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While there is plenty of academics undergarment wadding over AI generative text (and please stop referring to it all as ChatGPT), I was first interested and still in the generation of images (a year ago Craiyon was the leading edge, now it looks like a sad nub of burnt sienna).
Get ready for everything to get upturned with Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill, now in beta. I spotted it and some jaw dropping examples in PetaPixel’s Photoshop’s New ‘Generative Fill’ Uses AI to Expand or Change Photos but was drawn in more by a followup post on So, Who Owns a Photo Expanded by Adobe Generative Fill? This gets into even more muddy, messy, and also interesting (time curse like?) waters.
That latter article has some really fabulous pieces of ?? Extended Album Covers found originally in the twitter stream of Alexander Dobrokotov. I’d post the tweets here for you to see, but twitter broke the capabilty to embed tweets.
The concept is rather DS106-ish a central image of an actual album cover is embedded into a much larger imagined scene (see the Petapixel post for the examples) where all the imagery around was created with this new Adobe Photoshop beta feature.
I have seen this many times with AI, you see these jaw dropping examples that imply someone just typed a phrase in a box, clicked the magic bean button, and it popped out. Most of the time, if you can find where the “making” of is shared, you will find it took hours of prompt bashing and more likely, extra post processing in regular Photoshop.
Hence why my attempts usually look awful (?)
Now I could just share say image (like the Katy Perry cover of her sleeping in soft material that turns out to be a giant cat) and say, this is cool! But I always want to try things myself. So I downloaded (overnight) the beta version of Photoshop.
The way it works is you use the crop tool to create space around a source image. This fills with just white. But then you select all that blank space along with an edge portion of the seed photo, and watch something emerge. In many ways it’s impressive.
I started with my iconic Felix photo, the one I took on his first days with me in 2016, the one I use often as an icon.
In Photoshop Beta, I enlarged the Canvas to the left a lot, and a little above, and let the magic go to work. Perhaps this is not the best example, since my truck in the background is blurred from depth of field effect.
Not quite magic.
That’s a rather awkward vehicle there. And since AI has no concept of a porch rail, it would likely extend those posts Felix is peeking through into the stratosphere.
I decided to try again, and added a prompt to the generative gizmo saying “Red truck towing a camper”
Well, that looks awkwarder too. But it generates something.
I took another stab, thinking how it might take on extending a wide landscape that is well known. This is tricky because if one knows something of Geology, they canyon to either side extends to a broad plateau.
I did one first where I went about 50% wider on each side
It certainly continues the pattern, and is not all that weird. You do get 3 variations, this one is about the same:
It’s odd, but not really too far from pseudo reality. I riffed off of this version, adding again another chunk of empty space on either side. Now its getting the geology pretty messed up and messy.
These are just quick plays, and there are also the other features in the mix to add and remove elements.
This definitely is going to change up a lot things for photographers and digital artist, and what is real and what is generated is getting so inter-tangled that thinking you can separate them is as wise as teetering off that canyon edge.
But getting back to the Petapixel leading headline, “So, Who Owns a Photo Expanded by Adobe Generative Fill?” oh my is ownership, copyright, and licensing going to get mashed up too. So all of those creative album cover expansions? It’s starting with copyrighted material. But the algorithmic extension, is that so far changed to raise a fair use flag? Heck, I have no idea.
At least if you start with an open license image, you stand on slightly less squishy ground.
I’m going back to my shed to tinker (that’s for Martin).
Featured Image: 100% free of AI!
Not that anyone is keeping score… well I am! For 2023 my double daily habits, the DS106 Daily Create and my Daily Flickr Photo routine have notched another perfect month, bringing both to 90 completions at the end of March, the 90th day of the year.
This follows my streaks for both January and Feburary. Can this blistering pace be maintained? Welcome to March,in like a daily creator and out like a daily photographer, celebrated in the images above of both challenges on the third day of the third month.
For Flickr on March 3, my daily photo….
And my Daily Create response for March 3 covers my new outlet of “AImocking”.
@ds106dc s #dailycreate #tdc4067 #ds106 Prove that you are human… good thing you did not step in it! pic.twitter.com/cfFlYBaFQj
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 3, 2023
Not sure who cares to see what I am doing here, but given the reduction of creativity to what pops out of a black box after entering the 34th version of a prompt… all of these are generated by”CI”– CogDog Irreverence. For this month, maybe just a few more pairs of responses by date.
