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Screenshot Accounts 'Delisted' on Flickr

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Jun 14, 2006 10:26 AM
from the screenshots-more-real-than-photos-for-some dept.
The Internet Entertainment Games
An anonymous reader writes "Flickr and Second Life fans seem to have collided head-on over a little known policy on Flickr that 'delists' an account from public areas, including search, when more than half of your content is non-photographic in nature. Flickr stated that most people searching the site are looking for photographic content so the restriction is in place merely to keep the site focused on its original intent. From the article: 'As a result, many screenshots on Flickr are AWOL — at least as far as the general public is concerned. That's angering and confusing some of the people who carefully stage scenes in the popular virtual world and religiously post the results online.'"
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  • Flickr is all about photographs, so it makes sense that that's what they focus on. If you need a place to post SL screen shots, there's still deviantart, renderosity, and myspace. There are quite a few options other than just flickr.
    • ... and as a result, World of Warcraft screenshot addicts the world over mourn this day. Remember, World of Warcraft is a feeling. [purepwnage.com] (Grab episodes 6 and 7 if you haven't seen the full thing.)
       
    • i've never browsed rederosity, but myspace is not an option. 8 image uploads are allowed, and not as a gallery. they are greatly resized using horribly low quality jpeg compression.

      deviantart is one of the slowest sites i've ever used.

      flickr should definitely change their policy for things like this.

      • Re:Makes Sense (Score:2, Interesting)

        by mlk (18543)
        flickr should definitely change their policy for things like this.

        Why?

        It is not as if free blogs [livejournal.com]& image hosting [imageshack.us] are in short surply.
        • Indeed, the great thing about the Internet is that there is not just one single place for things. Why should flickr have to change from a photography site just because they are good at it?

      • Re:Makes Sense (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MaWeiTao (908546) on Wednesday June 14 2006, @11:48AM (#15533211)
        Why should flickr change their policy?

        Its creators wanted a site to share photographs. Why should they have to accomodate anyone who doesn't want to use the site as intended? There are countless other options for sharing images other than photographs.

        If I go into your house and start using your bedroom as a toilet should you be forced to accommodate me? Of course not. I'm in your house, I should abide by your rules. It's essentially the same situation here
    • Heheh, when I finally get around to it, www.screenshots.ca [screenshots.ca] will provide user-contributed screenshot galleries (With tags). I guess I'd better get started on coding that :)
    • There are quite a few options other than just flickr.

      The free WWW account provided by your own ISP (or others) for instance?

      Not very Web 2.0, but cheap as free and reliable.

  • simple solutions (Score:5, Funny)

    by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Wednesday June 14 2006, @10:30AM (#15532490)
    This is easy enough to fix. You can take pictures of your computer monitor with a camera, then upload those. Or you can take your screenshot, print it out, scan it back in, then upload the scan. There's a bunch of ways around this. C'mon, use a little creativity, people!

    • It brings up a good point though, since cameras are moving away from film to memory cards and pixels: just what constitutes an image? If you go the route of thinking that it's something that has to be taken by a camera, that severely limits what we could call an image. If you believe an image is made up of a collection of pixels in some organized fashion, then the range of things we can call images is staggering (PDF files, fonts, screenshots, etc.).

      Flickr's probably just trying to keep from being overwhe

      • They're not debating what consitutes an image. It's what constitutes a photograph.

        If you take a photo of your monitor in place of taking a screenshot, then it's not the photograph people will be looking for, it's the image in the photograph.
      • It brings up a good point though, since cameras are moving away from film to memory cards and pixels: just what constitutes an image?>

        Well in this case it's pretty clear-cut - it's whatever the flickr creators want to have on their website. I guess that could result in some "unfair" "censorship" but meh: their site, their rules.

      • Re:simple solutions (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Wednesday June 14 2006, @10:45AM (#15532636)
        My post was intended as a joke, but your response brings up an interesting semantics issue.
        Picture of your monitor != a photo
        If using a camera to take a picture of something doesn't result in a photo, then what exactly is a photo? I've generally viewed it as being a product of the device used to capture the image. Anything output by a camera would be a photo, in my opinion. However, you seem to disagree with this notion. Is a photo defined by the content of the image? Or is it something else entirely?
      • What if I take a picture of my screen with the digital camera, import it into the computer, insert it into a word document, email it to a friend who can print it out place it onto a wooden table, take a picture with a nice camera, develop the film, scan it in before finally uploading it to flickr.

        Would it be acceptible then??

        (appologies to dailywtf [thedailywtf.com] for copying an idea)
      • OK, but how about if I create a scene in real life that is similar to what is on my computer screen. For example, if I want to post a screen shot of an error dialog, I could get a giant poster board and then write the error message on it and have someone hold it up while standing in front of something that looks like a computer desktop. Then, I could photograph that and post the photo.

