MURALI DORAISWAMY: It’s easy to lose one’s cool in the fast-paced, react-now, high-stress world of business—just look at the emails or tweets that have come back to haunt so many leaders these days. And there’s a scientific explanation for why it’s can be so easy for any of us to fire off insensitive or angry tirades.
By scanning people’s brains while they’re making decisions, scientists have discovered that, when stress or emotions are involved (as they often are in the workplace), people’s thinking patterns change. When we’re calm, the frontal lobes of our brains guide slow, rational thinking; this is called “cold cognition.” But when we’re aroused—by stress, anger, or even love—spur-of-the-moment, impulsive “hot cognition” decisions are made by the emotionally-driven limbic system and amygdala, which hijacks information before it’s ever even processed the more logical frontal lobes.
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); At the same time neuroscientists have revealed how this “hot cognition” system can overpower our brains, science has also revealed some ways we can fight back. So if you’re faced with a stressor—a complaining client or financial crisis—here’s what neuroscience says you should do before confronting the situation to avoid making a potentially costly mistake:
Be aware that emotions are tied to altered decision making. Simply having this awareness, and noticing you’re fired up, can help you step back from sending an email or making a phone call until your stress or anger has calmed.
If you can’t sleep on a decision, turn to meditation or have a ritual that helps you calm down on a faster time scale than overnight. They key is to get keep your amygdala from making a rash decision.
Pretend you’re giving advice to your best friend about how to deal with the situation. When you’re giving advice to someone else, neuroscientists have shown, your brain automatically uses the “cold cognition” system.
Likewise, get advice from a close friend about how to deal with the stressor; they’ll likely have a less emotionally charged perspective.
Interestingly, some studies suggest that women (often considered the more emotional sex) are more likely than men to take a step back before rushing to act in stressful situations – another reason to have greater gender equity in leadership teams.
Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy is professor of psychiatry and medicine at Duke University Medical Center, where he also serves as a member of the Duke Institute of Brain Sciences and as a senior fellow at the Duke Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development.
Are you on the lookout for the latest app you won’t be able to put down, the next gadget you’ll be itching to get your hands on, or the slickest new tools to make your workday more productive and your downtime even more fun?
Then look no further than our favorite site for finding the latest and greatest tech products. Each week, we review the crowdsourced links posted to a website called Product Hunt, where tech-savvy users post their best finds and discuss the latest apps and gadgets with a growing community of developers, designers, investors, founders, and tech enthusiasts.
The developers and founders of a newly launched product — whether that product comes from a big, established tech company or whether it’s the first hit from a small startup — often chime in to answer questions, offer some backstory on how the product was created, and gather feedback from the early adopters in the community. Somewhere between 600 and 800 venture capitalists reportedly use the site, a great testament to its ability to surface products that would otherwise fly under even the best-connected people’s radars.
We took a look at all of the apps, gadgets, and services posted on Product Hunt last week and chose the apps that offer the most fun ways to send messages, communicate with your friends, and connect with new friends. While you can use any old app to send a basic text message or share a photo with friends, these apps offer novel ways to communicate.
Bethere is an Android and iOS app that enables you to check in ahead of time, simplifying the process of letting your friends know where you’re planning to be. With bethere, you can let your friends know where you’ll be and at what time, and get real-time updates on your friends’ activities. To invite a friend to join you, select an activity, tag a friend, and share your plans. Once you arrive at your destination, the app uses a time and location-triggered push notification that can remind you to take a photo to capture the moment.
You can sign in to the app with Facebook, import photos directly from Facebook or Instagram, like others’ “betheres” and photos, and become friends with others in the same vicinity. Bethere cofounder Panos Spyrakis explains on Product Hunt, “Our challenge is to take the check-in concept even further adding true value & introducing social planning as it should be.”
He adds: “We want to offer real value & reward users for actually sharing their location with friends and this is what happens with bethere. Once they start using the app they actually realize they can influence their friends’ schedule offline. And that’s what reminds users to get back in the app and post!”