The Daily Creates this month featured a nifty range of challenges using web generators or randomizers I’ve not seen before. The prescription generator for TDC4075 was one that did on small thing well:
@ds106dc #tdc4075 #ds106 Listen to Dr. Hackenbush, not a hack in the bush at all… pic.twitter.com/WthLPhfhpC
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 11, 2023
My photo for the same day? My favorite prescription for making use of those bananas that have been out a bit too long.
The photo for this day was easy to pick as it was the first day we spotted our local fox dad named Watson standing guard outside the den where we know/hope the pups are coming out soon. Spotted out the window with the telephoto lens.
I can only arm wave a connection to the Daily Create for that day (I posted a day late) to “Write (in blue font) a one-liner, wish, wise-crack, proverb (a.k.a Old Dutch Tiles) on a blank tile” Yes, I did a wisecrack about asking ChatGPT to describe themselves in 4 words (“modest” did not make the cut).
@ds106dc #tdc4082 #ds106 Tegeltje-LeegGPT, empty in, empty out. But why not assert your own intelligence? pic.twitter.com/Gs27DvddFw
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 19, 2023
Here is a secret…Daily Creates are maybe more fun to make than do. I rather like it when I can pull one from a colleague’s online post like today’s to make a “goofy” face in response to a Mastodon post by @ResearchBuzz (showing off a bit by embedding in the Daily Create but not showing off as I still have not coded the site to accept Mastodon responses) (soon?) (maybe?).
I already had a goofy photo of me following the end of a full Open Education Week doing 14 live webcasts but took the next step to graft on to my head my dog and cat.
@ds106dc #ds106 #dailycreate #tdc4088 A goofy face for @ResearchBuzz and her granddaughter.
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 24, 2023
This was me celebrating and energetic after doing 14 live webcasts for #OEweek with my pals Felix and Maggie.
Looking forward to your feedback on the goofiness level. pic.twitter.com/Uw9FLUN1nW
My photo for that same day? Just about as opposite from goofy as on can get- it was a black and white rendering of a foggy morning view of our eastern end of the property, which looks rather spooky.
This habit of monthly recaps is one more self-imposed obligation atop doing these daily acts. They still do as they always have done, gives me a small creative outlet, a chance to see how quickly I can make a response with my own mind, tools, and memory.
I wonder about the DS106 Daily Create, it keeps humming along in its 11the consecutive year but as the leaderboard shows, participating has fallen in 2023 to only 14 participants, of which half have been doing it at like a 90% level.
Is it worth doing?
Hell yeah.
Line me up both daily doubles for April.
Featured Image: Screenshot of my flickr daily photo for March 3, 2023 combined with a screenshot of my tweeted response to the DS106 Daily Create for March 3,2023. Heck I made them, call this licensed CC BY.
Against all common wisdom, I have been running an old operating system (10.14.6 Mojave) on my old MacBookPro (2103) to mainly use the photo management software Apple dropped in 2015 (Aperture).
Yes, newer software is out there, and I have access to Lightroom via my Adobe plan I pay through the month for to get PhotoShop, but the Aperture Strategy I have used since honing it in 2009 has just kept working smoothly for me. Especially for adding metadata to all photos and also the (long gone) Connected Flow Flickr Exporter that until recently deftly posted photos, sending titles, tags, captions, said metadata to my flickr and also writing back to Aperture the flickr url.
I did learn recently, from some stellar Flickr support, that the reason many of my photos have gotten mis mapped to the opposite hemisphere is my old software. I was willing to live with my barn photos being located to the Russian village Botsiy.
But the dying has gotten worse. For about the last two weeks, my uploads have been regularly failing like 20% out of a bach with API errors:
And another plus for the old Flickr Exporter is that it provides tech details in a “problem report” (a log of the comm between Aperture and flickr).
At the same time, I, like many others got a weird email from flickr about impending changes to the Flickr API, they were adding a requirement to include some other data in the transmissions, all played out in a torrid exchange in a flickr forum.
