Thanks for giving it a critique – extremely useful stuff. I’m the man tasked with building the site, so it’s nice to have some step by step feedback on the site.

A few responses from me then:

* The ‘may take 24 hours’ – we had to put this line in because we have to temporarily store all of the requests to Flickr so that the site is quick to use and we didn’t want people getting confused about where there photo is once it’s added. There’s also the issue of moderation, but a photo you add should only take about 20 minutes to appear at the moment. Definitely looking at a ‘find my photo’ or a ‘get an email when your photo is online’ button.

* The ‘authorize’ issue – basically we don’t have control over the message you get here. There are four levels of access – Read, Write, Delete and None. So we can add tags and geotags we request ‘Write’ access, and it’s only when you’re logged in to the site that the system does anything with your photos. I’m with you on the message – it looks scary, particularly the ‘private photos’ part. However – the site doesn’t allow you to add private images, and we’re only issuing a small subset of Flickr commands – “Get photo info”, “Search photos”, “Add tags” and so on.

* Glad you like the Google Maps geotagging – I’ve got a few improvements I’d like to see here. “Type in a UK address”, “Type in a postcode” shortcuts and so on. I’ll add an optional satellite view.

* The ‘payback’ issue – I’ve been working on this this week but been held up with slight headaches and improvements that needed making on the system – I agree, something a bit special for adding a photo is needed…. I’ll get my thinking cap on.

* As always, there are ties that go with any arts project, and in this case it’s to gather some information about who’s using the site. I’ve done my best to ‘webbify’ the form and make it an easy thing to do. We’ve had a great rate of response to this so far – I’ll see if there’s any way to compress it or simplify it further in any way.

* Because participants retain the rights to their images the promotion thing has been a bit of an issue, so we’re adding an ‘opt in’ box to alow media partners to use an image with permission and credit.

Again – thanks for the feedback. Maybe in a week or so take it for another spin and see what you think? Hopefully most of the bugs will have been ironed out by then and we’ll have a bunch of new features and things to do on the site too.

The points you raise and the questions you’ve asked make sense to me. Bht some of these things have no answers. They just are.