Convoy is an invisible app that enables you to have anonymous one-on-one text message conversations with a stranger. The app’s creator, Jordan Singer, explains on Product Hunt: “The concept is simple: all through a single number, (442) 242-6686, you can send messages to Convoy and it will start an anonymous conversation with someone else who has also messaged Convoy before. Commands include ‘start convoy’, which starts a conversation with someone else who isn’t currently in another conversation and ‘stop convoy’ for when you’re in a conversation and want to end it.”
Singer explains that when you’re in a conversation, you’re simply sending a message to the Convoy number, and your message gets relayed to the other person via the Convoy number. “Think of it as a single chat window, but you don’t know who the other person is,” he said. “No numbers are disclosed, nothing. You’re just having a conversation through Convoy’s number.”
Postpone Pixel is an iOS app that enables you to “send a photo to the future.” Using the app, you can take a photo, enter an email address, set a future date, and send the photo. On the date you’ve specified, the recipient will receive the photo and be able to relive the memory of “good old days.”
Postpone Pixel’s App Store description gives some examples of occasions when you could send photos to yourself or others in the future — such as capturing memories on meaningful anniversaries or to mark progress since the occasion of setting a goal — and explains that you can use the app while you’re offline. (If you’re offline, the photos you’ve taken will be uploaded when you have a data or Wi-Fi connection again.)
Designer Erim Franci writes on Product Hunt of the motivation behind the app: “Pictures command a powerful emotional response when associated with a good time, and nothing motivates us like witnessing progress. The feeling of reliving moments like group photos with loved ones, being out with friends having a good time, watching our children grow, or seeing ourselves get stronger and meeting goals is priceless.”
Wudup, described on Product Hunt as “Tinder meets FaceTime,” is an iOS app that enables you to instantly video chat with people around you. “Tap the start button and connect with people in your area for a quick real-time video conversation,” explains Wudup’s App Store description. “After that, add them to your friends list and continue messaging through the app. It’s a fun and totally authentic way to build your social network.”
Anthony Haid, chief executive of Castle Ventures, the company behind the app, explains to the community at Product Hunt, “By adding search preferences and making the app localized we’re trying to create an experience where the online conversation can lead to an offline connection.”
Google’s self-driving cars have been involved in a few accidents since the company has started testing them on public roads. But according to Google, not one of those accidents was actually caused by the driverless car. Instead, they were all caused by the biggest hazard on the road: the errors that human drivers make when they’re distracted, impatient, inattentive, or just make poor judgments on distance and speed. And it’s precisely our aptitude for human error that will make the road to better safety — even with the help of driverless cars — a long and difficult one to navigate.
Chris Urmson, director of Google’s self-driving car program, writes on Backchannel that because about 33,000 people die on America’s roads every year, much of the enthusiasm for driverless carshas focused in on their potential to reduce accident rates. And consequently, Google is “thinking a lot about how to measure our progress and our impact on road safety” and finding that it’s not so easy to quantify the safety performance of its self-driving cars.
In order for Google to figure out how its cars are performing, Urmson writes, it needs to establish a baseline of typical “accident activity” on suburban streets. That baseline is difficult to understand because many incidents never make it into official statistics. The most common accidents involve light damage and no injuries, and while they often aren’t reported to the police, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says that they account for 55% of all crashes.
That makes it difficult for Google to determine “how often we can expect to get hit by other drivers.” Urmson writes that with its fleet of more than 20 self-driving cars, which have logged 1.7 million miles, Google has learned that “Even when our software and sensors can detect a sticky situation and take action earlier and faster than an alert human driver, sometimes we won’t be able to overcome the realities of speed and distance; sometimes we’ll get hit just waiting for a light to change.”
Urmson writes that if you spend enough time on the road, accidents will happen whether you’re in a regular car or a self-driving car. Over the six years since Google began its driverless car project, it’s been involved in 11 minor accidents, and Urmson writes that “not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident.” Rear-end crashes — the most frequent accident type in America — accounted for seven of Google’s accidents, and its cars have also been side-swiped and hit by a car rolling through a stop sign.