I was invested in this since two of my long running creativity tools (from the days when creativity was not relegated to typing text prompts into an AI box) Pechaflickr and Five Card Flickr Stories depend on the Flickr API to grab random photos based on tags.
I was able to the best of my more hacker than programmer skill set to modify the old phpflickr library that still works. And I managed to make them work in the API change testing window.
All for naught as Flickr announced a day later, in best Emily Litella style– “Never Mind!”
Regardless, I saw other mentions in the forum of others reporting API failures.
The clock is ticking. So I am accepting that its time, 14 years later, to hone a new strategy.
I’m not bothering to try to import my mega Aperture Library into Lightoom. I will leave it as be, but I do have to update my old MacBookPro to some newer mountain named OS (Big Sur I think is as new as I can go). My plan is to leave Aperture running on my even older older MacBookPro, a 2009 dented from a HD killing fall to concrete Just In Case I ever need to re-edit something (not sure when that might ever happen). All my photo originals are on external drives (luckily using Referenced files a long time ago).
This old photo dog needs to learn some new Lightroom tricks.
Thanks Aperture, you’ve been great to me for like 60,000 of my photos (I used the Wayback Machine to find my total in 2009 was about 9000 photos, and look at who I see in the stream there, hiya Scott! BG!).
Onward….
Featured Image: 2015/365/14 What The Lens Sees flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) with superimposed on the lens a screenshot of my flickr/Aperture error and Pixabay image of Cracks by b0red.
Ain’t that llama a cutie? What is that smile about?
Ah, it’s how this person (a.k.a..me) can stand the fact that someone is making money off of a photo I took and shared on the internets. Doesn’t a license protect me?
Welcome to my unconventional corner of the Creative Commons tent, already explained in 2016:
So counter to thinking some other flavored Creative Commons license will protect me– I have opted to give my store away. Since I never intended to profit from my photos, how can I lose what Inever “moneytized”? I am fine with people making commercial use of my photos, of taking and using without asking. This has been my ongoing experiment for these seven years, to find out how much I will suffer by putting my 70,000 flickr photos in the public domain.
In fact, I have gotten more in return than money… gratitude and stories.
One perk of the Flickr pro account is access to Pixsy, a service that can locate much more reliably places on the internet my photos have appeared. This service is set up to aid in “going after” stolen images, bu my use is mainly to just enjoy seeing sites where my photos have gone to. Sometimes I have gone through just to add to my album of photos that have been reused (283 so far). You know, a little self-flattery.
But it also does provide something I have had to swallow with my giveaway choice described above:
That was he first time I discovered that there are “people” out there who scoop up public domain photos, upload to a stock photo outfit like Alamy, and earn a gazzilion (or 20) bucks. I should be OUTRAGED. But then so should be the schmuck who pays $60 for a photo they could get for free from my flickr.
Recently, I looked at my pixsy updates which reported finding 33 of my photos floating round on Alamy, like heck my goofy llama. You can get it free from flickr or pay Alamy £29.99 to use it on a web site.
It’s interesting that entity who added my photo kept my original title (the “2010 365” indicates this was one of my daily flickr photos for 2010). Following this, I can play some search gimmicks and find for sale on Alamy:
I could go on… How do I know these are mine? There is no attribution, but it’s easy… I took ’em. But they are easily found in each of my flickr albums for daily photos.
I just have to wonder too about someone how there having to laboriously download my photos and then upload to Alamy, a job of minimal artificial intelligence.
No I am not changing my public domain tune, But in the interest of being curious how this shady game is played, tonight I created my own Alamy account, and uploaded 3 of my own public domain images as they require for “Quality Control”— can I pass muster with my own images?
Here is my pledge- if anyone is goofy enough to pay Alamy for my public domain photos, any proceeds that pile in will be donated to the local Humane Society.
It’s a public domain face a llama mother could love.
Featured Image: Yours for the taking, sans watermark.
Strap in (or hit eject) for a long blog ride. This has been one of those percolating drafts, meaning it has not progressed far from my head. But time is essencing.
As there are a wave of steps to weave together, I am borrowing in all sense of honoring, not stealing, a section convention from Kate Bowles’ blog.
Once again because almost no one cares for making the case of the power of RSS reading, I keep finding more reasons not to buy into the “twitter does it better” theory. I have a set of photography feeds I sometimes skim through at the title level. I cannot even deduce the reason why I got a nibble of curiosity for “The $10 Camera Photographers Are Snapping Up” (Fstoppers).
