Photoblog, Bandwidth & Beer
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
If you happen over to my photoblog Take a Walk in my Shoes you might quickly realise there is only a single image, rather than archives with a monthly favourite. If you’ve been enjoying the format with large high quality images in archives, I can only apologise. Unfortunately the main issue is that I initially blew my hosting account bandwidth, so I doubled it, and I’ve pretty much used half of that again. So my 2000MB account bandwidth limit, which usually only consumes a fraction of that, seemed to blow out to about 2600MB this month. Last month it was a mere 300MB, up from about 130MB the month before. At the increase over last month’s statistics I’d say it’s a case of fix the leak now before January cuts me off at the financial bandwidth consuming knees.
A secondary reason is that Creative Commons licensing with a requirement for attribution and a non-commercial limitation is just that. The saying is free as in free to use non-commercially, not free as in beer. So I’m reticent to leave archives of particularly high quality images online for Google Images or other automated systems to dish out to all and sundry as free stock photography. No, it isn’t free. Not as in free beer. And if anyone has that impression then I apologise again. Sharing these images with people online, and saying that I don’t mind if you show people or stick them on your own tshirt or mash them up for fun, does not mean I forfeit copyright or moral rights on the images. It’s about sharing, not exploiting.
However, the large image size and clean format of Take a Walk in my Shoes proves to me that Flickr isn’t the option if you want to produce and present high quality photography (stock, commercial, art, whatever) into the online marketplace. I’m not known for my photography although I’ve been getting more heavily involved in it over the last year – more heavily than web development, for sure. But people like to see interesting and beautiful photography with low cognitive effort on their end. I know this because that’s how I like to view photography, and the statistics here confirm it. This is a potentially popular and fast growing photoblog.
