fotoLibrarian

Gosh, I haven't driven past this site for a while. It looks so comfortable and familiar.

I'm just climbing out of the car to plant two signposts in the road. The first will take you straight to the fotoLibra Pro Blog, where I (and I hope you) will discuss picture libraries, stock agencies, picture researchers, picture buyers, picture users, sales, photographs, metadata, keywords, storage, downloads, accounts and all the things that go to make up the life of a busy picture library and its suppliers, customers, staff and shareholders.

The second points down a winding lane to my own blog, where I rattle on about anything outside fotoLibra which catches my attention or takes my fancy. For those of you who know me, you will not be surprised to learn there'll be a number of postings about follies, fonts, food, football (Rugby Union), Formula 1, foreign places and all the other miscellania and charivari that make up this wonderful world. Some of it, I hope, may even be interesting. You can find the new fotoLibrarian Blog here.

Thanks for your patience, Opera lovers, and I hope we'll see and hear from you on the new fotoLibra sites. Participation is welcome, if not mandatory.

Hugs and kisses,

Gwyn

We've had a problem with a couple of recent uploads to fotoLibra.

If you find them on the site, you'll see their dimensions are much too small for sales use: 120 x 160 pixels, 10 x 14 mm, 0.4 x 0.5 inches. They'd barely make a postage stamp.

What's happened is that a few Nikon users have uploaded NEF (RAW) files by mistake. fotoLibra only accepts JPEG or TIFF files, and our system will not read RAW files, as every manufacturer uses a subtly different format.

They need to be re-uploaded as JPEGs or TIFFs.

Most software will identify the images as real TIFFs, just very small ones.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 automatically converts the RAW NEF files into TIFFs, but when we looked at the original filenames on fotoLibra (we store, but do not use, the members' original filenames) and in the EXIF data in Bridge CS3, we discovered they were NEF files. You can upload them to fotoLibra DND if you manually change the file extension to TIFF.

And you don't want them to sell.

BAPLA runs an award for the national newspaper that runs the greatest number of picture credits in the year. It's usually won by the Times, Guardian, Telegraph or Independent.

fotoLibra insists on proper picture credits. But, ultimately, we are at the whim or mercy of the editors. Credits can be dropped for the oddest reasons, but the usual culprit is the designer, who simply forgets. He's not penalised for it, because where's the profit? The time taken to add the correct credit doesn't make the proprietor any more money.

In order to get proper credits we have to be nice to people. And as we are nice by nature, that's not too hard. But sometimes all our efforts come to naught.

We sold 11 out of 12 pictures to a major national calendar. They kindly sent us proofs, and we spotted a major error — all the photographs were credited ©Yvonne Seeley / fotoLibra. Now Yvonne is many things, but she's not a photographer, she's a picture librarian. So the correct attributions were hastily sent to the printer, the receipt was acknowledged, and we were assured the corrections had been made.

The calendars arrived this morning. All the photographs were credited to ©Yvonne Seeley / fotoLibra. What can we do? It's their calendar, and it looks great. The picture credit is insignificant and unimportant to them. It's not to us, or to our photographers. It's their fault, but we get to shoulder the blame.

I was asked to write the Foreword to a newly published book titled 'Bizarre Buildings'. I was sent a proof, in which the word 'Dalek' had been replaced by 'futuristic tanklike robot', and I had been described as 'Founder of the Folly Fellowship'. I made the corrections — everyone outside Canada knows what a Dalek is — and I was co-founder, not sole founder, of the Folly Fellowship. The corrections were received, acknowledged and ignored.

The book packager has expressed his regret, and has offered to write to the other two co-founders of the FF to admit the mistake was at their end.

I doubt we can ask the same of the calendar company.

Yet another new member of fotoLibra's staff to greet. Welcome to Dan Ashdown, who joins us today as Web Designer. He'll be working for our Technical Development Manager Neil Smith, putting the final touches on the forthcoming fotoLibra version 4.0, and he's based in Cardiff.

The design has largely been done, and Dan's job will be to integrate it across the board. When it's complete, we've got two more projects for him to start on which have been awaiting someone with his design skills.

You'll hear more in due course.

Big journey next Monday. Pack new Proliant server into car, then London to Cardiff to collect the Teravault on which all the fotoLibra assets are backed up, then Cardiff to Manchester where our first rack is located.

We now have more terabytes of image storage than the entire US military had ten years ago.

We (or rather Neil) then install the servers and storage in Manchester, and I schlep back to London. I will crash out on the way. Hope the servers don't.

My job is to chauffeur and hump the avoirdupois of hardware. Neil is the magician who will make it all talk to us.

Meanwhile the Xserves and Xserve RAIDS will still be chattering away to us from Cardiff. They have been fantastically reliable, only faltering briefly when we were overloaded after being made Website of the Day on BBC Radio 2.

But we've all noticed that they're slower than they used to be. They're running way over peak capacity, and have been for some weeks. I hope everything will speed up next week when the new equipment is up and running, but I have a sneaking suspicion Neil wants to wait for fotoLibra Version 4 before releasing all this raw pent-up power.