        (It would be a lot of work.)

  • Virtual != Real (yet) (Score:4, Insightful)

    by brenddie (897982) on Wednesday June 14 2006, @10:31AM (#15532508)
    Is true that these digital representations are not real photography but how long until you cant diferentiate from a real scene and one generated on a virtual world.

    Maybe Flickr should start thinking about having 2 sections :
    Real photography
    Virtual photography

    • Re:Virtual != Real (yet) (Score:5, Interesting)

      by iainl (136759) on Wednesday June 14 2006, @10:48AM (#15532658)
      They do. Then they delist the virtual one from the search engine, because their site isn't meant to be for looking at some stranger's screenshots.

      Also, this is not news; it was in the click-through agreement from way back, and people who actually draw their own pictures in photoshop or whatever have already hit the problem, had an argument with Flickr and lost once already.

      If nerd X isn't allowed to post homemade hentai, I see no reason why they would let nerd Y post a 3rd-rate imitation of same in Second Life.

    • Re:Virtual != Real (yet) (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tim C (15259) on Wednesday June 14 2006, @11:08AM (#15532851)
      While I appreciate that digital cameras have somewhat blurred the distinctions, I still feel that it's a hell of a stretch equating screenshots with photographs. Even a perfectly photo-realistic scene captured from a game wouldn't be a photograph to my mind; that would require pointing an actual, physical object at some other, actual physical objects and pressing a button (or even saying "take photograph!" for that matter). Maybe I'm just an old stick in the mud.

      I'm not arguing that purely digital representations aren't art, just that they're not photographs, in the same way that a painting or a sculpture isn't.

  • Mr. Literal-Minded has the obvious answer. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dpbsmith (263124) on Wednesday June 14 2006, @10:31AM (#15532509) Homepage
    Instead of posting an electronic "screenshot," take an actual photograph of a computer screen... with some desk clutter like a soda can or a yellow Post-It note in the frame.

    Heck, you could probably take a single photo like that and use an image editor to paste the screenshot into the genuine screen image. If television ads can get away with "picture simulated," why not Flickr users?

  • Delisted, not removed. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Aladrin (926209) on Wednesday June 14 2006, @10:31AM (#15532512)
    They are simply delisted. Nobody WANTS to search for your crappy 'I'm so awesome' screenshots. All of your stuff can still be accessed, just not by people who don't care.

    Big freaking deal.

  • My Rights Online?!! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 14 2006, @10:33AM (#15532524)
    And what pray tell, do Flickrs policies and actions have any relevance to my rights online or any rights offline?!!!

    If you dont like Flickrs actions, dont use them anymore. This isnt a holy violation of your rights or anything else.

  • Stop whining (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tygerstripes (832644) on Wednesday June 14 2006, @10:36AM (#15532558)
    If I really really want a steady crapflood of WoW Wedding shots, I'll tick the "bore me senseless" option. You can put what you like on Flickr, just don't assume anyone else gives a damn. Delisting is a good thing for people who want to use the site as it was intended.

    If you're really that obsessed with having people look at your uninteresting life, why not go and get one. Then take pictures of it. Sheesh.

  • It doesn't seem like it would be too terribly difficult to circumvent the block.

    However, Ito's images do show up in the Flickr group pools for his guild, We Know, and for World of Warcraft, because more than half of the images in his account are traditional photographs. In Ito's Flickr account, images he has taken of Helsinki, Finland, and Vancouver, British Columbia, show up beside an image of guild members setting out for a hike in World of Warcraft.

    Just upload a crap load of pictures, yours or ones you f

  • No big deal. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Rob T Firefly (844560) on Wednesday June 14 2006, @10:41AM (#15532607) Homepage Journal
    I can totally see Flickr's side of the issue, it was never intended to be another deviantart/imageshack/whatever. Free image hosts are a dime a dozen these days. And if you do really want to stay on flickr, upload enough random real-life photos to satisfy the more-than-half requirement.
  • You know, it's not that hard or costly to setup your own domain and Coppermine (or whatever image package you like). Not to mention you don't have to put up with ads or whatever other nonsense those public sites make you deal with.

  • If they are positioning themselves as some kind of photography site, then fair enough. But it seems Flickr's focus is on the sharing aspect rather than the photography aspect. I suspect that the original intention of this limitation was to stop people from turning Flickr into the average viral cartoon/funny photoshop picture dump, and that overzealous employees took it a bit too literally.

    After all, is there any significant difference between capturing a scene from the real world and capturing a scene

    • After all, is there any significant difference between capturing a scene from the real world and capturing a scene from a fictional world?

