Adam Franco.com

Adam Franco July 28th, 2008

As a proponent of open-source software and freely usable culture I try to encourage others to make use of my work as much as possible by applying the GNU General Public License (GPL) to all of my software and the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike () to any writing or photography.

Aside: The reason I use different licenses is that for software I have a reasonable expectation that commercial use of my software would result in feedback, bug-reports, translations, or patches that would further improve said software, whereas I do not feel that commercial use of photographs without compensation would improve my photography.

While I encourage others to make use of my work, I do expect them to respect the (liberal) license that I have applied to them and properly give credit where it is due. What particularly bugs me is Flickr’s so-so support of Creative Commons licenses. They encourage usage of CC licenses (decent) and display license information on the photo page (good):

But in the HTML snippets that they provide users for showing an image in one’s blog, they do not include any attribution or CC license information as required by the CC licenses (bad).

One of the knocks against the Creative Commons effort as a whole is the lack of clarity as to how attribution should be done in different media. For web publishing however, how to attribute is quite clear - though buried as the 11th item in their FAQ. Major services like Flickr failing to provide good example of attribution and how to properly credit work just makes the whole Creative Commons thing that much less clear for the general public who now find Creative Commons work readily available and with copy-paste code that violates the license by default.

In an effort to push Flickr to provide a good example for users of Creative Commons-licensed works I’ve started the following thread (reposted below) on the Flickr Ideas forum. I encourage others to weigh in if proper attribution is important to you. Such a fix should only take a Flickr developer about 15 minutes to do, but first such a feature needs to hit their radar.

Flickr Ideas: Update embed code to properly attribute for Creative Commons Licenses

As discussed in this Help thread from a year ago, the “Share This” and “All Sizes” embed code does not meet the Creative Commons license requirements for proper attribution. To quote the CreativeCommons.org FAQ:

How do I properly attribute a Creative Commons licensed work?

If you are using a work licensed under one of our core licenses, then the proper way of accrediting your use of a work when you’re making a verbatim use is: (1) to keep intact any copyright notices for the Work; (2) credit the author, licensor and/or other parties (such as a wiki or journal) in the manner they specify; (3) the title of the Work; and (4) the URL for the work if applicable.

You also need to provide the URL for the Creative Commons license selected with each copy of the work that you make available.

If you are making a derivative use of a work licensed under one of our core licenses, in addition to the above, you need to identify that your work is a derivative work, ie. “This is a Finnish translation of the [original work] by [author]” or “Screenplay based on [original work] by [author].”

Further recommendations and guidelines for marking works can be found at the CC Marking project.

The creator’s name (2) and license logo/link (1) are required for proper attibution, but missing from the Flickr-provided embed code. This means that when a user copy/pastes the embed code provided by Flickr, they violate the license by default if they do not take other steps (not mentioned anywhere on Flickr) to give proper attribution.

After no response on the previous thread for a year, TeX HeX has utilized the Flickr API to create an embed code generator at www.ImageCodr.org that can take the URL of any CC licensed Flickr photo and generate the proper HTML code on the fly. This ImageCoder example page provides embed code with the results below:

  by  Adam Franco 

Note the proper link to the license and attribution of the photographer. Also, note the very understandable description of how the Creative Commons license terms affect usage of the image:

I applaud TeX HeX for his wonderful work, but this embed code really should be generated by Flickr itself as only a small percentage of users are going to find their way to ImageCoder.

Please Flickr staff, update the embed code with proper attribution lines so that users of our images can properly attribute by default.

Comment on this thread in the Flickr Ideas forum »

• Musings , Photography
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Adam Franco August 29th, 2007

Sarah, my dad, and I took a canoe and kayak trip down the Big Spring Creek in Newville, Pennsylvania. The creek is beautiful, with clear water, many aquatic plants, and much waterfowl.

Since the creek has a tiny drainage and is primarily spring fed, it does not flood regularly (if at all) and is hence heavily silted. For about the first 3rd of our trip, the canoe was constantly scraping the bottom and getting stuck. My dad in the sea-kayak had a little bit shallower draw and only got stuck once.

After the first 3rd of the trip the channel deeped, but was still quite narrow, requiring a lot of maneuvering of the large canoe.

In a few spots fallen trees block the channel, though we were able to gingerly maneuver over or under them.

Be aware that a State Boat Registration sticker is required on all boats.

• View the Photos from the trip
• View the route map in Google Maps
• View the route map in Google Earth

The Google Earth/Maps images are making use of two scripts that I have just written that generate a KML file from the Flickr photo set and then join the photo collection with the GPS track of our route.

• Outdoors , Photography
• Comments(3)

Adam Franco August 23rd, 2007

One of the things I (and others) have found lacking when working with geotagged images on Flickr, is the inability to retrieve a “photo set” (Flickr’s take on a slideshow) as a KML document that can then be displayed in GoogleEarth, GoogleMaps, or other geo-browsers. Flickr provides some KML links and GeoRSS feeds, but these are either limited to 20 items or can only be pointed at tags or users’ photo-streams, not a particular photo set.

To fill this niche, I present a small script I wrote to generate a KML file from the geotagged photos in a set:

Features:

• Generate a KML file from a Flickr photo set
• Directly open the KML file in Google Maps
• Choose what size image to include in the placemark description for each photo.
• Optionaly draw a path (line) from photo to photo ordered in one of several ways: by date taken, by date uploaded, by set order. Useful for making a quick and dirty map of a trip.

Examples:

• KML / GoogleMaps - A nice set of graphitti in Toronto.
  