Curious clicking that was the opener to this whole run.
The author makes a case for the versatility of the old mid 2000s style pocket digital camera, but in this style I loathe in at least a lot of photography sites, asking me to not read, but watch a video of two photographers doing an outing with their $10 cameras. Loathing is because there’s not much skimming one does from content in a video.
The video is well produced, and obviously the two had fun, but I find it all a but more style over substance.
That’s me.
The thing is the video opened a memory stream, as I do not need to find one of these cameras used on eBay, I just need to rummage through my box of camera STUFF.
Memories flood in.
My cameras are a thing I keep track of– by photos. Though it has been 14 years since I wrote of my lineage of film and digital cameras there is only one more not on that list, my current DSLR Canon 7D…assorted iPhones, a few forays trying some vintage cam— I got off track already.
The thing is in 2005 when I plunged into the first DSLR, the Canon Digital Rebel, I saw no direction going back to small pocket cameras.
Shift to 2007 while I was working for the New Media Consortium. Quite a few in that crowd were avid digital photographers. Two colleagues and fellow camera geeks I respect much kept going on and on to me about their little Canon digital cameras. I will call them Phil and Carl for now… well those are their names. These two made a case for what was then rather high image quality from the little cameras (7 MP), but more the affordances of a pocket camera for street photography, and unobtrusive photographer, in lieu of putting a Big Camera in front of your subject.
I took the plunge and bought that PowerShot 800 SD IS. And that was pretty much my main camera for a few years. On a 2008 trip to Japan I could not resist picking up an updated model (IXY 3000IS) that offered maybe twice the resolution and was not even available in the US.
I knew Carl would smile at those specs.
Back in 2002 I was organizing district-wide technology initiatives at the Maricopa Community Colleges. In collaboration with then IT Vice Chancellor Ron Bleed, we organized a series of collaborative events/workshops called the Ocotillo Technology Visioning Forums.
This has much to say about the heady times I was lucky enough to be part of at Maricopa. The rationale of these activities was preparing for a bond election to fund the system, including instructional technology, which as noted there, from the previous planning in 1994 had not included the impact of the world wide web (as the web then was called).
Under the umbrella of bond planning, Ocotillo and Information Technologies Services (ITS) are sponsoring a series of Technology Visioning Forums that will bring to Maricopa a series of distinguished professionals, who will inspire and challenge our thinking about instructional technology and facilities for learning.
For the next X (3? 5?) years, what is the next “web” we might need to address for the future? What is the learning environment of the future look like? What do models of “hybrid” courses mean for planning? What sorts of technologies are we planning for? What do Learning Objects mean for course developers? How do we provide better physical (and virtual) learning environments?
Each Maricopa college will form a team to participate in the process, leading to a collection of outcomes to be further developed at the year-end Ocotillo Retreat.
Ocotillo Technology Visioning, 2002-2003
One of those “distinguished professionals” was a colleague (and friend) of Ron’s from the University of Michigan named Carl Berger, who spent two days in December leading us through discussions guided in his theme of “Back to the Future: After WYSIWYG, What is the Next Killer App?”
The excitement Carl spoke with was infectious, while at the same time backing his ideas with examples, experience, research, and a focus on pedagogy. Amongst the media I found from my old Maricopa MCLI web server archive (all was wiped out after I left in 2006) I found two 320x240px video excerpts from his talk- I patched together to share:
I also found a copy of Carl’s presentation slides!
Here in 2002 he pointed out emerging technologies (just respect this from looking back 21 years) were wireless networking, these brand new tablet devices, learning objects, integrated administrative systems, open learning platforms, research tools, and a vision of a learning platform he called “the Real Processor” explained through a narrative Maria, a professor using a platform that looked LMS-ish but was richer in complexity.
But these forums were not just slidedecks and cheese sandwiches, there was a whole lot of group discussion, brainstorming, and collaboration between faculty, technology staff, and administrators. And, can see it because I found an archive of photos from these events, assembled in a funky Javascript slideshow thing I built in maybe 2000 called the jClicker (I am shocked it even works!):
When I took a leap from Maricopa in 2006 to work with the New Media Consortium, it was a more than pleasant surprise to be at the conferences and connect again with Carl. Here he is gleefully uploading photos he is taking with one of those small cameras at the 2006 NMC Conference in Cleveland.
