Project

New: Submit Your Photos and Vote on Others

Today I am releasing the long-awaited voting area.

The scoop:

The idea is simply that I didn’t want to prescribe what went into the book completely. I tried getting 50 photographers to join the project, and almost everyone agreed. Only one photographer that I contacted declined to be a part of it. Unfortunately, a few had not responded at all, though.

That left me with a problem. I could go back to Flickr and ask another bunch of people to be a part of the project. But, most likely I’d end up asking people for months. Plus, it would be completely based on what I thought was a good photo. And, even though I plan on purchasing a book for myself, I think we’d all agree that we’re not too fond of dictatorships.

So, I decided to create a voting application where you can submit and vote on photos for the book.

How’s it work?

Well, there were a few things I had to do to make it easy on myself and everyone else, so here’s the list of stuff you probably might not know about this unique website.

1. To log in, we are exclusively using Open ID instead of usernames and passwords. You don’t really want to remember another username and passwords do you? I don’t, and I created the thing.
2. To submit photos, we just need the url on Flickr. When I asked for just the Flickr urls in the comments of this page, I didn’t realize how awesome that is. You don’t have to download, upload, or any kind of loading. Just submit the photo’s url from flickr and you’re done.
3. Vote on other photos. Once you’ve logged in, you can run around and vote on all the other photos in the system. The first page only shows 9 random photos, but you can feel free to vote on all of them.

Now, a few things this site doesn’t quite do yet, but that have been noted:

• Once you vote yes or no on a photo, you can’t go back and change your vote.
• You can’t see how many votes a particular photo has on it
• You can’t change your Open ID provider or add new ones
• You can only submit one photo at a time

Now, before you get all grumpy on me for the things you can’t do yet, please understand that I haven’t made a dime off this project yet, and I don’t expect to make anywhere near what it cost me in time to create this. This is a labor of love and although I do expect to add those features in the future, they’re just not there yet.

I thought it would be better to have the capabilities that are in the site right now, rather than wait and try to do everything all at once but never get the project off the ground.

The only two things I ask is (1) you submit your own photos, not someone else’s and (2) the photos you submit are Creative Commons licensed (particularly Share-Alike 3.0 with Attribution). In fact, those two things are requirements. Any photo not fitting those, regardless of how many votes they get, will not be considered for the book.

OK, what now?

First, get all your friends to submit photos which are worthy to be in the book titled “Old”.

Second, login and vote on photos. Come back often because I expect new photos to be added daily.

Third, if you’re interested in purchasing the book when it’s completed, fill out this form and let me know, or fill in your email address under “My info” after you log in.