Urmson cites NHTSA statistics that driver error causes 94% of crashes, and writes that Google has identified patterns of driver behavior that it considers “leading indicators of significant collisions,” even though these behaviors don’t show up in official statistics. Distracted driving, lane drifting, running red lights, making impatient or distracted or just plain “crazy” turns are a few of the behaviors that Google observed. And while a driverless car — with its 360-degree visibility, full attention, and array of sensors — can plan for and detect these behaviors, it can’t unilaterally eliminate the safety hazards posed by other drivers’ behavior.
Re/Code’s Mark Bergen reports that Urmson’s Backchannel post is part of Google’s defense against an Associated Press report that three of its driverless cars have been involved in accidents since September, when California first allowed self-driving cars on public roads. The report suggests that Google’s driverless cars were involved in property damage incidents at rates higher than the national average.
“The national rate for reported ‘property-damage-only crashes’ is about 0.3 per 100,000 miles driven, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,” AP’s Justin Pritchard writes. “Google’s 11 accidents over 1.7 million miles would work out to 0.6 per 100,000, but as company officials noted, as many as 5 million minor accidents are not reported to authorities each year — so it is hard to gauge how typical this is.”
Urmson’s post highlights Google’s belief that comparing its accident figures with existing statistics provides an inaccurate picture of how well the driverless cars’ extensive safety features are performing. “Many minor accidents — the dings and fender benders — go unreported when only human-driven cars are involved,” Bergen explains. “Google wants them reported, in part, to prove the need for its autonomous systems. It may be a tricky balancing act for Google to weigh transparency with its self-driving project versus a public image of risky robotics.”
Pritchard notes that a major selling point of driverless cars being developed by Google and others is their safety. “Their cameras, radar and laser sensors provide a far more detailed understanding of their surroundings than humans have. Reaction times should be faster. Cars could be programmed to adjust if they sense a crash coming — move a few feet, tighten seat belts, honk the horn or flash lights at a distracted driver.”
But the top priority at this point in the development of self-driving cars is not to avoid the minor accidents caused by other drivers’ errors or inattention — factors that would be impossible to eliminate unless driverless cars were the only ones on the road — but to avoid causing a serious accident that would severely impact consumers’ estimation of the technology for years to come. Consumers still need to be convinced that self-driving cars will actually keep them safer, and transparency about how the technology is performing along the way is key.
History may not always repeat itself, but sometimes it raises enough eyebrows to spark a social outcry. Since the dotcom and housing bubbles of yesteryear, investors have been on the lookout for the next financial meltdown, with little success. Finding bubbles is easier said than done and often only realized in hindsight. As the last six years have shown us, asset prices can defy criticism longer than we think. However, one area of the stock market may be sending us a warning message.
Social media names don’t look so friendly all of a sudden. This earnings season, companies like Twitter and LinkedIn are reminding investors that valuations still matter. Twitter’s quarterly revenue fell $21 million short of Wall Street’s estimate, while user growth was unimpressive. Shares crashed 18% after the disappointing news and look set to nurse broken wings for the rest of the year as management implements new advertising products. LinkedIn shares plunged by almost the same amount after lowering its full-year guidance on revenue and earnings. Even Facebook, the belle of the ball, missed revenue estimates for the first time since becoming a public company.
Conveniently, social media outcasts may be the wake up call investors need. Some prominent investors already believe another tech bubble is upon us. David Einhorn, president and founder of Greenlight Capital, explained last year how he views the current bubble as an “echo of the previous tech bubble,” but with fewer large-cap companies participating in the fun and much less public enthusiasm. A certain group of “cool kids” like Athenahealth and Amazon are prime candidates where conventional valuation methods are rejected, for now.
Mark Cuban, billionaire tech mogul and Shark Tank investor, sees a tech bubble that lacks the liquidity of its predecessor:
“In a bubble there is always someone with a ‘great’ idea pitching an investor the dream of a billion dollar payout with a comparison to an existing success story. In the tech bubble it was Broadcast.com, AOL, Netscape, etc. Today its, Uber, Twitter, Facebook, etc. To the investor, it’s the hope of a huge payout. But there is one critical difference. Back then the companies the general public was investing in were public companies. They may have been horrible companies, but being public meant that investors had liquidity to sell their stocks. The bubble today comes from private investors who are investing in apps and small tech companies.”