Version 4 looks sensational. It will provide members with a slew of exciting new features, and will be a lot faster.

I can't wait to get your reactions.

Sys-con Media, a digital content licensing technology provider, has launched new services for publishers to help them monetise [that’s an Americanism meaning ‘to make more money out of’] their online content. One service, called Photo Reprints, allows publishers to sell reprints of their photos, separate from the articles in which they appeared. Users can buy photo reprint rights for use on the internet or in other media, and also select from a variety of sizes and formats.

Nearly right!

It’s a clever idea, except the overwhelming majority of publishers will almost always only have the rights to use the photograph in the particular context in which you see it. When we sell usage rights to a photograph, the publisher often wants to assume the purchase price includes web use as well.

Not so. No, no, no, no, NO!

If a UK publisher sold US hardcover rights in a novel, how pleased would he be to find the US publisher marketing a paperback of that title?

When you buy a rights-managed image, each use is clearly defined and paid for. And if you buy a royalty-free image, you can use it wherever and however you like, with one exception — you cannot sell it on.

So unless the publisher has taken the picture itself, owns the photograph outright or has specifically purchased these rights, then the Photo Reprints scheme could get them into a whole heap of trouble.

fotoLibra has only got tiny little teeth because we’re kittens, but sabre-toothed Getty Images and Corbis prowl the jungles of the internet hunting out infractions like these.

There’s a lot of blood, and a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. And the arrogators always have to pay up.

Fair play, they did say “sell reprints of their photos” but there’s insufficient emphasis placed on the ‘their'.

Did Sys-Con Media figure all this out before announcing it? And then they went ahead with it?

Apologies for this. Opera, my blog hosts, seem to have decided to ignore carriage returns. So this looks like one big lump of text to me, and there's not much I can do about it. Anyway, here I go:

We’re not lawyers, and we’re not rich, so talk of who owns what copyright is generally best left to billionaires and vexatious litigants.

Once a piece of creative work (which could be music, a piece of writing, or whatever, but as this is a fotoLibra blog let’s keep it to images) is in the public domain, that should mean what it says. Anybody can use it without payment.

We agree and support this right. But there is an additional factor to consider. How is this work supplied?

When a book is delivered to your door, you expect to pay the shipping costs. You would be hard pressed to claim the cost back from DHL or FedEx simply because the book is out of copyright.

Similarly, if a fotoLibra member buys an old out-of-copyright postcard, scans it, uploads it to fotoLibra, fotoLibra goes off and finds a buyer and money finally changes hands, that’s equally fair. The original might have cost little or nothing to acquire, but it’s like bottled water — effectively you’re paying for everything but the product.

The Bridgeman Art Library, an international picture library that specialises in reproductions of works of art, took the software company Corel Corporation to court over their use of high quality photographic slides Bridgeman had made from original paintings in the public domain.

The US court found against them, ruling that “Photographic reproductions of visual works in the public domain were not copyrightable because the reproductions involved no originality.”

That’s as technical a decision as you could hope to hear, and deliberately ignores the painstaking work Bridgeman had put in to create the most perfect replica of the artwork. Once again we see the great gulf between art and craft, between opera and pop music, between them and us. Bridgeman was an honest broker in this suit; where else could Corel hope to acquire those images?

Now there’s a new spat with a pressure group (usually one old biddy in a bedsit, but this time a non-profit organization, public.resource.org) claiming that America’s Smithsonian Institute is selling images that are in the public domain. So to get even the PG downloaded over 6,000 photos from them and posted them on Flickr, thereby challenging the copyrights and restrictions on these images being sold by the Smithsonian.

That’s fine and admirable, but as well as spending an inordinate amount of public.resource.org’s own time doing this, what possible use can this be to anyone? You can’t buy and use the pictures from Flickr, you can simply look at them, utterly out of context and with no reference.

When fotoLibra sells an old postcard for use in a book, the picture is required to enhance the text; the caption explains it; it is elevated to become an Illustration, rather than a simple anonymous picture. Therein lies its value. The fotoLibra member spotted its potential, fotoLibra itself provides the mechanics to bring it to market, the image has renewed use and relevance.

So public.resource.org has made its point. And if it had uploaded the images to fotoLibra, we could have made them some money.

There was another trial by television on BBC 1 last night, riveting as always, and if provable in court then prison sentences all round, please.

The Panorama programme claimed that people phoning in to competitions on GMTV were encouraged to carry on calling in at 75p a pop (even when they didn't get through) for up to an hour after the winner had already been chosen — so there was no chance whatsoever of winning. But GMTV and its telephone service provider Opera Interactive Technology pocketed about £10 million a year from this scam.

For scam it clearly was. They stopped doing it as soon as they were found out. What I can't figure out is why they did it in the first place. They would have made exactly the same amount of money if they had allowed callers to have a chance of winning right up to the cut-off time. What did they save? Was it so they could slope off home an hour early? Have I missed something here? They knew they were doing wrong, because Panorama also alleged that Opera employee Mark Nuttall had sent an e-mail to staff in 2003 telling them to keep it secret from GMTV.

