Yes, we are still alive. Recently the 1% Streetfiles exhibition (actually just 0,3%) was shown in Dresden-Prohlis during the Prohliser Wandmaltage by Sichtbeton. Photo above.
Yesterday we have had a nice chat at the Verunstaltungsreihe here in Berlin Kreuzberg in the Wendel Cafe about graffiti in the internet in general and of course about Streetfiles in particular. It's amazing for us to see how everybody interacts with our website. Good motivation.
photo by: timer cage
We launched Streetfiles not 2 years ago (july 2008) with about 15.000 photos from our forerunner graffitinet. Yesterday the 300.000th photo got uploaded! Thanks a lot for sharing your photos with us and the rest of the world! If you keep on we will have 1.000.000 photos in another 2 years.
Beyond our craziest expectations Streetfiles popularty is still growing. See some more numbers here. Thanks to the great support of Montana Colors we don't have to worry about the financial situation for the moment.
Drugs are on the left, prostitutes on the right. This one goes out to all you true gangsters, hustlers talking bullshit all day:
Please keep your conversation away from Streetfiles, at least keep it private. We are ambitious about our network here. Our aim is to show some beauty in graffiti and street art, even if done illegally. Streetfiles is public domain and presents this subculture like no other platform, we are very proud of it.
I don't want to leave the impression that we are all dumb. I wish that some visitor might think: "These guys might be vandals, i don't understand their behaviour, but i see that they have a great sense of humor."
This is the new feature: There is a button now claiming: "abuse?" on each comment and on each photo. So if you see some questionable content here on Streetfiles you can report it to us, fast and directly.
The new abuse report should help us solve more concerns quickly. It is NOT a new channel for endless dicusssions. We are sorry, but we can't answer all your questions personally. We have a beautiful guidelines page with nice drawings (in case you can't read) answering all the frequently asked questions. We also have our terms and this blog. Please mind not to overdue the new abuse feature. In other words: Don't abuse the abuse system. The abuse report contains your concerns and critics, your ID and of course the content you reported.
photo by neo knight
Last night Streetfiles was down for about 5 hours.
We are back, but there are still some problems.
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The missing photos on the front page will be back in some minutes.
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Probably some of you can not login at the moment.
Some user data are lost. We try to recover it now.
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We recovered about 500 accounts and hope everything is fine. Tell us if you created your account last week and you still have problems.
photo by LosMolozs
The original idea of Streetfiles has been to be totally open for everyone. One of our claims is: "Every piece tells a story". But with the increasing popularity and some real live experience we have found out that we actually don't want and regrettably can't afford "every piece".
It has turned out that Streetfiles is a 500 GB constantly growing gorilla. We have invested in new storage, but there is definetly a limit. We still want to keep your original (hopefully high quality) photos, because we want to be open for further needs. But in fact we strongly believe that quality is more important (and therefore more relevant) than quantity. Let's not fool ourselves: 1 photo with 500 views is better than 500 photos with 1 view.
We want to show beauty in destruction, not just a whole lot of senseless bombings. Most of us are over thirty years old. All of us are a bit tired of your testosterone driven uploads and comments.
I also don't want to answer on the same proceedings on a weekly basis. I will have a laugh on the first writer who will get busted for stuff he has published here on Streetfiles. Believe me: this will happen for sure and it is just a question of time. I hope this will open your eyes then and not destroy our beloved platform. We can't protect you from your very own imprudance, the internet is NOT anonymous.
We are about 10 admins. We review all of your photos after the upload. About 30% of all uploaded photos are not accepted. That is about 300 photos a day. We work from different places. The admins have different backgrounds and different points of views. And yes: we are human beings and we do mistakes. So it's very unlikely that we can answer your question why this and that photo has been rejected or even been deleted. The most common reasons are answered in our FAQ. We see that some of you have learned since you try to upload better quality photos. This gives us a tremendous boost of hope.
We have great ideas how to improve the process of photo clearing. We certainly want to make things more transparent and more fair. But for the time being we have to focus on other (crucial) aspects first. Right now e.g., we are optimizing our MySQL queries to give Streetfiles more speed.
First of all we would like to thank you: our loyal Streetfiles members. Without you Streetfiles would be nothing. Let's go further in 2010!
Finally we have signed a contract with our brand new sponsoring partner: the spraycan manufactor Montana Colors (yes the original ones from spain). We are really happy with this deal, these guys truly understood our ideas. Don't worry: Montana Colors is just supporting us. Of course we stay independent the way we are. MTN will be present here in the following ways:
Now that the food supply for our little monster is secured we are experimenting (expect some hic ups) with a new slightly bigger cage: we just installed a new image caching server.
We hope to find more time to develop and enhance Streetfiles in the near future. We have many many ideas. Your feedback here is as usual welcome.
SORRY, next Tuesday, starting at 22:30h CET the first of December we have to take down Streetfiles for about four hours again. At the last maintenance break we installed our new servers. This time we need to move all the data from the old server to the new. We hope that this will speed up Streetfiles a bit.
WOW: We now have 200,000 photos! Thanks a lot to everyone for uploading, keep on! Actually we already have more photos: The shown number of photos just counts public photos. About 5% (10,000) of all photos are private and are not included in the public number. For security reasons we strongly encourage you to set more photos private. Sorry, we are to busy to arrange a little party but you can join us at the "Stammtisch with Dejoe" in the Cafe Nest (the place where our ongoing exhibtion is) each Wednesday, starts at 20:30 h, Görlitzer Str. 52, 10997 Berlin. We would really like to meet some of you guys (NOT all) in person.
SPONSORSHIP: Thanks to your help we are in talks with a few companies. We are confident to bring good news on this soon.
We are getting new servers. Expect some hic ups on Saturday between 11:00 h and 16:00 h CET, we might be off a few hours.
Photos by stefan-kaz
Half a year ago we showed 1,000 photo prints in Gdansk at the Graffest. At that time we had about 100,000 photos in our archive. That's why we called it 1% Streetfiles. 1,000 photos are an impressive amount and still just one percent of Streetfiles.
Finally our polish friends returned the photos. And now we are going to show them for the first time in Berlin.
Actually the name should be "0,6% Streetfiles" or something, because right now we have 186,000 photos. But we printed no new photos, so the name stays the same. Please mind that all photos are half year old and older. We made just a quick selection. That means we surfed around, added photos we liked and as soon as we got the 1,000 together we stopped. Only photos under Creative Commons licence are published. Under each photo the address on Streetfiles.org (URL), the member name and the title are stated. The original uploaded sizes are used, this is why the quality varys a bit.
The location is really nice. We prepared four rooms as a gallery above the Nest Restaurant in Kreuzberg. Use the spiral stairs inside to enter.
Nest Speise- & Schankwirtschaft
Görlitzer Str. 52
10997 Berlin
U-Bhf Schlesisches Tor
The exhibtion will be opened from the 5th of November every day from 10:00h on until the 29th of November. And yes: the entrance is free.
Every Wednesday: Stammtisch mit Dejoe.