Look no further than Silicon Valley and its surrounding area to find ground zero. An influx of affluent techies have virtually demolished any chances of decent-priced housing. The National Association of Realtors reports the median price of an existing single-family home in San Jose is $900,000, making it the most expensive housing market in the country. San Francisco ranks second at $748,300. California is obviously not known for its affordable housing, but as the chart above from Zillow shows, the median sale price on all homes in San Francisco now dwarfs anything seen during the housing bubble, with a pronounced spike currently taking place.
Will social media soon pop a bubble in Silicon Valley if there is indeed one? Probably not. Mr. Market can have a short memory. One impressive quarter can turn around Internet names like Twitter or Amazon overnight. In fact, Amazon is already up 50% from its recent low made in January. When revenue or earnings are not enough to rekindle animal spirits, buyout deals from companies flush with credit thanks to low interest rates can keep the music playing. For example, Yelp shares recently plummeted 23% in a single day after announcing disappointing quarterly revenue, but recouped most of the losses in about a week after buyout rumors hit headlines. AOL, infamously known for dial-up connections and free trial discs during the previous tech bubble, is being acquired by Verizon for $4.4 billion.
One thing is certain: When the music eventually stops, hearing about it on social media will be too late for comfort.
The much hyped but little used live video streaming service has addedcloser ties with the world’s largest social network as part of a new iOS app update.
As well as being able to post streams to Facebook, Meerkat users will now also be able to see if anyone they’re friends with listed in their device’s contacts book, is also using the app.
Meerkat launched to huge publicity from tech journalists and initially used Twitter as a means of sharing streams. However, since launching a competing service, Periscope, Twitter has limited Meerkat’s access to its platform.
And despite huge fanfares, neither app appears to be getting real-world consumers particularly excited. According to 7Park, as of April, Meerkat had a 0.1% reach in terms of all US iOS device users while Periscope boasted a 0.5% reach. For some perspective, Vine, which is well established by comparison, currently reaches 5.4% of American iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users and its owner, Twitter, 19%.
The auction is simply titled “My FB password” and the winning bidder will apparently receive Schmidt’s username and password written on a piece of paper through the mail. (Winner pays the bid plus $5.99 shipping and handling.)
Schmidt told Yahoo Tech in an email that he considers the piece an extension of a previous work, “Unlock and Explore.” Schmidt’s description of that project:
In this interactive installation, I offered my cell phone up to the public, allowing complete strangers to rummage through my personal information; my texts, emails, photos, Facebook, etc. For the duration of the exhibition, my cell phone remained in the gallery-my private life becoming a sort of public theater. At the same time, I experienced what it was like to be without a cell phone, and thus out of contact, for an extended period of time.
Do you want access to Nick Hugh Schmidt’s Facebook account?
Internet researcher Mahsa Alimardani, right, and Frederic Jacobs pose for a portrait photo at the international internet and society conference ‘re-publica’ in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, May 7, 2015. The researchers have found that Iranian censors are struggling to block Instagram photos of Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian as the service gains popularity in their country. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
LONDON (AP) — Iran’s censors are struggling to keep Justin Bieber’s abs off Instagram.
The tattooed pop star’s pouty, shirtless poses have recently reappeared on Iranian smartphones, along with lingerie shots of Kim Kardashian and red carpet photos of Jennifer Lopez.
Mahmood Enayat of the London-based research group Small Media said a colleague in Iran confirmed he was able to access the racy images Wednesday.
“I am sure he has enjoyed it,” Enayat said in a jokey email.
Bieber’s was one of at least 983 accounts previously blocked in the Islamic republic, according to a paper being presented at technology conference re:publica in Berlin on Thursday. One of the paper’s authors, security researcher Frederic Jacobs, said Kardashian’s and Lopez’s pages were also among those blocked. A smattering of fashion pages — Burberry, Gucci and Jimmy Choo — were subject to the same restrictions, as was the odd political account — a page devoted to Iranian reformist politician Mohammad Khatami, for example.
