My sister keeps her photos on Yahoo! Photos. This is unfortunate, because it's a bad photos service.

I don't know when Yahoo! lost its way (although my first guess would be when they got rid of me ^*  🙂, but they seem to spend their time now making things “flashy” instead of the “useful” and “intuitive” of the old days. Most recently, this manifested itself with a big screwup of their TV-listing sit.

With the current version of Y! Photos that debuted during the summer, they have perhaps added useful features, but in the process, made the site really inconvenient for its most basic use: it's difficult to view photos.

1. When I click on an album, it shows an empty-album page for six seconds before populating the page with the pictures in the album. It's not showing an empty page, mind you, which would be a clear indication that something's not done yet, but rather a page showing an album containing no photos.

   Six seconds is a long time if you count it out — long enough to recognize that the album is empty and that you must have clicked on the wrong thing, and hit the back button. The first time I used it, it took me a while before I figured out what was going on. I thought my sister simply had no photos.

   (I should point out that I have 100 megabit fiber service at home; my ping time to Yahoo! image servers is 200ms.)

2. When viewing a page of thumbnails (which are miniscule!), images that are “below the fold” (not visible on the screen until you scroll down) aren't loaded until you actually do scroll down. So, that means that you're guaranteed to have to wait again for images to load. It would make much more sense to let those images load while you're viewing the above-the-fold images.

   The only reason I can think of that they would have done this is to try to reduce the load on their servers/bandwidth. If someone views the top of a page of thumbnails but never bothers scrolling down to see more, those below-the-fold thumbnails won't have been fetched from Yahoo's servers. And even if someone does scroll down, waiting until they do scroll before fetching the images reduces the “burstiness” of the thumbnail accesses.

   I can understand the service/cost tradeoff in this decision, except for two things: it really degrades the service, and worst of all, they bypass the browser image cache. This means that every time I view her gallery to see whether there are more pictures, my computer has to re-fetch the thumbnails from Yahoo!'s servers. They'd gain MUCH more efficiency by leaving “it works well” alone and allowing my browser to cache the thumbnails: the next time I view the page, I'd have to fetch only the new thumbnails.

   This is nothing more than the dumb result of someone playing with new scripting toys and deciding that “cool” is somehow better than “useful.”

3. When viewing a page of thumbnails, we all know that to view a larger version of the picture, you click on it. It's been this way since the Beginning of Time, and for a good reason. That every picture web site ever built does it this way is also a strong recommendation to continue doing it this way. However, clicking on a thumbnail in Yahoo! Photos does..... nothing. Nothing.

   (For the record, if you want to view an image, you must double click on it.)

4. After double-clicking on an image to see a larger version, hitting the back button results in.... another six-second wait as all the thumbnails are again downloaded from Yahoo!.

   Every. Time. Every. Picture.

   Something is very sick at Yahoo for this to be considered an improvement over the old site.

5. Yahoo! Photos has no RSS feed. If this were 1997 I'd understand, but it's beyond comprehension in 2006 how a major player like Yahoo! can offer a service like this without RSS support. Yahoo!, what are you thinking?

   This bring us back to why they do the stupid thumbnail loading: to save load/bandwidth on their image servers. Well, if I have to view the thumbnail gallery just to find out whether there's anything new, that's a lot of load on your servers. Simple RSS support to indicate whether there's anything new would mean I'd actually view the gallery only when there is something new.

6. They remove the “.jpg” (or whatever) file-ending on images they serve, which makes right-click-and-save less convenient. It's possible that they did this on purpose, just to make something they somehow deem undesirable less convenient, but the rest of the site makes me inclined to believe that they just didn't think things through.

7. The “larger version” they show upon double-clicking isn't really all that large for my tastes, but that's fine. I should be able to click on the photo for yet a larger version, or click on the “other sizes” link, or something? Yes? No.

   Something that should be so simple is now difficult: I have to click on the “Download” tab (which doesn't even look like a link), select a larger size, download to my computer, then view. I don't want to save a copy... I just want to see the thing! Geez.

8. They are completely clueless about how to handle digital-image colors. Their resized versions strip all color-space information, thereby guaranteeing that at least some users will see the wrong colors. Guaranteeing.

   In their defense, I should point out that pretty much every other online photo site is similarly clueless, including Flickr and Google, and even ones targeting the professional photographer like PBase. [UPDATE: Flickr does not strip profiles!]

   They should all read this Introduction to Digital-Image Color Spaces.

Maybe the thinking that has gone into this product explains why Yahoo's stock is doing so poorly in absolute terms, and even worse when compared to others in the industry. Sigh. My future retirement is sitting in Yahoo stock.... maybe I am the stupid one.