  View Larger Map
   
• KML / GoogleMaps - A set of photos from a trip I took around Turkey, with lines drawn chronologically. Since this is a large set that causes GoogleMaps to time-out, I’ve downloaded the KML file and then re-uploaded it to my website. This is the method I recommend for large photo sets.
  
  View Larger Map
   

You are welcome to use this script hosted on my site, or you can download it and run it on your own computer/webserver. If you would like to run it yourself, please be aware of the following…

System Requirements:

• PHP 5.2 or greater.
• The PEAR Flickr API

This script is available under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 or later. (Source Code)

Updates::

• 2007-08-27
  • Now uses htmlspecialchars() to clean titles instead of htmlentities(), the latter of which was causing excessive translation of German characters. Thanks Stefan Geens, for pointing this out.
  • Form now generates valid XHTML 1.0 strict.
  • Now can use image thumbnails instead of camera icons. Thanks for the idea Nicolas Hoizey.
• 2007-08-24
  • Now escapes ampersands in titles and descriptions. Thanks Jesse for pointing this out.

  Future Improvement Ideas::

  • Add an option for icon size.
  • Add options for custom icon/path styles. I’m not sure whether to give several options, or just provide a field for a block of arbitrary KML style-markup.
  • Computers and Technology , GIS/GPS , KML , PHP , Photography , Software
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Adam Franco May 11th, 2007

A few roving thunderstorms last night gave new plants a much needed drink. The flowers below are “Bleeding Hearts”, a beautiful surprise to find in the beds our first spring in this house.

• Musings , Photography
• Comments(2)

Adam Franco April 5th, 2007

Today we received an unseasonably late snow-storm that has left us with several inches of snow on the ground. We woke up this morning and were greeted by the first several inches of heavy, wet snow clinging to branches during a lull in the storm. After accidentally letting the cat slip out the door I spent 45 minutes tromping around the yard with my camera. Click on the image below to open a Quicktime VR panorama (a 3D view that you can rotate around in).

QuickTime VR (5.5MB)

equirectangular panorama, a stitch of 93 photos (3.6MB)

• Musings , News , Photography
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Adam Franco February 17th, 2007

On Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 snow started falling, hard. Sarah had class and I had a meeting that was not yet canceled, so we headed in to campus in the morning with several inches on the ground. A quick errand to the Agway for flowers at 10:00am required 15minutes of shoveling to free the car. By noon my meeting had been canceled as had Sarah’s afternoon classes, so for home we headed. After a futile attempt at freeing a colleague’s car from the snow, we giving him a ride home to Cornwall then worked our way slowly through the clogged streets of downtown Middlebury. At this point visibility was limited to about 50 feet and what traffic existed was crawling along. The Jetta did ok as long as we kept up our momentum to blast through drifts; if we had stopped we may not have be able to get going again without a lot of shoveling.

We knew we wouldn’t be able to get the car up to the house right away, so we stashed it in the Paris Farm supply parking lot across the road and scrambled over the snowbanks and up the driveway. Luckily Sarah had decided several days before to stay in and roast a duck for Valentines dinner instead of going out; a brilliant bit of luck now that travel was pretty much impossible. The snow kept falling harder and the winds were picking up so I got out the snowblower and started cutting a car-width path up the driveway to our parking area. By my 4th pass the first strip that I cleared was covered with two fresh inches of snow so I put the blower in high gear, cleaned off two tracks for the tires and ran to get the car.

The car by this point (2:30pm) was beginning to drift over. I could barely see Route 7 and had to stomp around looking for the exit from the parking lot onto the highway. Exit located I jumped in the car and with about zero visibility brought it around up to the house. I finished blowing the rest of the parking area and headed inside for the night.

The next morning we awoke to over 30 inches of new snow on the ground and an announcement that the college was closed. A lazy breakfast later we began three and a half hours of shoveling and snow blowing to clear all of the snow off of the driveway. The 10-hp Cub Cadet blower worked like a charm, though cutting through the 6-foot snow banks along the road still took a lot of effort: blow out a bit, cut down the overhang with the shovel, blow that away, lather, rinse, repeat.

As I finished the driveway I chatted with my neighbor, George, about the snow and the strength of roofs. I went up on our roof to check it out and was greeted with hip-dip drifts. I was under the mistaken impression that we had only 2×6″ rafters so I began the 2-hour project of shoveling off the roof. When it was done we were left with 6-7 foot-deep piles of snow surrounding the house. While the shoveling of the roof may have been unnecessary, the piles were much fun for jumping off the roof into!

Friday afternoon was the biweekly employee ski race at the college Snow Bowl. Conditions we epic. After our race runs, Mike S. and I spent the rest of the afternoon getting fresh tracks in the knee deep snow in the woods between Ross and Hadley. Wonderful fluff!

• Musings , News , Photography
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Adam Franco November 1st, 2003

That big coronal mass ejection (a.k.a. “solar flare”) that has been in the news this week has finally hit earth, causing really big and pretty auroras (Aurora Borealis = Northern Lights) even far from the poles. My mom said that she could see them in Pennsylvania. The view from Vermont was a large red and green curtain across the northern sky and up to about 45° off the horizon.

I took my camera and tripod about a quarter-mile down 125 past Ridgeline and took pictures for about 45min. It was pretty stunning.

I made up a slide show of [14 of] my pictures (taken between 8:30pm and 9:30pm Thursday night).

For more photos, visit: http://www2.adamfranco.com/photography/

Enjoy! I hope you got a chance to see them!

• Musings , Opinions , Photography
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