Sami Serola (inactive)'s most appreciated articles

People often wonder how the images become picked to ipernity Explore . And here I try to figure it out and explain, as well as I can. The very first thing one needs to understand is that Explore is more or less an overview on what is popular during last few days. However, popularity is a tricky concept. One should keep in mind that what is popular may not match with any subjective or shared understanding on what is quality . If number of ipernity members like images of fences, or more p…

Every now and then I test sharing private images only on groups, and get some interesting results. What I mean is that I keep the image as "Visible by: Me only", but then I share it on some group. What happens is that ipernity asks if I really do wish to share the image on the chosen group, and let other group members to see and comment the image. The test part is to find out if people actually view my image within the group context at all. And then the test reveals if the group is actually…

Ipernity uses UTF-8, which does not support all latest Unicode symbols. The followings should at least work: ▀ ▁ ▂ ▃ ▄ ▅ ▆ ▇ █ ▉ ▊ ▋ ▌ ▍ ▎ ▏ ▐ ░ ▒ ▓ ▔ ▕ ▖ ▗ ▘ ▙ ▚ ▛ ▜ ▝ ▞ ▟ ■ □ ▢ ▣ ▤ ▥ ▦ ▧ ▨ ▩ ▪ ▫ ▬ ▭ ▮ ▯ ▰ ▱ ▲ △ ▲ ▵ ▶ ▷ ▸ ▹ ► ▻ ▼ ▽ ▼ ▿ ◀ ◁ ◂ ◃ ◄ ◅ ◆ ◇ ◈ ◉ ◊ ○ ◌ ◍ ◎ ● ◐ ◑ ◒ ◓ ◔ ◕ ◖ ◗ ◘ ◙ ◚ ◛ ◜ ◝ ◞ ◟ ◠ ◡ ◢ ◣ ◤ ◥ ◦ ◧ ◨ ◩ ◪ ◫ ◬ ◭ ◮ ◯ ◰ ◱ ◲ ◳ ◴ ◵ ◶ ◷ ◸ ◹ ◺ ◻ ◼ ◽ ◾ ◿ ☄ ★ ☆ ☇ ☈ ☊ ☋ ☌ ☍ ☎ ☏ ☐ ☑ ☒ ☓ ☔ ☕ ☖ ☗ ☘ ☙ ❧ ☚ ☛ ☜ ☝ ☞ ☟ ☠ ☡ ☢ ☣ ☤ ☥ ☦ ☧ ☨ ☩ ☪ ☫ ☬ ☭ ☮ ☯ ☰ ☱ ☲ ☳ ☴ ☵ ☶ ☷ ☸ ☹ ☺ ☻ ♧ ♨ ♰ ♱ ♲ ♳ ♴ ♵…

We are "social media nomads", not like those who are travelling around the world and keeping their personal blog or vlog about it, but folks who try to survive in the jungle of social media services. We try to find best and cheapest place to share our creativity and hunger for inspiration. And what makes us as nomads is the fact that nothing seems to continue forever, especially not the social media services. Who remembers such communities as Multiply and My Opera? Who will soon remember Pan…

I decided to start a new article, which I will update every now and then. I collect here useful online services discovered on Web. ➽ Coblis — Color Blindness Simulator Useful tool for testing your images and graphs, to see how they look for someone who has some color vision handicap. ➽ Linguee A very useful service to find out how different words and phrases translate into other languages. Linguee gives examples of various contexts. Here's an example how English expression "o…

Currently on ipernity 'Photos' pages the following notice is shown on right margin: "It is recommended to have GPS data in the meta data (EXIF) of the images before the initial upload." The reason why this recommendation is given is that the Google Maps quota may become exceeded easily if many users search and use it get geolocation for already uploaded images. To avoid this it would help if more people would start to define geolocation before uploading the images. How to do that d…

Here are some useful sources to understand what all can be protected by copyright laws, and what copyright is about: Copyright rules by subject matter explained at Wikimedia Commons. And the same in French . Intellectual property wiki People often take the copyright lightly, ignores it, or simply don't know it very well. We easily refer to fair use , which more or less covers only cases in United States, but should not be stretched to cover publications globally shared on Inte…

