See Flickr's daily photo deluge in hard copies

Roger Highfield, contributor

(Image: Gijs van den Berg)

Ever wondered how many images are uploaded to Flickr every day? That question lies at the heart of this installation by Dutch curator Erik Kessels, part of an exhibition at the Foam photography museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The answer is around a million. The installation is made up of print-outs of images posted on Flickr during a single 24-hour period. Kessels hopes this avalanche will highlight how the rise of digital photography has swamped us in images. The Future of the Photography Museum exhibition runs until 7 December.

Flickr has also been a boon for research. One group at the University of Washington in Seattle used thousands of photos to create a virtual 3D model of landmarks, including St Peter's Basilica in Rome, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Statue of Liberty in New York. The idea was to recreate the detailed geometry of an entire city using online photographs.

Meanwhile, in rural Bahia, Brazil, handyman Jos? Carlos Mendes Santos found a mysterious inch-tall plant with white-and-pink flowers. When amateur botanist Alex Popovkin uploaded the images to Flickr, Lena Struwe at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and others identified the plant as a new species. Its name, Spigelia genuflexa, comes from the plant's habit of bending its branches down so that fruits ripen underground, a process called geocarpy.

Another project that used Flickr as a tool could have privacy implications. Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and colleagues analysed 38 million photos uploaded to Flickr by people with social network contacts. They found that two people have a 5 per cent chance of knowing each other, if on three separate occasions they take an image at the same place on the same day. This is 300 times greater than the chance of two randomly chosen Flickr users knowing each other. They were surprised to find that so much information could be extracted from so little.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/1a9bd9ec/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A110C120Csee0Eflickrs0Edaily0Ephoto0Edeluge0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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