Small confession — this is my favourite time of year. The cherry trees in the Japanese Tea Garden are in full bloom (that’s a hint for my fellow San Franciscans). A quick peak at photos tagged with "cherry blossom" reveals that much of Japan is blossoming as well. Little did I realize that there’s a Cherry Blossom Forecast, which helps when you’re planning your Hanami (outdoor party).

Photos from pink_emmie_bat, Yumi@bagdadcafe and Saw You On The Flipside. See more photos in our cherry blossom clusters or those tagged with "cherry blossom" on the world map.

One of the best things about Flickr is that our membership is made up of people from so many places and diverse backgrounds. It’s important to us that everyone feel comfortable, despite vastly different cultural and personal comfort levels. What I like, you might not, and it’s up to the entire community to make this work. So, we’ve rolled out content filtering which allows you to flag your images as you upload and also set your viewing preferences for what you’d like to see (or not).

There’s a complete FAQ covering all the details, but here are the important highlights:

• Uploading: The new system enables you to categorize everything you upload by Safety Level (safe, moderate, restricted) and Content Type (photo, art/illustration/cgi, screenshot). So as an example, you can set a default preference to tell Flickr you generally upload safe screenshots.
• Searching and Viewing: The reason you need to place your content into the categories above is so that content filters can be applied later on, both in search and in your general browsing around. There is a new search preference available to you, where you can choose what content you’d normally like to have show up in searches (e.g. photos and screenshots), and a safety level you’re comfortable with.
• Your Account: You can now set up default categories for your uploads and set your SafeSearch preference. As a bonus, you can also hide your photostream from public searches on Flickr (and from any 3rd party sites that access Flickr via our open API)
• "Flag This Photo": The "This may be offensive" link has expanded to a widget where you can change the categories associated with individual images, and we’ve updated the Organizr so you can edit stuff there too (both individual photos and in batches)
• We’ve heard your feedback: The status of your account is now noted on Your Account page.

As with any change to a living system, there’s bound to be turbulence and we apologize in advance for any errors. We have been running parallel review of both new and old accounts for a few months, but there is a small backlog of older accounts that may be miscategorized. If you feel that your Flickr account falls into this bucket, don’t panic! You can request a review of either a photo or your whole account using new options in the Help by Email form.

We’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect content filters and the continuing role & responsibility each member has in being a good Flickr citizen. Please take a moment to review them at your earliest convenience.

As always, we’ll be happy to answer any questions and hear feedback that you may have regarding this new feature in this Official Help Topic.

Photo from warrenguy.

We’ve rolled out content filtering which allows you to flag your images as you upload and also set your viewing preferences for what you’d like to see (or not). For more information check out this post on the FlickrBlog or the new Filters section of our FAQ. We’d love to hear your feedback in this Official Help Topic.

 

 

"Each DILO is a major document of one day in our time – all over the world. A work of art in itself!"

With over 3,000 members in a day in the life of…, and with those members sharing five pictures in the group pool on a certain day every once in a while, the DILO group is building up a lovely, initimate look into the lives of its members. The next DILO is tomorrow, March 21, so stay tuned for the next worldwide snapshot.

Thanks to jon…, Computer Science Geek, Auntie P and robholland for showing us part of a day in their lives.

You can now transfer your Flickr account between two different Yahoo! IDs. We’ve added links to the transfer tool on your account preferences page. If you already use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr and want to switch to using a different Yahoo! ID, go here: www.flickr.com/account/transfer (If you still have an “old skool” flickr.com account, you should still use the merge process at: www.flickr.com/account/associate) For help with this tool, please see the official thread in the forums.

Change to the old skool account merge deadline In order to avoid any last minute problems for people with unmerged “old skool” Flickr accounts, we’re moving the cutover date to Tuesday, March 20th. We had hoped to launch a Yahoo! ID “switcher” — a tool that allows people to change the Yahoo! ID with which their Flickr account is associated, transferring the Flickr account to the second Yahoo! ID — before the cutoff date, but we didn’t have a design for the transfer tool that made it simple enough until today. That tool just launched (see above) and we wanted to have a few days with it running in the wild before requiring that everyone use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr. We’ll also be adding reminder notifications for the remaining old skool users letting them know about this change to the date.

Today we launched what’s probably the most requested feature over the last few years: a way to categorize and organize your photo sets! In the past this feature has been referred to as "sets of sets" or "subsets". After today, we’ll know it as "collections".

What are collections, you ask? A collection is a container into which you can place either sets or other collections, allowing you to create a hierarchy as deep as 5 collections. You can place as many of your sets into a collection as you like, and a set can be in as many different collections as you like.

Collections get a spiffy new "mosaic" icon to represent them, like the one you see below for my collection of "flora" photos. You can allow Flickr to auto-generate your collection mosaics, or you can create them yourself using any of your photos.

As a Flickr pro user, you can create and edit your collections in the Organizr, under the "Sets and Collections" tab. The best way to see how it works is to just start playing around with it. You’ll find that drag and drop is your friend!

But wait, there’s more! Once you’ve made some collections, It only makes sense for us to allow you to choose what you want to appear in the right column of the Your Photos page: sets or collections (or neither, if you’re that type). So we’ve added a layout preference for that. In addition, the layout setting lets you choose to display the standard small sized images, or, if you’re feeling crazy, 5 medium sized images.

Give it a whirl here http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/layout and see what suits your fancy. We plan to offer more customizations like this in the future, but we’re taking baby steps with it for now, so we can get a feel for what works and what doesn’t, and what you all like the most!

HP recently sponsored a group called Resolutionaries with an invitation to Flickr members to contemplate what "resolution" means to them. They also created a showcase on the HP site to showcase the submitted photos. 

I found a few gems there which nicely hit the theme, like the shot above entitled Stubble by tapirka which shows a field after reaping, seen through a fine mesh fence. The effect, when viewed large, somehow reminds me of the loud flap-flap-flap movie projector used in my elementary school when it was educational film time.

Photo from Mashka Cordwell. See more photos tagged with "womensday".

Photo from broadcasterTR. See more photos in the lunareclipse clusters.

Photo from jimheid. See more photos in the furryfriday clusters.

You can also check out more hot tags here!