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UER Forum > UE Tutorials, Lessons, and Useful Info > Flickr and privacy (Viewed 3125 times)
Ganesha 

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Location: Seattle, Washington, USA
Gender: Male
Total Likes: 216 likes




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Flickr and privacy
< on 10/11/2015 3:33 AM >
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Posted on Forum: UER Forum
I've often seen advice to host photos on Flickr and link them here on UER, rather than uploading them here. The reason given is to avoid UER's photo compression. You do this by going to Flickr, clicking Share, picking bbcode and copying the gobbledygook; then you go to UER and paste it in a post. For example,

IMG_6425 by Ganesha Ganesha, on Flickr

Let's take a closer look at the gobbledygook. If we just look at the tags and literals, this boils down to:

[url][eimg][/eimg][/url] [url][/url]  by  [url]username[/url] on Flickr

(Sorry about the "eimg" markup, it should be "img".) So you're posting three links. The first one tells UER where to get the image, and makes the image a link to a Flickr page containing the image. (Note that if you delete the image in Flickr, this link still works.) The second one makes a link to Flickr labeled with the image's title. The third one makes a link to Flickr labelled with the Flickr username.

So, what we're really talking about here is a hole in UER's security; that is, a conduit to a completely different website, Flickr. This gives people you don't know access to your whole Flickr website. If it's your personal RL Flickr website, your real name and perhaps other personal information is hanging out there. So is that of all of your followers. If you use your Flickr username on other websites, a curious person can google it and follow you there, too.

If you're a professional photographer, this just boils down to more traffic for your gallery. However, sad to say, there are a few bad apples among UER's membership. They may mine your Flickr page for site locations and personal information. They may send you FlickrMail that you won't enjoy reading, via anonymous Flickr accounts that can't be traced.

What to do, if you care about this issue? Some alternatives:
1. Edit the gobbledygook, removing everything after the first "/url" link. This keeps your Flickr userid (your name?) from being displayed in UER. But the image still works as a link. Try it:



2. Create an anonymous Flickr account. Best create an anonymous email address for it, too.
3. Don't use Flickr; just upload your photos to UER. I think they look okay, and Av says he has plenty of disk space for them.

Related; a discussion of the risks of being personally identifiable on UER, http://www.uer.ca/...=1&threadid=120404







"The beauty of mediocrity is that anything can make you better." -Jeff Mallett
Zweiblumen 


Location: Boston, MA
Gender: Male
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Re: Flickr and privacy
< Reply # 1 on 10/12/2015 4:06 PM >
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Posted on Forum: UER Forum
The best way to dodge this issue would be to delete everything in the goobldeygook except for the
[eimg]....[/eimg]
(really img, not eimg, as discussed above) stuff. Then you just inline the image by its farm.staticflickr.com name, and it's not a link and not as obvious (or maybe not even possible?) to tie the img url back to your flickr account.


Personally I'm deciding not to worry about this too much and am going to tolerate a linkage between my UER account and my real name.



[last edit 10/12/2015 4:10 PM by Zweiblumen - edited 2 times]

RescueMe1060 


Location: San Francisco
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Radioactivity, its in the air for you & me

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Re: Flickr and privacy
< Reply # 2 on 10/12/2015 7:35 PM >
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We have & had creepers on UER that did use Flickr to track down and stalk people. I brought this issue up a few years ago via the contact a mod board but I was kept in the dark on how the issue was being resolved and/or improved. -But- that was before and this is now. Now we have new moderators who actually care and are engaged. Happy to see this subject is still being thought about by our newer members.




http://www.flickr....rescueme1060/sets/
Deuterium 


Location: PNW
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Re: Flickr and privacy
< Reply # 3 on 10/16/2015 5:59 PM >
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Posted on Forum: UER Forum
Posted by Ganesha
I've often seen advice to host photos on Flickr and link them here on UER, rather than uploading them here. The reason given is to avoid UER's photo compression.


The "attach image" button was the only option to host on UER in the 2000's and it is picky on what it will accept. Though the function is retained, there's really no reason to use it. UER's new hosting system AvGallery Creator down below is a huge improvement and maintains quality. You just need Adobe Flash plug-in installed. You can disable the rescaling by unchecking the check box. I would still try to keep the image no larger than 1000 pixels on either sides only because it becomes too large to display on a screen.





UER Forum > UE Tutorials, Lessons, and Useful Info > Flickr and privacy (Viewed 3125 times)


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