Klick Blog

This post has been waiting to be written almost since the first release of Klick two months ago. It was delayed because it includes content that I couldn’t legally discuss under the NDA I (and every other iPhone developer) agreed to when I began developing for the iPhone. Thankfully, the NDA was lifted last week, so I can now discuss the issue of EXIF with you openly and honestly.

The reasons Klick does not include EXIF data on photos it uploads are largely technical. For starters, the part of the iPhone SDK which allows you to take photos from within Klick does not automatically embed EXIF information into photos you take with it. The Camera application that comes with the iPhone does, but not the camera functionality available to other applications via the iPhone SDK.

This means that it takes extra effort for us to add EXIF information to photos before we upload them. It also means that certain EXIF tags you find on photos can never be added by Klick. Certain somewhat technical EXIF tags such as focal length or exposure simply aren’t available to us: they’re hidden by the underlying iPhone software. So if we were to start adding EXIF information to photos, we would probably be effectively limited to the photo’s size, location, and the fact that it was taken with an iPhone.

We haven’t gone to the effort to to embed this EXIF data into photos for a few reasons. Most importantly, we’re currently all working on a brand new iPhone application that we hope you’ll all love. We’re concentrating on getting this new application out, so we’re not going to be putting much effort into new features for Klick until this new application is out.

That’s the current explanation of why there’s no EXIF data on uploaded Klick photos. EXIF is something we know you all want, and it’s going to be a high priority when start working on the next version of Klick, but we don’t know exactly when that will be. Watch this space for more news.

Since Klick 1.3 hit the AppStore earlier this week, I thought now would be an appropriate time to go over some of the latest improvements and new features, particularly since we never did anything similar for 1.2, and there was also a bunch of cool new stuff in there.

Sets & Groups

Your sets and groups have both been accessible since 1.2. It’s not yet possible to see other user’s groups, but this is something we’re keeping in mind.

Paging

Paging, one of our most requested features early on, was also introduced in 1.2. Paging isn’t supported on every feed. It isn’t supported on the Recent feed because the Flickr API only allows 50 photos to be retrieved for the Recent feed, so there aren’t too many pages possible there. We don’t support paging on the Near Me feed because our algorithm does not make the idea of a “page” logical. Keep in mind that you can, however, pan around the map and new photos will be fetched in the visible area of the map. Beyond that, however, My Updated, Search, Favorites, Interesting, Streams, and photos from Sets & Groups all allow paging.

Search

Search is brand new in 1.3, and it’s pretty cool. Search works pretty much as you expect: where it gets neat is that, like every other feed in Klick, if any of your results have gecode information attached to them, you can flip over and see them on a map.

Even cooler, however, is that if you run a search while you’re already on the map, Klick tries to find out if you searched for a place. If you did, it will take you to that place on the map and show you photos in that area. If you didn’t, it returns the results of a standard keyword search and shows them on the map.

For example, if you search for “Paris”, you don’t just see photos with “Paris” in their titles or descriptions, but photos that were actually taken in Paris. We think this is a lot of fun, and can help you discover photos of places you’re interested in that you might not have found otherwise.

That’s the current state of Klick. Right now we’re hard at work for some cool new ideas for other iPhone apps, so updates may not be coming as quickly for Klick as they have been in the last few weeks, but that doesn’t mean we’re not listening or thinking about what we can do better, so keep that feedback coming!

Some users started reporting a few days ago that their images were uploading upside down. As I wrote earlier, Klick has two modes for rotating photos: one which assumed you had Auto-rotate turned on in your Flickr preferences, and one which assumed you didn’t. If you had the mode where Klick assumed you had Auto-rotate turned on in Flickr on, Klick would still rotate your photos in certain orientations because a Flickr bug caused their auto-rotation to rotate the photo incorrectly. It has come to our attention, however, that Flickr fixed their issue with auto-rotating iPhone photos, which means that Klick’s behavior is now actually making photos incorrect, rather than correct.

We apologize for the hassle to users resulting from this. A new version of Klick, which fixes the issue, has been submitted to the AppStore for approval, and will hopefully be available soon. The new version also includes other bug fixes and one very cool new feature, so keep an eye on this space for more news about that when it’s available.

It’s also worth mentioning there is a workaround in the meantime to make sure your photos upload correctly to Flickr from Klick. If you turn off Auto-rotate in your Flickr preferences, and turn on the “Rotate Photos” setting in your Klick preferences (found in your iPhone’s Settings application), your photos will be rotated correctly.

We know we’ve been silent here for a while, and haven’t been as responsive to some people’s questions as we should have been. We’ve been really hard at work on the 1.2 release that just hit the AppStore, and our concentration on the new features we were getting ready meant we weren’t as communicative we wanted to be. So I thought now might be a good time to do a quick overview of some recent questions we’ve heard, and the answers we have for them right now.