As I learned Carl was right there from the birth of NMC and was at it’s first conference in 1995. Later, on a visit to his home, he pulled out and gave me a mint condition T-shirt from tha conference (I still have it).
And always Carl was beaming with his excitement about new Apple technology, the latest photo editing software, and always with some new kind of camera. He was active always in the era of NMC’s Second Life period (look! I even found him in the directory as an avatar named Carl Oxberger).
In more image rummaging, I am so happy to find Carl in a photo listening intently to another fantastic friend colleague, Bryan Alexander, here at a 2009 EDUCAUSE ELI Conference.
The photo becomes even more special to me because of the gracious comment of another influential colleagues/mentor, George Brett, who passed away in 2015.
For no one keeping track of the camera stories here, at this time I was using much that small Canon as well as my first iPhone. But the small camera came back in a big way through an unusual device.
Once again,toward my latter years at NMC, I was the beneficiary of a lucky connection. A new colleague named Keene Haywood knew of my interest in camera, and told me about his Austin friends at an outfit called Charmed Labs were developing beta versions of a thing called a “Gigapan“. I was a robot controlled mount that would move a camera methodically through a grid pattern and worked with a stitching type of software to create potentially a GigaPixel panorama image.
I was curious, and Keene hooked me up, and I bought I believe one of the few beta versions of the metallic box rig.
At the time, it could use only the small cameras, and I did a bunch with that first Canon Elph, seen above. It became an object of curiosity in public spaces when people would watch it go through its robot maneuvers, moving a bit, the robot rm clicking the shutter, tilting a bit, and repeating. See it in action:
I recently came across the box where I had stored the rig; it’s been 10 years maybe since I even used it. I assumed that the software that made the images was long gone and after showing it to Cori I said I did not see a need to keep it. “No way!” she said. “That’s part of your photography history, put it on the shelf with your camera collection.”
Out of curiosity I did the Google thing and found out how wrong I was- the software is still out there and the Gigapan site is alive. I even found my own collection of panorama images, all there. I give em a CogDogBlog howl of praise for keeping a web site going 15 years later.
One scene popped out, a panorama image I made on my last day of my 2008 Month in Iceland adventure, when I drove out to see Þingvellir (that place where they were doing democratic forms of government in 930AD).
Typical of most off the highway places I explored while living in Iceland, I saw no people when I got there. So I set up my Gigapan rig to capture a scene.
Then car pulled up! Three American college age students came out. I was shocked when one guy looked at my rig and asked “Is that a GigaPan?”. As it turns out, he had worked at the Carnegie Mellon University where it was first developed.
Now calculate me the odds of that.
Speaking of long odds, I got an email request in 2011 to use the scene I had made that day for use in a book. They wanted the biggest highest resolution possible, I remember doing some hijinks in PhotoShop to generate the format of a TIFF file.
And here is something I know would make Carl smile, a photo stitched together from that little Canon camera was printed in the largest picture atlas ever, a book that is six feet high! That has to be my biggest (literally) credit ever.
I kept in touch with Carl, and it was rewarding to see he had retired and settled in St George, Utah. The last NMC Conference I was part of was the 2010 one at Disneyland, never a place that was on my list of destinations, but conference location picking was not my department. Since I was living then in Northern Arizona I made a decision to skip the air travel and drive to LA, the way out taking the dull Interstate 40 route.
But this made for a scenic backroad return trip, which I had arranged to pass through St. George, at an invitation to stay with Carl. He was eager to show me his latest Lumix camera, but the big part was an outing he set up for us to do some photography together in Zion National Park, one of his favorite places.
What a glorious and ideal a day! Carl was as usual so xcited to share with me his experimentations with HDR photography, later resulting in my buying at Carl’s suggestion a copy of Photomatix Pro software.
Here is an HDR image I later made using that from a photo, which if you read the flickr comments, credits Carl and the software from rendering a fantastic image from originals that were not so great.
I also steered a trip through St George in 2015, on the end of the longway back from a 5 month stint at Thompson Rivers University, in Kamloops BC. I took an even more back way across Nevada (The Extraterrestrial Highway) before pulling up to Carl’s home in St George.