Last week I showed four-year-old Anthony with a messy face, and received comments like “that's not a messy face,” with commenters recklessly comparing my well-behaved four-year-old with their snotty-nosed incorrigibles as infants.

Well, I used to have one of those, too 🙂

11-Month-Old Anthony in Various Stages of Un-Eat

Notice the rice in his nose in the left-hand picture.

Anyway, here's a followup to the messy face post. When asked to smile for the camera, Anthony tries, but it's a very fake, plastic smile. So while taking pictures of his messy face, I did various things to try to get him to laugh.

The first picture below is just after I made a loud sound..... mouseover the boxed letters below the image to see subsequent views (with the number of seconds between)....

Whatever it was that made him laugh soon melted into a slow-developing cry. I think he was fairly tired and ready for a nap. A hug helped.

Here's a bonus pic I ran across while looking in the archives for messy faces: Anthony, aged 1 year 10 months, and spaghetti:

Well-Versed in the Culinary Arts of Italian Cuisine

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/320 sec, f/3.5, ISO 100 — full exif & map
Anthony

These shots are from about two weeks ago, when the leaves were starting to approach their peak. Out for a walk a few minutes from the house, I was surprised to come across this tall grass, and I thought it would make a nice background.

It wasn't really that cold — maybe 15C (60F) — but being the first cold snap of the season, it felt cold. Lately it's gotten down to 6C (43F). It won't get much colder... the low during the winter in Kyoto is about freezing, with the mid-day average about 5C (41F).

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 26mm — ¹/200 sec, f/6.3, ISO 100 — full exif & map

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/500 sec, f/3.5, ISO 100 — full exif & map

This post is not likely of interest to regular readers of my blog (“Hi Mom”); I'm putting it here mostly for the search engines.

A Nikon D200 dSLR has two color-space settings: sRGB and Adobe RGB. People often ask which should be selected when shooting in raw mode, with the oft-provided answer that “it doesn't matter” because raw data has its own camera-specific raw-sensor-data color space, and sRGB vs. AdobeRGB comes in to play only when converting the raw sensor data to a different image format (e.g. JPEG).

Indeed, the color-space setting doesn't matter for the main picture, which is what people are generally asking about, so “it doesn't matter” is a good first approximation of the answer.

However, even when shooting raw, there are effects to the resulting NEF file from the on-camera color-space setting, so I thought I'd document them here for completeness:

• The MakerNotes:ColorSpace metadata reflects the setting (“sRGB” vs. “Adobe RGB”).

• The setting determines the color space for two JPEG images embedded within the NEF. The embedded JPEG images have no metadata of their own, so the only indication of their color space is the NEF's MakerNotes:ColorSpace metadata.

• The setting determines the name of the NEF file: with sRGB, it's of the pattern “DSC_0001.NEF”, and with Adobe RGB, it's of the pattern “_DSC0001.NEF” (see D200 manual, English version, page 29).

Perhaps surprisingly, a NEF (at least a D200-produced NEF) contains two embedded JPEG images:

• A small (570 × 375) “preview image”

• A full-frame (3,872 × 2,592) “JPEG from raw” image, which is identical to the image inside a Large-size Basic-quality JPEG produced with the camera's JPEG Compression set to “Size Priority” (manual page 30).

Together, the two embedded JPGs add about 9-10% to the size of a compressed NEF.

It's interesting to note that if you shoot both raw and JPEG at the same time, you end up with six versions of the same picture, in two files:

1. Raw full-frame sensor data in .NEF file
2. Small (570 × 375) “preview image” JPEG embedded in the .NEF file
3. Full-frame basic-quality size-priority-compression “JPEG from raw” embedded in the .NEF file
4. Main JPEG image in the .JPG file whose size depends on the Image Size setting (manual page 32)
5. Tiny (120 × 160) JPEG thumbnail embedded in the .JPG file
6. Small (570 × 375) “preview image” embedded in the .JPG file

Images 3 and 4 are identical if the camera is set to produce Large Basic-quality size-priority JPEGs. The resulting .JPG file has a lot of metadata that the embedded “JPEG from raw” doesn't have, of course.

If you have Phil Harvey's most excellent ExifTool (now available in a Windows stand-alone executable), you can easily extract these embedded images:

  exiftool -b -PreviewImage   file.NEF > file-Preview.jpg
  exiftool -b -JpgFromRaw     file.NEF > file-FromRaw.jpg
  exiftool -b -PreviewImage   file.JPG > file-Preview.jpg
  exiftool -b -ThumbnailImage file.JPG > file-Thumb.jpg

Again, be warned that none of these extracted images have any metadata, including an indication of their color space.