Kai’s Photo Soap - The Long-Lost Image Editing Gem

If you ever want to illustrate that software development has gone backwards in the past couple of decades, the late 1990s image editing phenomenon of Kai's Photo Soap can happily serve as your Exhibit A.

In the Tone Room. The original Kai's Photo Soap, circa 1997.

Over time, image editors have become more and more bloated with options and tools. That’s not such a problem if you’re familiar with the package and know where everything is. But if you’re using an image editor for the first time, a crowded screen of tools, mini-windows and menus is likely to prove a brain-frying experience.

Heading back to the 1990s is one way to find simpler image editors across the board. But if you delve into that vibrant era in photo-editor design history, you find that a brilliant solution to interface overload had been developed early on in the timeline. It just didn’t make it to the forefront of industry protocol, and sadly, it pretty much expired with the decade…

Anti-Piracy By Design: Why Preventing Copyright Theft is Small Social’s Best Weapon

If you thought that privacy, decentralisation or free speech was going to drive the next big social media sensation, you were wrong. Anti-piracy on the other hand... Well...

Image by Bob Leggitt - @PlanetBotch

It’s a telling trait that advancement within the different disciplines of technology has been unequal. Perhaps most telling of all, is the gaping chasm in progress between the tech giants’ ability to keep track of a person, versus their ability to keep track of stolen content.

Although big tech treats these two realms of progress as though they’re completely different disciplines, they actually use exactly the same principles. So the tools to eliminate online piracy already exist. They’re just rarely used. And the reason they’re so rarely used? Big tech is a pirate. Big tech loves piracy, and it defends its right to host pirated content by persistently derailing proposed anti-piracy laws.

The amount of money the tech giants have spent on lobbies and campaigns to block anti-piracy laws (which they always somehow manage to re-frame as “censorship bills”) is astronomical. So this is not a case of those tech giants simply not caring enough about piracy to stamp it out. It’s a case of those tech giants being ruthlessly committed to facilitating piracy.

Evidently, without that elusive change in the law, an internet which is anti-piracy by design is not going to be built from the top down. But could it be built from the bottom up?

How The Internet Abuses Photographers & How Photographers Can Fight Back

Post a photo on the free internet, and by default its copyright will be twisted into a knot of "yes but"s and "you have to expect"s. Here's the "Actually, NO!" you were looking for...

Image by Bob Leggitt - @PlanetBotch

One of most common things I see when I look at the average photographer online, is a person who truly has no concept of how grotesquely they’re being screwed over. I’ve said before that I despair when I see photographers accepting as normal a situation where they have to pay to contribute their work to the internet. But in this three and a half thousand word epic, I’m going to delve much deeper into the kit of psychological tools, used by big tech, to turn the web's most important contributors into the most unsung. And then I’m going to discuss some solutions…

The internet has deliberately been engineered to devalue photos, whilst at the same time using them to front nearly everything the web has to offer. And when I say front it, I don’t just mean appear at the top. I mean literally drive it. Photos are about 90% of the value of £billions worth of online content. Alongside provocative titles and egotistical lure, they’re one of the key push systems of traffic to some of the web’s most lucrative domains.

One might imagine that would be good news for the photographer. But because of the way the internet is set up, it’s the exact opposite. It’s very bad news indeed.

Flickr Dupes Paying Members Again as 'Pro' Content is Strewn With Ads

SmugMug is now apparently so takeover-addled by the mess it's made of Flickr that it can't remember what "NO ADS" means.

Image by Bob Leggitt - @PlanetBotch

Just one year after Flickr blackmailed users into paying for 'Pro' memberships with a substantially empty threat of content deletion, the platform has its con-man hat on once again.

And it's those same forgiving, compliant creatives the platform is exploiting. This time, by brazenly breaching a pledge which was clearly and expressly communicated, by Flickr, to paying, 'Pro' members. Namely…

"Your photos will never be shown next to an advertisement, whether you are viewing them or they are being viewed by the community."

"WILL. NEVER." Oh yeah?…