flash. The home page is designed with one large image space that contains a flash-style slide show.  The gallery pages contain rows and columns of thumbnails, which I prefer to “filmstrip” style thumbnails that require you to scroll up/down or side/side to see all the thumbnails in a gallery.

I actually like the gallery look enough that I actually use a gallery as my home page on my new photojournalism site. Below a screen shot of my new homepage. It also shows you want the galleries generally look like (although you can customize those like everything else.

Grade: A

EASE OF USE

I’ve often noted that there is an almost direct trade off between Ease of Use and Flexibility. Designers of templates can make thing easier by limiting the number of options you have, or they can give you lots of options, which will complicate things.

WordPress has lots of options. You can do almost anything with it. One downside of that is that WordPress themes are very much do it yourself solutions. You need to set up your own domain, your own hosting, and install WordPress. If you are familiar with all that, it’s really not too complicated. You can do it all in a few minutes at sites like <a href=”http://www.BlueHost.Com/track/erickdan” target=”_blank”>Bluehost</a> that offer one-click installation of WordPress.

Once you’ve got your blog and you’ve got to fill it out, and make many of the layout decisions yourself. Again, this is great for flexibility, but less so if you are looking for a plug-and-play-and-don’t-worry-about-it kind of site.

That said, pound for pound, WordPress is known to be one of the easiest web platforms to learn, giving you a tremendous amount of flexibility for a relatively short learning curve. And once you know WordPress, it IS easy.

Grade: B

FLEXIBILITY OF DESIGN

If these themes have a learning curve for WordPress newcomers, then the payoff is incredible flexibility. There really is very little you CAN’T do with a WordPress site. You can change colors, fonts, layout. Add elements or take them away. Move elements around. Add text where you want it. Integrate with social media. You can even add a full-fledged forum or e-commerce shopping center to your site if you want to.

The WordPress community is huge, and there are thousands of plug-ins that allow you to do just about anything.

Grade: A

BLOGGING CAPABILITY

WordPress is the world’s most powerful blogging platform. Not much more to say.

Grade: A

E-COMMERCE FUNCTIONALITY

I mentioned just a paragraph or two that there are all kinds of E-Commerce plugin-ins that allow you to add full shopping capability to WordPress. So the potential is there.

But for the time being, these these don’t offer what many of us want, which is the ability to sell photos directly from our galleries. The Photocrati team is working on this, but doing it in a way that is simple and elegant is tough work.

So for the time being, unless you are a WordPress guru who can do it yourself with one of the E-Commerce plugins, then you are out of luck until the Photocrati team comes up with an easy method to do it.

Grade: D

COST AND FEE STRUCTURE

Again, it doesn’t really get any better. Right now the Photocrati themes are selling for $59 each – for lifetime rights to the themes any updates. Pay once, low price, and it’s yours for life. Most highly managed template solutions (Photobiz/PhotoShelter/etc) entail ongoing monthly payments ranging from low to very high.

Grade: A

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Once again, WordPress is widely known to have about the best SEO capability that it’s possible to have. It has an inherent advantage over managed flash solutions, because it is a powerful blogging engine. And search engines love blog-style content – it fits all the qualities that search algorithms look for and therefore does very well. That’s while small mom-and-pop blogs can compete on the front page of Google with major multinational corporations.

Grade: A

FREE TRIALS AND GUARANTEES

Photocrati offers a 30-day money back guarantee that entails sending one email requesting a refund. Easy enough.

Grade: A

CONCLUSION

So, as you can see above, the Photocrati themes are strong in almost every aspect. They have two weaknesses: they do not yet offer the ability to sell your images directly from your site, and there is a learning curve for users who are new to WordPress. The second weakness, however, goes hand-in-hand with overwhelming flexibility. The reason there’s a learning curve is that, with WordPress, you are in control, and you can do just about anything.

As of now, pound for pound, I think these are best low-cost solution on the market, and it competes effectively with some highly managed solutions that cost 10-20 times more.

OVERALL GRADE: A-

From DPReview.com…

Dragged kicking and screaming into 2008 we’ve finally decided to break the code of silence which hovered over the inner workings of the dpreview beast and launch our very own blog, or blogs to be more precise.

They’ve start two separate blogs: one for the editorial side of things, and one for the developer side.

Looks like they will be using the blogs primary to open up the site to some transparency, which is always nice, as well as being a direct link to the community for questions, comments, and the expected flamewars that are sure to come.

It will be interesting to see how active the blogs are beyond the usual reviews and such, and of course the ability to rant tends to bring out the best AND worst in people, so only time can tell how the community will react to the personalities behind the blogs. So far though, it’s looking pretty good.

If you’re interested in camera/equipment reviews, and photography in general, I’d highly suggest checking them out.

Here is what they say about it:

“Viewfinder” is a novel method for users to spatially situate, or “find the pose,” of their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth

That doesn’t really make much sense until you watch the video and then it becomes much more exciting!

What can be achieved when you combine thousands of images, tags and photographers? Flickr thinks they have the answer with their Commons feature. Check out the info over at the Flickr Blog

What if we could lend this wonderful power to some of the huge reference collections around the world? What if you could contribute your own description of a certain photo in, say, the Library of Congress’ vast photographic archive, knowing that it might make the photo you’ve touched a little easier to find for the next person?Well… you can.

Announcing The Commons.