Internet researcher Mahsa Alimardani, right, and Frederic Jacobs pose for a portrait photo at the international internet and society conference ‘re-publica’ in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, May 7, 2015. The researchers have found that Iranian censors are struggling to block Instagram photos of Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian as the service gains popularity in their country. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
The recent collapse of those blocks is awkward because Instagram is one of the few social networking sites easily accessible to Iranians and had been held up as a showcase for what politicians there describe as “smart filtering,” or targeted censorship. The administration of President Hassan Rouhani touts the technique as a way to ease Iran’s blanket bans on popular foreign sites while reassuring hardliners that objectionable content will remain out of reach.
The re-emergence of Lopez’s flesh-baring dragon dress and Kardashian’s sexy selfies suggests it isn’t going to be that easy.
Internet researcher Mahsa Alimardani delivers her presentation at the international internet and society conference ‘re-publica’ in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, May 7, 2015. Two researchers have found that Iranian censors are struggling to block Instagram photos of Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian as the service gains popularity in their country. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
“It does seem a little bit embarrassing,” said Internet researcher Mahsa Alimardani, who worked with Jacobs on the paper.
Alimardani and Jacobs say the snaps reappeared in Iran after Instagram began encrypting connections between smartphones and the site’s servers in the past month. The encryption means that third parties can’t easily tell whose accounts users are connecting to, frustrating censors’ attempts to zero in on any particular stream of photographs.
It’s not clear if — or how — officials in Tehran will react to the change. Unlike other social networks, Instagram photo-focused approach doesn’t easily lend itself to political mobilization. The Iranian Embassy in London did not return repeated messages seeking comment.
Internet researcher Frederic Jacobs poses for a portrait photo at the international internet and society conference ‘re-publica’ in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, May 7, 2015. Two researchers have found that Iranian censors are struggling to block Instagram photos of Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian as the service gains popularity in their country. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
Instagram declined to comment specifically on the situation in Iran but spokesman Gabe Madway said the Facebook Inc.-owned company is working to roll out encryption across its network.
Instagram declined to say how many users it has in Iran, although the number appears to be growing rapidly. Tehran-based app store Cafe Bazaar says the photo-sharing service has racked up more than 6 million downloads across the country. The figure is a threefold increase over last year, according to Enayat of Small Media.
In a phone interview, Enayat said the censors’ inability to control the flow of racy selfies proves that Rouhani’s smart filtering policy is “a complete failure.”
Internet researcher Mahsa Alimardani poses for a portrait photo at the international internet and society conference ‘re-publica’ in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, May 7, 2015. Two researchers have found that Iranian censors are struggling to block Instagram photos of Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian as the service gains popularity in their country. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
“The case of Instagram shows it’s not going to work,” he said.
International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran director Hadi Ghaemi agreed, predicting that the country’s censors would continue to struggle with smart filtering.
“Nothing about it is ‘smart’ as far as we can tell,” he said.
Flickr, the photo/video sharing site, has had its ups and downs since Yahoo bought it 10 years ago. Its purpose, design, and features have changed several times, not always to popular acclaim.
But one thing is for sure: Flickr’s 112 million account holders are in for a big surprise this week with the new Flickr 4.0.
I’m going to describe the seven major new features, but I have to be very, very careful doing it. I work for Yahoo, so it’d be silly for me toreview a Yahoo product.
All I can do is describe Flickr. But assess it? Don’t ask me. I’m absurdly biased.
New feature No. 1: Universal 1-terabyte autobackup
Flickr’s design is mostly unchanged, and no features are going away.You still get 1 terabyte of free storage for your photos and videos — that’s around 500,000 photos, or enough for your first child’s first three birthday parties.
(Not to make any kind of judgment here, but a mathematician might note that Flickr therefore gives you 67 times as much free space as Microsoft OneDrive, 200 times as much free storage as Apple’s iCloud, and 500 times as much as Photobucket.com or Dropbox. By the way, Google Photos also offers an auto-uploading program for your computer—but it’s limited to 15 gigabytes on the free plan.)