      Yes, yes there are significant differences. You see, most pictures taken of virtual worlds are boring, have little artistic merit, and are of no interest to anyone outside the immediate circle of the person taking them, whereas most real life pictures are... Oh, wait...

      No, no difference.

    • I expect the policy will be clarified to allow things like screenshots from virtual worlds, but disallow things like movie posters and screenshots from desktop applications.

      Then we get into the tricky situation of defining a "virtual world" vs. a "desktop application." Any MMOG client is an application, and a certain popular spreadsheet has a flight simulator easter egg.

      To take it to further levels of headache-induction, many mapped textures in 3D games and other CGI are based on a real photo of the textu

  • Instead of using the Print Screen key, just point your trusty Digital Rebel at the screen and voila ... real photo.

  • Who's rights, where? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ivan256 (17499) * on Wednesday June 14 2006, @10:46AM (#15532651)
    This could be a useful slashdot section, but we keep getting these stories that don't have anything to do with 'rights' at all, much less the reader's rights... Somtimes even the online part is a stretch.

    So, some website actually implemented their policy, and some self-important people with a misguided sense of propriety got pissed about it. News for Nerds? Absolutely! Your rights online? Not a chance.

  • Market Forces (Score:4, Informative)

    by Doomedsnowball (921841) <doomedsnowballs@yahoo.com> on Wednesday June 14 2006, @10:48AM (#15532668)
    So why don't people use Photobucket [photobucket.com] or Snapfish [snapfish.com] or Snapzilla [sluniverse.com] or VillagePhotos [villagephotos.com] or Zoto [zoto.com] or TinyPic [tinypic.com] or SmugMug [smugmug.com] or Greatest Journal [greatestjournal.com] or...

    My personal favorite DeviantArt [deviantart.com]?

    There's not much of a story here except that if you commit to one hosting service, you run the risk of them being complete jerks with your content choice.

  • Need my morning coffee (Score:3, Funny)

    by gotem (678274) on Wednesday June 14 2006, @10:55AM (#15532743) Homepage Journal
    I at first read that as 'non-pornographic in nature'.
    I was about to add Flickr to my bookmarks

  • Your Rights Online? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tim C (15259) on Wednesday June 14 2006, @10:56AM (#15532749)
    This has to be one of the most ridiculous misapplications of this topic that I've ever seen.

    1. You have no right, natural, God-given or otherwise, to have your content hosted on Flickr.

    2. The accounts have not been deleted, they have just been delisted. That means that they won't show up in a search.

    3. As I understand it, you can still provide people with direct links to the screenshots.

    Please, help me out here - in what way is this a YRO issue?
  • Hmm, it looks like Flickr is between a rock and a hard place. I don't know exactly how they do it now, but I would guess they use automation to flag images that are not considered photographic. It's just too big a job to do this manually, even if you offshore the whole thing to a low wage country. So if they decide that due to demand, to allow "photos" of users' virtual lives in WoW, SL, FFXI, etc., then policing it is going to be a real challenge. There are ways to make it easier to automate this, but the
  • Flickr is a free site originally designed for photographers. Screenshots of Second Life or any other game are not photography. Seems pretty simple huh?

    Go find a different host if you can't accept Flickr's rules.
  • As long as I can still get to the OMG!!! PONEYS!!! [flickr.com] version of Slashdot, I'll be fine. At least I'll always be able to make my own sign [cmdrtaco.com].
  • Here we see the downside of Web 2.0. Apps available for the asking? Cool. The problem is that what happens to my data is completely up to the whim of the people running these sites. People are _shocked_ when something that they throw onto someone else's web site is moved around, or removed entirely. Wake up. The bargain you've made for all these freebies is loss of control.

  • Screenshots sites (Score:3, Informative)

    by jedigeek (102443) on Wednesday June 14 2006, @11:20AM (#15532953) Journal
    A friend of mine developed a site specifically for screenshots in virtual worlds:

    http://multitap.net/ [multitap.net]

    It's fairly popular, easy to use, has an API so you could hack it straight into WoW. Maybe some of you upset by flickr would like this?

    • Re:Search option (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ScottLindner (954299) on Wednesday June 14 2006, @10:43AM (#15532620)
      You can't create something effective that is everything to everyone. It really is best to carve out your niche and stay in it. This is exactly what Fliky is doing and it is very wise. To do otherwise will only cause problems in the long run for both users and advertisers paying Flikr.

      Scott
    • Am I the only one who read that as "non-pornagraphic" the first time?
      I'm afraid you are. All the others read that as "non-pornographic".
    • no.. no your not.. i reread it three times before i caught it.. althought it might make the site work looking at if that was their policy
    • Delisted not deleted. Still taking up file space, just not now listed. Apparently flicker has a target audience, and random crap from WoW in the listing is not what the target audience wants.

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