Again, I got a huge warm welcome from him and Shari, we chatted, he showed me his latest geeky toy, a Cardboard VR Camera. If you look at the table, he has more toys out!
Like previous visits together Carl urged me try another photography software, Intensify. So again, I bought software Carl said I should use– and to this day this is maybe the main photo editing tool I turn to whenI cannot tune the image the way I like with my normal controls. I use Intensify usually on 1 or 2 images of my daily photos.
Thanks, again, Carl!
And again, Carl has no limit on his energy and enthusiasm. He suggested a photo outing to the luscious sandstone scenery of Snow Canyon State Park, where we spent hours poking around, climbing sandstone bluffs, taking photos.
Look at this scene– forget Waldo, can you find Carl?
That was eight years ago I visited Carl. Over time, I’d still “see” him active in his flickr stream and we’d “talk” occasionally in comments. I slacked a bit in emailing after I moved to Canada in 2018, but saw some new flickr photos in December. I commented once or twice, asked if he still used his same mac.com email.
Now if you think all of this is written in eulogy like fashion, you are wrong. Well… I got an Instagram message from a mutual colleague who shared that Carl posted in Facebook that he was in hospice with maybe 3 months left to live. But they said he was posting photos a few have come in flickr usual scenery stuff and his little dog, Thor. As my colleague knew I was not on Facebook, they relayed this message from me to Carl.
Hi Carl, I don’t use Facebook but was excited to see a new Flickr photo today of Thor. There’s nothing like the companionship of a dog! I’d give anything to be now walking with you in a Zion canyon, geeking out on cameras, HDR, and hearing your joyful laughter. I regularly use the Intensify CK software you recommended! No need to respond just keep taking photos. With you in spirit, friendship always, Alan
I cannot say enough (well I tried) about the 21 years I have been lucky enough to know and be friends with Carl. They do not even make these kinds of leaders and visionaries any more; ones like Carl who are not in it for ego or spotlight, but because he cares about and loves his work. Carl has been huge influence on me as a mentor, and moreso as a friend.
From little cameras to big panoramas, I am fortunate to have known to the genuine laugh, love of life’ love of teaching, and the big heart of Carl Berger. Keep on clicking the shutter, Carl!
Featured Image: A collage image made from a photo of my old Canon Digital Elph (that Carl inspired me to buy in 2007) That Little Camera flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0), with on the screen a photo of Carl from our 2015 outing — The Eye of Carl Berger flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license plus a screenshot of the Gigapan.com web site.
Flickr does some very fun things for me, and my pink and blue dot loyalty planted in March 2004 remains true. One of the fun things it has done numerous times over the past 6+ years is, without much a recognizable pattern, decides to locate my photos somewhere in rural China and remote regions of Russia.
Case in point, there is an edited photo of a valentine rose posted last week to flickr posted from home here in Saskatchewan but Flickr decides it is a bit farther away. Screen shot version here:
It’s happened so often that I mostly ignore or do not notice, but at least the all seeing eye of Stephen Downes noticed after I shared the photo in Mastodon:
Ah yes, greetings from Botsy (as Wikipedia spells it) “(?????) is a rural locality (a selo) in Dzhidinsky District, Republic of Buryatia, Russia. The population was 550 as of 2010. There are 5 streets.”
Maybe the mis-mapping is some issue with the GPS data captured in my iPhone, but as the EXIF data shows on this photo in flickr, the longitude (around 105 W) is correct.
So if I click the link for flickr’s location in Russia, it reveals 64 of my photos taken around Botsiy!
The clue is in the URL parameters (see why it pays to be curious about URLs?)
https://www.flickr.com/search/?lat=50.46908&lon=105.71585&radius=0.25&has_geo=1&view_all=1
it references longitude as lon=105.71585 which is Longitude EAST. If you flip that value negative to lon=-105.71585 you get some 2386 photos correctly mapped to my area in Saskatchewan.
The question for flickr is- why can you map 2386 photos correctly why do you mess up in the other 64?
I decided to reach out for help in the flickr forums with a post explaining the situation. Alot of user replies came in, suggestions, people tried even reporting my photo and got the same result. Oh, and others confirmed its an old bug. But nothing from Flickr Official.