You can still post your photos, tag, name, edit, slideshow, and organize them; order printed stuff; search the photos of the other 99,999,999 members; and discuss them (the photos, not the members).
But despite the terabyte of storage, Flickr was never much good as a backup system. You had to manually upload every new batch of photos. If disaster struck, and your computer died, you could restore your precious full-resolution photos — by downloading them one at a time. Lovely.
And that was a real shame. Because if you asked 100 people what one item they’d rush into their burning homes to rescue, most would say, “My pictures and videos.” I’d be willing to bet that as you read this very sentence, you don’t have a complete, totally current backup of every picture and video on your phone, tablet, and computer(s).
Handshake bet, anyway.
The new Flickr changes all of that. There’s now a free little program for Mac or Windows called Uploadr. All it does is sit in the background and watch for pictures and videos that enter your ecosystem: when you connect a hard drive, insert a flash drive, introduce a camera’s memory card, grab a photo from a website, take as a screenshot, or save from an email attachment.
And also, of course, your existing photo collections: photos in folders, photos in iPhoto or Aperture, photos in your Dropbox. Even I was startled when I connected an external drive to my laptop last week and got this message:
The big idea, of course, is to consolidate all your pictures — your entire life’s worth — in a single place online, where it’s safe and easily searchable. (Alas, the uploader doesn’t yet auto-upload the photos in Adobe Lightroom.)
This, by the way, is also the idea behind Apple’s new iCloud Photo Library. But that’s not free like Flickr; Apple charges you $240 a year for that terabyte. And Apple’s service works only with iPhones, iPads, and Macs; Flickr’s works with Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS.
It took a whole week for Uploadr to finish uploading all 92,000 of my pictures — from a motley assortment of backup drives, old iPhoto libraries, flash drives, and even old DVDs. I just let my computer sit there, day and night, uploading every scattered photo I’ve ever taken. But now I know that everything is backed up online.
(Yes, 92,000. Yes, I’m what you call an avid photographer. Yes, I love my kids.)
The Uploadr automatically filters out duplicate photos. It also marks everything it uploads as private. Only you can see them. That way, Flickr hopes, your scantily clad photos won’t accidentally become the next viral sensation.
Of course, at any point, you can make certain photos public, or limit their viewing to people on special lists, like Friends or Family.
New feature No. 2: New phone apps
There are new Flickr apps for iPhone and Android today, too. They look and work the same as Flickr.com; they, too, offer auto-uploading of every picture and video.
If you can come to trust the uploading procedure, an intriguing possibility presents itself: You can delete photos and videos from your phone after they’re backed up. Your life of living with the hassle of a nearly full phone is over.
Yet you can still view and work with your pictures in the Flickr phone app, even though they’re no longer physically on the phone.
And by the way: Since there are Flickr apps for Apple TV, Roku, TiVo, and so on, the following scenario is now possible: You go to a concert or something. By the time you get home, the photos you’ve taken with your phone are already on Flickr — and you can pull them up on the TV to show your roommates or family.
New feature No. 3: Redownloading
Once your pictures are on Flickr, you can select any batch of them (by dragging through them or clicking Select All for a full day’s batch) and then click a Download button that appears beneath:
At this point, Flickr delivers the original, full-resolution photos back to you, compressed into a .zip file to make the process faster.
On Flickr, you can organize your pictures into Albums, which are virtual containers; a single photo can appear in lots of different Albums. You can’t yet download an Album with one click, but that feature will arrive shortly.
New feature No. 4: Universal Camera Roll
In the new Flickr, you still have your Photostream (all photos that you’ve made public). But now you also have a Camera Roll (all your pictures, public and private). Making its debut in the Camera Roll: a timeline ruler, which lets you jump to any month or year without having to scroll.
In the Camera Roll, moreover, you can sort your pictures either by date taken or date uploaded.