Their first stab at this idea is the library of congress pilot project. While it is early days I think it could be quite an interesting scheme. There is by no means the wow factor of Photosynth, but imagine both working in combination …?

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation.

I am sure you will agree, it’s the future!

If you have ever wanted to know more info about your Flickr traffic, who looks at what, and where your views come from, the Flickr has the feature for you!

We’ve designed stats on Flickr to give you all sorts of insight into how people arrive at your photos.

The stats are updated daily and include referrers from other sites and search engines, including search queries, individual photo views within the site, but nicely it does NOT include your own clicks which could skew results.

You need to be a pro user to get this feature, plus after activating you need to wait a while to actually see some statistics.

Visit Flickr now to activate your stats or read more at the FAQ.

When you first hit the edit button you are asked to allow Picnik into your account.

After that the editing interface should load. On my Mac’s Firefox it doesn’t, boo! Luckily I also have Safari.

Strangely even in Safari I found I had to click through twice or more to actually get to edit. When it does work though it is a welcome addition!

More info at the Flickr Blog

Most of the people on Flickr are a friendly sort. They’re helpful and chatty, and they usually have something nice to say about your pictures. Most of them. Like anywhere though, you do get the odd creep sneaking in.

Since one or two problems on Flickr I have become a lot more guarded about what I do and who I allow as contact.

• Any time I post a picture of children I try to make it friends and family only. Lately just family for certain pictures. There are just too many twisted people out there who have made it clear to me that these pictures are not safe for general consumption, no matter how proud we are of our kids. I can’t do anything about the copies that are on these “individuals” hard disks but can try to stop them getting any more new ones.
• I am now very careful how I label and tag my pictures. I had to stop using the word “mum” because of these slimy people who seem to search for those words for their own perverted uses.
• Now it seems pet and animal fans have to avoid drawing attention from people who think it is funny to submit images of abused or deceased animals.

With people like these out there, could it be we are better off not joining communities like Flickr? I would say we should be aware of the problems, protect our privacy and try to enjoy these communities despite the sickos.

Read the post over here and try not to have nightmares

“Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.”

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Via: D’Arcy

What it seems to have happened is that Virgin Mobile, or an advertising agency they hired, decided to save lotsa moola and attempt some good PR (backfiring, obviously) by using Flickr photos with Creative Commons licenses (specifically, the ones that allowed commercial use) in a recent ad campaign. Which, fine, is legal, though, perhaps, cheap-assed. What’s getting people especially crazy over this (and this doesn’t include me, thankfully) is that they’re using these photos without the models’ permissions

It seems some random person has spotted Gillians Flickr photo of a smashed car used on an advertisement. No problem there, it was CC licensed in a way that meant only attribution was necessary. Notification to these Flickr users would have been the polite thing, but ok it’s not a requirement.

The crazy thing though is there are people in these advertisements. Without model releases. Being insulted.

There is more coverage here and over at Flickr.

Tags: flickr, virgin, copyright, cc, license, pr, disaster

So what’s got me pissed today? What’s got me pissed today is that according to Rebekka, Flickr has removed her image from their site. That’s right. Not only did they remove and kill her image and her *non-violent* words of protest, but they censored each and every one of us who commented on her photograph, who offered support to Rebekka, who shared in her frustration by wiping every single one of our comments off the face of the internet forever.

According to Rebekka, Flickr’s explanation?

“Flickr is not a venue for to you harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we will send you a warning or
terminate your account.”

WTF?!?

So a flickr photographer gets ripped off. Dares to complain about it. Has an outpouring of support on the internet over it and Yahoo decides censorship is the way to handle this? This is the worst I’ve seen from Yahoo yet.

Many of us worried when Yahoo! took over Flickr. It seems some of those worries might be well founded.

Popular photographers like Thomas and Rebekka are people who built Flickr into the community it is (yes community, not just a picture hosting site). Even if they were not known at all, Yahoo! should be helping them not silencing them. To pour injustice on injustice is …. well, regardless of right and wrong, it’s bad for business.

Unfortunately, issue 10 will be the last one that Heather and I will have a hand in. We are no longer working for JPG Magazine or 8020 Publishing.

It’s a great shame, the magazine had a lot going for it. Probably still does. But you have to think a magazine founded on community support is at the mercy of that community. A community that loves Derek and Heather …

We’re proud and excited to announce that Dpreview has been acquired by the worlds leading online retailer, Amazon.com.

They must have really been cooking with those digital camera affiliate links!

Seriously, congrats to Phil and the guys over there, fantastic news.

Thomas Hawk quotes Stewart Butterfield:

“We’re doing the final testing and design tweaks now ” and “You’ll be able to go five levels deep (beyond that seemed a little silly, but we’ll see how people end up using it).” .

I’m sure this will be a much used (and abused) feature. It got me thinking though how cool it would be to have much more control of the layout.

Right now your flickr page is organised pretty much chronologically as a stream. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the ability to perhaps put up a welcome message? Highlight your best stuff as well as your recent stuff? Your top tags? When a visitor arrives at the moment there is nothing to orient them, unless your recent stuff is good they are unlikely to go much deeper.

I realise the way most people find my flickr photos is through my blogs or through flickr groups, but I think more people would promote their Flickr URL if they mutated into something more useful.

Thomas Hawk has reported that Flickr has rethought the cap on Flickr contacts. Now reciprocal contacts will not be counted towards the limit, allowing people to amass larger numbers of contacts.

More info at Thomas’ blog post.