Streetfiles.org

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.

Further Readings

• Streetfiles Manifesto
• Streetfiles FAQ (why we delete photos)
• Streetfiles Blog: Say No Go
• Streetfiles Blog: Toys are Us
• Blog: The secret Streetfiles

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:

• Logo in the footer of all pages;
• Web banner ads;
• Contest partner (more on this soon).

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.

Yeah!

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.

• Cafe Nest Website with street map

We've created a monster

Yesterday we took this website down and asked you to write a message to a potential sponsor. We really need financial help to continue this project. To answer the most common questions:

Streetfiles is hosted by our sister company Fortrabbit and should only pay the costs of operation. We have set up a very special environment including loadbalanced webservers, finetuned database servers, special memcache settings, a dedicated photo converting server and more. Right now Streetfiles is about 350GB large and has about 2500 GB of traffic each month. We, the core admins & developers, are all freelancers. It's hard to earn money elsewhere and develop Streetfiles at the same time.

Right now we do not want to ask our members and visitors for money for two reasons: We think some companies can afford to sponsor us. We like to respect your privacy.

Dear sponsor, here are 497 reasons to support us

Lieber Tagesspiegel, toll dass ihre unsere Website Streetfiles.org nicht nur genannt, sondern auch verlinkt habt. Wir hätten uns freilich lieber im Kulturteil wiedergefunden. Aber wie heisst es so schön? Even bad press is good press.

Wie kommts eigentlich, dass ihr so salopp mit den Persönlichkeitsrechten des Beschuldigten umgeht? Jeder Kriegsverbrecher ist, solange er nicht verurteilt ist noch ein "mutmaßlicher" Kriegsverbrecher. Die gleichen Rechte scheint ein Graffitisprüher bei euch nicht zu haben.

• Tagesspiegel Artikel
• Morgenpost Artikel

Illustration by gogo

Now let's get right on down to the skit. With increasing popularity of Streetfiles more and more photos come in every day. And that also inculdes of course a lot of toy trash. Actually Streetfiles should be as open as possible but for real we simply can't afford it and we learned that none of us is really interested in a whole lot of toy crap pieces. Please read this blog entry for informations about our reasons and see an interesting ongoing discussion.

It was only a question of time: fatcap.com is our new competitor and is just like your beloved Streetfiles an online photo sharing community for graffiti and street art. We just checked it out quickly and we have to admit that it looks cool and even has a few things that we do not have:

• Videos
• Artists (not only members)
• Multi Language (french and english)

So go, check it out, compare us, post your thoughts here. We are exited and of course now even more motivated to keep on going.