I saw this rather interesting news shared on social media, and thought it may interest also peeps around here: ➽ Camera sales are falling sharply by Om Malik So, supposedly phone cameras are taking over. Whether this is a bad or good thing depends on the point of view. Someone could call that as a "progress", and some may see it as a "paradigm shift". Or it can be even a "philosophical revolution". We all can't be masters of photography and professionals, but that should not stop…

Lately I have given a great deal of time and thought for what is commonly called as "street photography". It is more or less a genre of taking images of people one does not know. Usually it is about images of people in urbain area, but it can be any human figure seen anywhere. Please have a look at this Jamie Windsor's video 'Why you SHOULDN'T do STREET PHOTOGRAPHY' and give it a thought. So far street photography that includes human figures have never been my genre, and I guess it…

UPDATED on 25.9.2020 It looks like DownThemAll developers have been busy to get it running with FireFox (Mozilla) again . However, the Metalink format used here on ipernity is not supported ! This is why one still have to either 1) use other methods , 2) use SeaMonkey and an older version of DownThemAll, as instructed below, or 3) wait until one fine day we get the whole ipernity reprogrammed. If the following old versions of Seamonkey and DownThemAll compo is not an option f…

Record for the archives To answer the many questions about what actually happened: Friday, November 20, 2020, 18:00 CET the ima-team published the fortnightly 'Club News' (previously called 'Newsflash'). For that week, this was the last action of the ima team, executed with help of the normal ipernity blog editor. Any kind of modification to the software on the servers had not been done. No new html-files had been uploaded, except the notice banner. However, this is a proven, uncritical a…

Yes, please! =)

Enjoy these wonderful timelapse videos made by Riku Karjalainen Behind the scenes The importance of being alone... Do notice the subtitles in English and German which you can enable from bottom right corner! Choose the language from settings.

Yes, you read right! A very annoying dust particle appeared inside my Canon G5x camera lens. And since it is a compact camera, there is no way to remove the lens to get it cleaned by my own. Or so I thought... I was desperate, because sending it to service to get it cleaned would very likely cost several hundred euros. Luckily we have Google... I searched with string " dust particle inside canon g5x ", and found out an Youtube video showing how to clean pretty sim…

You can search somewhat anything on ipernity. But what you may not know are all the tweaks you can do to limit the search. Search for all cat photos (up to 1000) Write simply cat on top of the pages, onto field with "Search for people and more...", and select "Search for photos" from the drop down menu. www.ipernity.com/search/photo?w=0&q=cat The default search parameters then give you the most relevant photos where somewhere on the image title, caption, keywords or comment…

Instructions on how to add a picture in picture notes. A. Go to image which you want to add as a note on another image. Choose 'See all sizes' from 'Actions' menu to get the code . Select the size you want. 500px wide image is recommended. Skip this if you wish to add text only onto the note. B. Go to image where you wish to add a n…

There are some interesting observations on this video article, like people not necessarily realizing how wide angle close up shot distorts the perspective, and how a "professional photographer" may see things differently than less experienced ones.

If you have ever wondered how your ipernity account and images become picked by global search engines like Google, then hopefully this helps you to understand. Anything you publish with no restrictions get a status "Visible by: Everyone". It really means it is public on internet and it can not be restricted by any settings. What is public is then public .You can only set some local restrictions here on this page: https://www.ipernity.com/pref/privacy There you can say no to "Appear…

A general wish to all who use PiPs/notes on images. Please consider placing them close to the top left corner. Unless, you indeed wish to point out some spot on the main image. On modest sized displays, when notes are put more on right and close to bottom of the main picture, the less one can see of them on smaller display. The rest of the images becomes hidden outside of the display. And if there is no option to open them separately, then no chance to see them as a whole. Go ahead sh…

Because there are so many options to listen music online, I have not much bought albums anymore. Last one I did bought as a CD, was Opalescent by Jon Hopkins . And because it has collected dust in the bookshelf, I had almost fogotten it. But lately I have rediscovered it thanks to SoundCloud and Deezer. Jon Hopkins - Singularity from Khalid Mohtaseb on Vimeo . And once again, such music gives food for the thought: Open Eye Signal - Jon Hopkins from AOIFE MCARDLE…