I need your feedback on my film exploring website

shootfilm · Mar 10, 2019

Hey guys!

I have been working on a web application the last couple of weeks which helps people, especially new to analog photography figuring out which film might be the best for them. The site will list all available films with the associated facts. Furthermore it will let you filter films based on certain criteria and compare them. The main feature so far is that each film shows a stream of photos which should further help the selection process. Currently I am sourcing the images from tumblr but I will probably switch to flickr due to quality of the content.

The site is called Filmtypes and you can find it here: https://filmtypes.com/

Currently it is the first alpha version of a minimal viable product and I really want to get feedback first before continuing the development.

What do you think of the concept, the listed film properties and what features would you like to see in the app?

I am aware that you guys here are almost analog specialists and not particularly the target group of the site but I am sure your help can be very valuable.

Thank you so much!

Peter Schrager · Mar 11, 2019

I didn't see any black and white films listed....

Nodda Duma · Mar 11, 2019

Check out the comprehensive film list compiled last year at emulsive.org. It lists every analog media available to date.

removedacct1 · Mar 11, 2019

If you source the photos you embed in the pages from peoples blogs (or Flickr) without the authors permission, you are almost certainly violating copyright and/or intellectual property rights. Do you have permission to display the photos you are using?

trendland · Mar 11, 2019

paulbarden said:
If you source the photos you embed in the pages from peoples blogs (or Flickr) without the authors permission, you are almost certainly violating copyright and/or intellectual property rights. Do you have permission to display the photos you are using?

Pls. keep calm Paul!

with regards

PS : BTW concerning your avatar - is it you? If it isn't realy you (that is often the case with pics. from avatars) I hope it isn't copied from the net!
PPS : .....because FBI, ATF, Homeland Security, Air National Guard,....AND Oregon PD might be straight in the way to you......!
PPPS : Intellectual property rights are created to save "interllectual propertys" for not to be stolen!
But (just from my point - and from different "strong" regulation in different world regions there have to be first something "intellectual" within that is able to steel. Nonsence from the net is not able to be under protection!

Example : If a secretary is back at home from her bureau job - she might bake a pizza !
We can imagine that not all bureau jobbers are well experience in kitchen!
And so some photos of "burnt pizza" reaches the net as the 7. worldwonder !
Posters sometimes are so prout from fullfiling the serious task of pizza backing (after some try out with totally charred pizza) that they are looking foreward to be "liked"!

Such kind of poor interlectual achivement deserves no protection from copyright!
Explicide if it has been dublicated massive and published in the net from author!
Same is to most " bad photography" - think about tumblr !!

cowanw · Mar 11, 2019

Apart from the questionable choice to use other photographers work for your own purposes, it occurs to me that you have no way of knowing just what these other photographers use for their workflow and therefor just how the image represents the film as I, for example, might use it. Nor does the presentation on the world's computer screens offer much control over how representative of a particular film, the imagery is.
Your specs seem to be copy pasted from ? distributors? but, for example, your Lomography 400 is listed as natural colour but your examples are anything but that.

shootfilm · Mar 11, 2019

@ALL:

Thank you so much for your feedback so far!

It is indeed true that it is almost impossible to figure out which workflow they used. Especially scanners and computer screens can change the end result heavily. However, the way all the people I know who shoot film including me, did their first research was actually by going on tumblr and flickr and scrolling through the images and I am pretty sure there are other people out there as well.

So far if you hover over each photo you can clearly see the image credits and by clicking on them you will get redirected to their tumblr page. Those images/blogs are publicly available and exposing it to more people just benefits their interest of posting photos on a photo-sharing-network. That like I mentioned was just a first version to get people to test it. I will eventually switch to Flickr images.

The specs are put together from various sources including my own knowledge and interpretation. The facts for example are all CC BY-SA. I do not claim all informations to be "right" yet nor they ever will since in this domain everything is fairly subjective. The goal of the site is to give indications and not tell that this is the only source of truth. There are many blogs out there all claiming different characteristics of the same film. To counteract this effect I am thinking of implement a kind of voting or report mechanism which helps finding out what is more likely to be correct.

I hope I could clear most of the things and I am very happy to get more feedback and your thoughts!

removed account4 · Mar 11, 2019

looks nice !
i agree with noddaduma check out emulsive.org to see what's out there, there's LOTS...
AND
IDK i agree with paulbarden...
most likely a hot linked photo and being transported to the site most likely will not be good enough
if people get cranky you are using their work without permission. i know in the past people were doing that with
some of my photographs and to be honest i wasn't very happy about it. you might send the people an email telling them what you are doing
and ask them if you can use specific images and i am guessing some will be happy to help you out.
and you can find out what their "workflow" was so you have a clue why the superia films don't look like the prints I always get back from the lab !
its a nice start, i like the concept !

shootfilm · Mar 11, 2019

jnantz said:
looks nice !
i agree with noddaduma check out emulsive.org to see what's out there, there's LOTS...
AND
IDK i agree with paulbarden...
most likely a hot linked photo and being transported to the site most likely will not be good enough
if people get cranky you are using their work without permission. i know in the past people were doing that with
some of my photographs and to be honest i wasn't very happy about it. you might send the people an email telling them what you are doing
and ask them if you can use specific images and i am guessing some will be happy to help you out.
and you can find out what their "workflow" was so you have a clue why the superia films don't look like the prints I always get back from the lab !
its a nice start, i like the concept !

