[Commons-l] Yotophoto (free image search engine) developments

[Brianna Laugher]

See below.
My comments in reply summarised in square brackets.

http://yotophoto.com/

Play around, see what you like and don't like. I'll pass on any
comments given to me.

cheers,
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 10-Mar-2007 07:51
Subject: Re: [Provide feedback] Wikimedia Commons photos

Brianna,

First, sorry for the delayed response and thanks for your comments. I
especially appreciate feedback from people in your position as I want
Yotophoto to be embraced by those contributing to  important projects
like Wikimedia Commons.

Right now, most of the links to go back to Wikipedia instead of the
Commons for the main reason that awareness of the Wikipedia project is
higher than that of Commons. It's just easier for people to get their
head around it if they are unfamiliar with Commons.  (As an aside, I
find it pretty tough  explaining how everything works with regards to
'free' licensing and how we index only third party sites and so on.
You wouldn't believe how often people write us to ask if they can use
one of "our" images or how they can upload their own images to us).

One thing I also like about linking to the Wikipedia page over the
Commons one is that the list of pages that link to the image seem to
be more accurate on Wikipedia than Commons. Is this your experience as
well? Any feedback on this would be helpful. See #3 below for a little
more on why this is relevant.

Having said that, I'm working a new version that will change a few
things. Here's an overview:

1) Every site we index will have it's own "about" page. Here we will
explain a bit about what each site is about, how to contribute, what
kind of licenses the site allows and so on. In the case of the
Wikipedia and Commons we intend to outline the relationship between
the two and how Wikipedia will often hold a 'fake' image for images
that come from Commons as you described.

[I told him about Check Usage.]

2) Most images will have an intermediate preview (probably in a pop-up
lightbox). From here we can provide a link to *both* the Commons and
Wikipedia pages for an image. What do you think?

3) Yotophoto will eventually index images using captions from the
various Wikipedia articles that include said image. So if an image
doesn't have a complete description on it's own page - we can still
index it based on all the captions used for that image throughout
Wikipedia. Commons tends to have decent image descriptions but for
images only on Wikipedia taken from third party sites (say a PD US-GOV
image), the descriptions are often lacking.

[I said:
On Commons we have enough trouble forcing people to annotate their
files with basic information like licensing and author, let alone a
decent content description. Many people when they submit files, are
submitting them with a specific purpose in mind and are focused on
that, not on the possibility that the file might be re-used in the
future for something else. Also when one is looking at an image, it is
often quite self-explanatory, so the user doesn't feel the need to
explain the purpose or background to the file beyond three words. Of
course that doesn't stack up well for searching since machines can't
"read" images well at all (or even, mostly, at all).
]

4) Yotophoto would like to enable one click republishing of images
found so people can repost to their own blogs etc. To do this we will
provide a copy and paste HTML code they can use. This code will link
back to the image source (ie. Commons) as well as to the image
license. Sites like Commons will get tons of back-links and exposure
in this way I think. I like to think of this as the "Flickerization of
Wikipedia" (and Commons).

[I forwarded this part to wikitech-l to see what they say.]

5) The depth of the index will increase massively. We intend to one
day have the entire Commons and Wikipeida image collections searchable
(right now it is only a fraction) including not only photos but other
types of images as well like maps, charts, flags and so on.


I'd love to know what you think, and if you have any further
suggestions. As well, feel free to invite anyone from the Commons to
submit their ideas to me as well. I hadn't seen the Mayflower tool
before but it looks quite nice -  I want to look into it more.

Regards,





On 2/26/07, brianna.laugher at gmail.com <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Brianna Laugher sent a message using the contact form at
> http://yotophoto.com/feedback.
>
> Hi, I'm a volunteer on the Wikimedia Commons website. I just wanted to say
> how impressed I am with Yotophoto at the moment. Displaying the license
> and the image dimensions in the results is particularly awesome. A couple
> of comments:
>
> Is it possible to do domain-specific searches? (like in Google,
> site:commons.wikimedia.org) - doesn't seem like it, so far
>
> As you may or may not know, when projects like Wikipedia use images from
> Wikimedia Commons, it creates 'fake' image pages like this one:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Common_frog.jpg (note the red tab and
> the tag 'This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. The description on its
> description page there is shown below.'). To better promote Wikimedia
> Commons, it would be preferable if such images could be referred back to
> their Wikimedia Commons page, rather than the 'fake' page at Wikipedia.
> Would that be possible?
>
> Also, another Wikimedia editor has developed an image search engine
> specifically for Wikimedia Commons called 'Mayflower', which you might be
> interested in checking out:
> http://tools.wikimedia.de/~tangotango/mayflower/
>
> As the default wiki search engine for media performs very poorly, we tend
> to be very happy whenever we find out about nice products like these :)
>
> thanks!
>