The blame was not solely targeted at GMTV. The BBC's flagship children's programme Blue Peter once gave a prize to a studio guest because the phone lines weren't working properly. Tsk tsk. Guilty as hell.

The BBC is probably the most wonderful organisation in the world. Certainly they have easily the best website in the world, perhaps even better than fotoLibra's. But not everything they do is squeaky clean.

Take their calls for photos, for example. At fotoLibra we advise you not to do this, because they appropriate your copyright without payment but reserve the right to blame you if something goes wrong. I wrote about it in my blog last year.

And it struck me they'd pulled a fastish one on this humble blogger. There's a programme called Countryfile on BBC1 on Sunday mornings which is a miscellany on country matters. A couple of years ago they called and asked if I'd do a piece on architectural follies. As that's my passion (last century I wrote five books on the subject) I agreed. I went out to Castell Coch, a lovely folly outside Cardiff, and filmed for much of the afternoon. Dear fotoLibra members, I took half a day away from my work for you!

I asked when the piece would appear, and they said they'd let me know. They didn't, nor did I get paid, so I assumed they'd dumped the piece. A month or so later a couple of friends mentioned they'd seen me on telly. I acquired a video of it and there I was, dashing and clever as always, pontificating on about follies, about 3 minutes out of a 6 minute slot.

Two weeks ago a friend mentioned she'd seen me on telly on Sunday. Then another. By now I had a TV gizmo that replays previously broadcast programmes, so I checked it out and there was my little piece, broadcast again.

So. Half a day off work. Plenty of time on the phone suggesting locations. Travel to and from Castell Coch. 3 minutes airtime, apparently good enough to be broadcast twice. No payment. No offer of payment. No expenses. No offer of expenses.

Somebody made some money out of this. It wasn't me, and I provided the content. I had nothing to sell (I haven't had a folly book published this century) and nothing to gain by giving them my time. When I appeared on Roy Noble's show on Radio Wales, a small cheque promptly arrived (£25 I think it was). Why nothing from Countryfile? When fotoLibra provides content to a customer, it gets paid, and it pays its members accordingly. Why should the BBC be exempt?

Up till a month ago, if you’d mentioned the word Ajax to me I would eventually have thought of three things:
1.Household cleanser
2.Greek superhero
3.Dutch soccer team
in that order, I’m rather ashamed to admit.

But in the schema for fotoLibra Version 4, now well on the way, I was informed that much of the site would be written in AJAX. That’s nice, I thought, at least it will have the fresh burst of zesty lemon or smell of the soothing scent of lavender.

I then learnt that this AJAX stood for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, a combination of programming languages and techniques for building exceedingly smart Web sites, so I checked it out for myself.

Type AJAX into Google and you get the following top ten hits out of 80,700,000:
1.Greek superhero
2.Type of programming
3.Type of programming
4.Type of programming
5.Type of programming
6.Type of programming
7.Type of programming
8.Type of programming
9.Type of programming
10.Type of programming

Poor old Colgate, who own www.ajax.com. Poor old Dutch footballers, who despite being around as Ajax FC since 1900, using the Greek superhero for a logo and winning the Dutch league 29 times, don’t even figure in the first several Google pages on Ajax.

AJAX won’t be used on our home page. fotoLibra v4 is designed to be functional, not wow-look-at-me. AJAX is being deployed as a tool to help users navigate speedily through reams of photographs thrown up in searches.

It’s just one of the stacks of really exciting new features designed in to make the fotoLibra user experience even better for both buyers and sellers.

Watch this space.

And what about Ajax the superhero, still No.1 after all these years?

Well, he’s still dead. We don’t really know if he was ever alive, as we know about him from Homer’s Iliad as one of the mightiest — certainly the largest — of the Achaean warriors in the Trojan war. Perhaps he should count among the Fictional Heros? He must be better known than Carnacki the ghost finder, Furie? I have to admit I have never heard of Carnacki. I will check him (her?) out.

Hot on the heels of its one second of TV fame, the fotoLibra HQ now gets a radio mention — well, its location does.

Philip Pullman, author of 'His Dark Materials' trilogy (if you haven't read them, go out and buy them. Now. The best fiction I've read this century) was reminiscing with his old English teacher Enid Jones, from Ysgol Ardudwy in Harlech, on BBC Radio 4.

Pullman went to school in Harlech, and he was rhapsodising about the Morfa (the marram grass covered flatlands behind the sweep of the dunes) and the views around Harlech — as I have previously told you, the best in Europe.

"Don't forget Good God Corner!" chuckled Enid. "Ah yes," said Pullman. He passed Good God Corner every day on his way from home in Llandanwg to school in Harlech.

Why the name? Because the first time you drive round the corner this staggering view suddenly smacks you in the face, you ejaculate 'Good God!', slam on the brakes and the car behind whacks you up the bum.

That's where the fotoLibra HQ is sited. When we're not out flogging our members' pictures our highly-trained staff is sweeping shards of red and amber perspex off the road.

The view makes up for it.