New feature No. 5: Instant Share button
Once you’ve organized some pictures or videos into an album, you might conceivably want to share it — with a friend, with Facebook or Twitter, and so on. A new Share button produces a private link to that album:
Only people who have that Web address can see the pictures.
New feature No. 6: Image recognition groupings
It’s finally come to pass: Computers can look at a photo and know what it’s a picture of.
Thanks to Yahoo’s 2013 acquisition of two artificial-intelligence image-recognition software companies, Flickr now knows what you’ve taken pictures of.
You don’t have to name your pictures, tag them, keyword them, or whatever. Flickr knows that that’s a picture of a beach, a wedding, a banana, a portrait — by looking at it.
Google Photos has had photo recognition already, for searching purposes. But Flickr also offers a button called Magic View. It presents a collapsible left-side list of photographic subjects present in your photos, under headings like Animal, Architecture, Food, Landscape, and People. Click Bird to see all your bird pictures:
Click Wedding to see all your wedding pictures:
Click Music to see all pictures of people making music:
Or Writing, or Sport, or Shore, or even stylistic terms like Pattern, Black-and-white, Abstract, Serene, or Depth of Field… Flickr recognizes 1700 kinds of subjects and styles so far.
I won’t say that my jaw hit the floor when I saw this feature. Because that would be a conflict of interest.
But I would if I could.
New feature No. 7: Image recognition in search
The new Search box lets you use the same image-recognition technology to search all 11 billion photos on Flickr at once (or at least those that have been made public).
Searching for “pumpkin pie” no longer finds photos of pumpkins and pies; it finds pictures of pumpkin pies.
And once you’ve done a search, you can filter down the results according to what colors prevail in the photos. Here’s my search for motorcycles —
— and here’s when I turn on the Blue and Yellow checkboxes:
I can then use the License pop-up menu to choose “Commercial use allowed” or “No known copyright restrictions,” and boom: I’ve just found royalty-free photos of the subject and color scheme I want — and given migraines to the stock-photo companies.
The Search box now understands places, holidays, months, and years, too. So if you remember that amazing dog you saw last Halloween in Tulsa, you can search for “dog halloween tulsa,” and Flickr will find it.
Next steps
I’m not allowed to tell you how excited I am to finally, finally,have all my photos from all my gadgets in one centralized place, instantly searchable and sortable, and accessible from my phone. I can’t mention the deep sense of psychological satisfaction that comes from knowing that the most important files of my entire existence are safe.
It’s probably fine for me, though, to tell you what still needs work. As amazing as the new stuff is, many of the older parts of Flickr still need a visit from the Makeover Fairy.
Here’s what I think should be on Flickr’s to-do list:
The Batch Organize screen (called the Organizr) is just as cluttered and nonintuitive as it was when George W. Bush was president.
The Batch Organize screen.
The new Camera Roll feels fluid and slick, especially when it comes to selecting photos. Click to select (or deselect), drag across to select a batch, double-click to open. But the Photostream and album screens use totally different conventions for selecting and opening. (Flickr says they’ll soon be made to match.)
There’s no facial recognition by name yet—Flickr doesn’t know your subjects by name. (That, too, is on the way.)
The uploader doesn’t recognize what’s in Adobe Lightroom.
You can’t delete pictures right from an album. You have to go into the dreaded Organizr to do it.
Flickr is starting to get Menu Creep. There are two menu bars — and the lower one disappears when you’re in an album or when you click Create, and there’s no obvious way to get it back again.
Now then. If this were a traditional review, this is where you’d find the whole package summarized and evaluated. But I’m not allowed to do that.
All I can do is state the facts, coldly and clinically. For example, Flickr gives you 1 terabyte of storage for your photos and videos, for free; automatically backs up all your photos and videos, past and future, from all your computers, phones, and tablets, for free; permits access to those pictures and videos from your phone; permits instant redownloads of any group of pictures at original resolution; offers one-click sharing of albums by generating a custom Web address; and lets you search or group your photos according to what they’re pictures of.
Does that make Flickr an amazing deal, with eye-popping photographic intelligence and a mature set of truly useful features?
I’m afraid you’ll have to answer that question yourself.
hello world 