Thanks! It is also a good idea to ask other people to send in images and then just display a handful of selected ones. Maybe I will adapt to this way in the future but I think there are already enough blogs out there doing just that and it really helped me in the beginning to just see a stream of different photos even when was aware that the outcome of the images varies by different variables. I am using the Flickr API now and the quality of the images are already much better. Flickr also allows to filter based on different licenses so I can make sure to just use licenses appropriate to my intentions. I have not decided yet but CC BY 2.0 seems to be perfect.

I am now thinking about reviews... There are already a lot of reviews on various blogs, emulsive & jch being ones of the biggest. Maybe I will just link them to the websites or should I provide an own review section? I think there is never enough film reviews but to get the quality similar to the blogs mentioned could be very hard and especially time-consuming.

@ALL:
Also are there any other features or film properties you would like to see?

removedacct1 · Mar 11, 2019

shootfilm said:
Thanks! It is also a good idea to ask other people to send in images and then just display a handful of selected ones. Maybe I will adapt to this way in the future but I think there are already enough blogs out there doing just that and it really helped me in the beginning to just see a stream of different photos even when was aware that the outcome of the images varies by different variables. I am using the Flickr API now and the quality of the images are already much better. Flickr also allows to filter based on different licenses so I can make sure to just use licenses appropriate to my intentions. I have not decided yet but CC BY 2.0 seems to be perfect.

FYI, anyone who hotlinks to specific Flickr URLs of my work gets blocked, permanently. You need to ask permission to hotlink to someone's images.

shootfilm · Mar 12, 2019

paulbarden said:
FYI, anyone who hotlinks to specific Flickr URLs of my work gets blocked, permanently. You need to ask permission to hotlink to someone's images.

That is perfectly fine! Just make sure you have set the license on your photo appropriately; for example the strongest one is as far as I know is the All Rights Reserved one which is also the default one on Flickr I believe.

For more information about this topic take a look at the following three links: https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/understand-how-copyright-works-on-flickr-4106956 https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

AgX · Mar 12, 2019

shootfilm said:
That is perfectly fine! Just make sure you have set the license on your photo appropriately; for example the strongest one is as far as I know is the All Rights Reserved one which is also the default one on Flickr I believe.

You are twisting ones obligations!
The absence of a copyright mark does not necessarily make the image etc. free. For sure not where you are located.

And be aware the field of intellectual property is very tricky.

shootfilm · Mar 12, 2019

AgX said:
You are twisting ones obligations!
The absence of a copyright mark does not necessarily make the image etc. free. For sure not where you are located.

Yes that is in fact true! As long as you do not specifically choose another license model like CC BY 2.0 all your rights belong automatically to you.

removed account4 · Mar 12, 2019

i don't know about austria, but here in the usa, publishing someone's work without their concent
is a breech of copyright law. in the states someone who knowingly publishes another person's work like that
typically gets taken to court and slapped with a hefty fine ( sometimes 3x what the usage fees for that publication are ).
i would be very careful, unless something is listed as royalty free or someone specifically says you can use their work in your online publication, cuting and pasting + hotlinking
other people's work there. again send an email tell them what you are doing, often times people are flattered, some will say NO !

AgX · Mar 12, 2019

shootfilm said:
Yes that is in fact true! As long as you do not specifically choose another license model like CC BY 2.0 all your rights belong automatically to you.

I had not licence models in mind, but the various national laws.

shootfilm · Apr 29, 2019

**Update**

Hey guys, the first version 1.0 of the website is now finally live!

You can check it out here: https://filmtypes.com/

The site now allows you to find out about the variety of analog films by exploring the characteristics, photo examples, written & video reviews and engage in discussions. Over the coming weeks, I will off course add more films so that the database truly resembles the current state of analog films. Regarding the photo feedback, you were all right. I am well aware that developing times, scanner quality, monitor display, etc. affect the final outcome of the picture, so I thought to minimize the outcome of the automatic pictures pulled from flickr I have to pick the best fitting ones manually. I ended up selecting six photos for each film manually as well as manually picking the written reviews since there are better and worse ones out there. In the end, it was more work than I thought off but it was definitely worth it!

I would love to know what you think!

And thanks again for the feedback guys!

I need your feedback on my film exploring website

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