Someone even noted mine was a duplicate post, I had asked the same question in 2021 (but forgot, there’s nothing that really helps me find my posts in these forums).
The key result I did get was that as a FlickrPro user, if I send via a bug report form, I would get direct service. Where is that? I ended up web searching to find it at https://www.flickrhelp.com/ a site that looks different from the vintage layout of the user forums.
The only thing I did find was via a Contact link to a general request form, which, if you read the top sounds like its more about issues with account access. But I will try anywhere! And BOOM! The response was in maybe 2 hours:
I appreciate you letting us know that you are experiencing an issue with the geolocation mab box on your profile.
from Amanda at Flickr Help
At this time, our engineers have been alerted and are working to resolve the issue.
While I do not have any exact timeframe for when this will be resolved, we are doing everything we can to get everything smoothed out again as quickly as possible.
To which I replied:
It’s not a significant issue for me, I more wanted Flickr to know if this problem. I have seen it happen numerous times over the years; before 2018 when I lived in Arizona, I saw 100s? Of my photos mapped to remote parts of China (my only visits there was to Shanghai and twice to Hong Kong)
Do you need me to find more examples?
Again it really does not bother me, but as a huge fan of Flickr since 2004 I want to help identify any problems.
I went deeper in digging for info on the rose photo that set this off using the Flickr API for the method flickr.photos.getInfo and the photo id 52690089339 the API reveals the wrong location data — longitude="105.715850"
FreshRSS 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<rsp stat="ok">
<photo id="52690089339" secret="05b60de37e" server="65535" farm="66" dateuploaded="1676431124" isfavorite="0" license="9" safety_level="0" rotation="0" originalsecret="323b86829c" originalformat="jpg" views="112" media="photo">
<owner nsid="37996646802@N01" username="cogdogblog" realname="Alan Levine" location="Archydal, Canada" iconserver="7292" iconfarm="8" path_alias="cogdog" />
<title>By Any Color</title>
<description />
<visibility ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" />
<dates posted="1676431124" taken="2023-02-14 16:31:15" takengranularity="0" takenunknown="0" lastupdate="1676471187" />
<permissions permcomment="3" permaddmeta="3" />
<editability cancomment="1" canaddmeta="1" />
<publiceditability cancomment="1" canaddmeta="1" />
<usage candownload="1" canblog="1" canprint="1" canshare="1" />
<comments>0</comments>
<notes />
<people haspeople="0" />
<tags>
<tag id="14901-52690089339-986" author="37996646802@N01" authorname="cogdogblog" raw="rose" machine_tag="0">rose</tag>
</tags>
<location latitude="50.469080" longitude="105.715850" accuracy="16" context="0">
<locality>Botsiy</locality>
<neighbourhood />
<region>Buryatiya Republic</region>
<country>Russia</country>
</location>
<geoperms ispublic="1" iscontact="0" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" />
<urls>
<url type="photopage">https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/52690089339/</url>
</urls>
</photo>
</rsp>
Then I look up the same photo’s exif data via flickr.photos.getExif and the location data looks correct:
<exif tagspace="GPS" tagspaceid="0" tag="GPSLatitudeRef" label="GPS Latitude Ref">
<raw>North</raw>
</exif>
<exif tagspace="GPS" tagspaceid="0" tag="GPSLatitude" label="GPS Latitude">
<raw>50 deg 28' 8.69&quot;</raw>
<clean>50 deg 28' 8.69&quot; N</clean>
</exif>
<exif tagspace="GPS" tagspaceid="0" tag="GPSLongitudeRef" label="GPS Longitude Ref">
<raw>West</raw>
</exif>
<exif tagspace="GPS" tagspaceid="0" tag="GPSLongitude" label="GPS Longitude">
<raw>105 deg 42' 57.06&quot;</raw>
<clean>105 deg 42' 57.06&quot; W</clean>
</exif>
It looks like to me somewhere the conversion from 105 deg 42′ 57.06 West longitude to numerical is fouled. But I have no idea how it works.