Photo Orientation

There have been some complaints about photos being rotated incorrectly after they’re uploaded. Believe me, this is something we struggled with during development. What makes this difficult is how the iPhone encodes orientation on photos taken with its camera, which I can assure you is not at all what you would expect it to be, combined with the fact that Flickr has a preference for auto-rotating photos. To make matters more interesting, Flickr’s API does not make it possible for us to check whether you have your Auto-rotate preference turned on. To make matters even more interesting, Flickr’s Auto-rotate feature actually does the wrong rotation on iPhone photos taken with particular orientations. Our answer to this was to assume your Flickr Auto-rotate preference was on (it is by default on new accounts), and treat your photos that way, while still “fixing” the rotation of photos that we knew Flickr’s auto-rotate would make a mistake on.

Of course, if your Auto-rotate preference was off, this behavior would make your photos come up at some very unexpected angles. So we added our own Rotate Photos preference so you could tell us if your Auto-rotate preference on Flickr was off. If you turn on the Rotate Photos option in Klick, Klick takes care of rotating your photos to look correct, assuming Flickr won’t be doing this.

So if your photos are uploading at weird rotations, a quick change to your settings should fix it. If your Auto-rotate preference in Flickr is on (you can check it in your account Privacy Settings), then your Rotate Photos preference in Klick (you can find it in the Settings application under Klick) should be off. If your Auto-rotate preference in Flickr is off, then your Rotate Photos preference in Klick should be on.

If you think your settings are correct and you’re still getting weird behavior, send an email to feedback@klickmap.com with a description of what’s going wrong for you.

EXIF data

Some people have asked about EXIF data attached to the photos taken with Klick. EXIF data, as many people have noticed, is embedded in photos taken with the iPhone’s Camera.app, but not in photos taken using Klick (or probably any of the other third party apps you’re using). The reason for this is that we would need to generate this EXIF data and embed it into the photos ourselves. We decided to concentrate on other features that we thought people would get more use out of, and so didn’t include this in current versions of Klick. If there’s enough demand for this, we’ll consider including it in a future version, so let us know if this is something that’s really important to you!

Also, please let us know if I’m wrong about EXIF data not being included by other third party apps. If you know of apps that do embed EXIF data in photos taken from within those apps, please drop a comment.

One issue with our current treatment of EXIF data that we definitely hope to address is the location information embedded in photos you took with Camera.app. Right now, if you use Klick to upload a photo taken with Camera.app, Klick will by default tag that photo as being taken at your current location, even though the EXIF data in the photo might say it was taken somewhere else. You can change the location Klick will add to the photo when it uploads it with the location editor, but it should of course use the correct location by default. This is something we’re aware of and will work on.

Photo sizes

There have been some comments about photo sizes in Flickr as uploaded using Klick versus other methods, such as email. Photos as taken by the iPhone’s camera are 1600×1200 pixels. If you send a photo via email, the iPhone resizes the photo to 640×480, presumably to make sending the email reasonably fast on the cell network. Klick uploads photos at full size, which is great for photo quality, but can be very slow if you’re on EDGE instead of 3G or WiFi. Note, however, that Flickr only maintains the originally sized image if you have a Pro account: otherwise it gets resized down to 1024×768.

Location finding

Some people have reported having Klick tell them their current location is the last place they used their phone, which could be very far away. I’ve had this happen to me myself, both in Klick and other apps. This appears to be a caching issue with how locations are found and reported by the iPhone. If this happens, try waiting ten seconds or so and switching to a new tab (or just tapping the current tab again) and see if that fixes it. If it doesn’t, try just quitting Klick and relaunching it. We know this isn’t really great, and it’s something we’re working on.

Those are some of the most frequent issues we’ve heard from you about. If there are others that you’re worried about that I didn’t mention or explain to your satisfaction, leave a comment!

We know that a few users are having issues authenticating Klick with Flickr. We are aware of this and are actively working on resolving this issue. In the meantime, a temporary work-around is to delete and re-install Klick on your iPhone which should fix this problem. If you still can not authenticate your application after trying this please let us know.

Yesterday, the first version of our app was released on the iTunes App Store. We were, of course, very excited about this. Working practically non-stop for a couple months now, it’s great to finally have something people can use and we feel good about.  Our strategy has been to build the best user interface we can, so we have appreciated the positive and constructive feedback we’ve received so far.

In order to have a more open dialog with our users we are opening this blog. We hope other users will benefit from our answers to questions that we’ve so far been answering over email. Also, we hope this blog becomes a dialog for future features and ideas.

Please reply to this post with any initial comments of feedback you have on Klick v1.0.