My curiosity got to me- was my memory correct? I dug into the Flickr Oragnizr where I can use the bottom options to select my geotagged photos (like 23,000), and then via the Map button I could get a view of all these places in China, Russia, Mongolia where my photos were mis mapped
More than 1100 photos of mine are shown in parts of the world I have never seen. But I can spy the patterns, The locations marked lots south of Irkutsk Russia is where I live now in Saskatchewan. The other area with lots near Henan province in China are ones I took when I lived in Strawberry Arizona. In between these two are photos I took from my early road trips back and forth.
Those ones down in Laos? Some of those were from my times in Guadalajara Mexico.
What we have here is somewhat of a reverse image map of where I have been and roamed over the last few years… let’s see if I can get a comparison map thing going (the location map has to be reversed so the names are backward):
To help flickr I found examples that are explicitly obvious:
The one from Kamloops is telling as others have noticed- my good photo friend from Australia, Michael Coghlan commented in 2017:
You’ve taken pix of this photogenic place before…..but seems Flickr thinks it’s in Mongolia!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/33564084071/#comment72157678621828423
I actually don’t care or even want flickr to fix my locations. I like the quirkiness. I just think they should know in case it matters to other people.
As for me? Yes, go ahead and believe I have been up and down the 5 streets of Botsiy, or lived for years in ???, ???, ??, drove through a desert to sea level in ??, ???, ?? south of Jinana, drove through a canyon in Avdzaga, Bulgan, Mongolia… I like the notoriety!
But Flickr, you might want to know what flips the longitude, because it makes a map difference to some folks.
Featured Image: One correctly located!
With grand intentions to stick to a schedule of daily challenges, by skin of my calendar teeth I am 31 for 31 days in both daily flickr photos and ds106 Daily Creates.
I’ve held this pace before maybe 2 months? Does it really matter to get a perfect score (no)? But parsing some time to try something new even if not to the daily metronome I will always maintain is valuable. More so than scrolling through ___________ (fill in any social media stream).
Sometimes there is a 2-3 day catchup, but the photos have been taken every day. Lots of snow, sunsets, dog, the occasional taco, this is maybe the most compulsive habit I have aimed for now for the 16th frigging year.
For fun I made a spreadsheet to make some stats and chart gunk. Since I started there have been 5510 days and of those I posted a daily photo 5205 times for a 94% percentage. For years, I have batted as low as 62% in 2012 and hit the 100% buzzer in 2009, 2015, 2016, 2017, and so far, 2023.
Charts!
I feel like I am nothing but [frozen] net
But the fans are dubious.
They are saying… “Show us your charts in February!”
Game on.
I’ve spouted and presented and yowled about how great the DS106 Daily Create and while I have done (and created) many of them since 2012, I’ve never sustained a run at the top of the leaderboard.
Well for 2023, I am running 31/31!
I just love this bit of data tracking (the good kind) that runs in the now rather old, but despite the Musky One’s Meddling, still works via the Daily Blank WordPress Theme. Even more, everyone who ever participates has their own archive built in– mine is at https://daily.ds106.us/hashtags/cogdog/
That makes my batting percentage 581 / 2710 days or a .214 hitter. Maybe not so impressive after all. But it’s still fun to see what I can conjure in about 20 minutes–
@ds106dc #tdc4031 #ds106 I'm flying far with Helene Dutrieu, next stop…. MARS! pic.twitter.com/OjJoFYdfLH
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 26, 2023
@ds106dc #tdc4029 #ds106 Depluralised the entire PoTA franchise… can't even squeeze a sequel from this much less 5. pic.twitter.com/3REubDu45N
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 25, 2023
It’s been a good mix of challenges in 2023.
For more stats and people to be in awe of, see the all time leaderboard. Heck,even Todd Conaway is ahead of me!
This year the pool of players is only 14. Without a current or recent ds106 class, theparticipation has fallen. But also the sagging spirit of twitter may be at play.
I do have the site posting to Mastodon at https://social.ds106.us/@tdc but admit I am sluggish at getting my head into some code to pull mastodon responses into the site (and the board). The main task is finding or thrashing some PHP code to fetch replies to that account.
If you want that, keep bugging me.
I may not keep this pace, but I am going to be at it as much as possible, as this is more valuable use f time than venting about ChatGPT.
What are you doing for a daily constructive habit?
I’m doubling down on the dailies! Bring it on, February.
Featured Image:
