photo by StreetBrother

Streetfiles launched one month ago. We thank all visitors and all members for wasting time with us. Each day about 1000 visitors check out the newest photos of graff and urban art. The average visitor stays about 9 minutes (which is very long for a website). So each day 8 days get spended on Streetfiles, not only like the Beatles mentioned: 8 days a week.

We already have 500 members. About 4000 photos got uploaded in the first 30 days, most of them by members.

We got linked from quite a few pages (cpluv.com, fontanel.nl, ekosystem.org, page-online.de, juxtapoz.com …) and some websites already use our RSS stream (buffstuff.de, streetart.berlinpiraten.de).

Anyway, we hope to become a bit more international. We come from Berlin, we love Berlin and Berlin is a big city with a lot of urban art, but not as much as ten times more than everywhere else! We have 10.000 photos from Berlin, the next city is Barcelona with 1.000 photos. Come on!

And we hope to attract more great artists to post on Streetfiles. Our webstats tool tells us a lot, but not how old our visitors are. But we believe that there is a gap between the younger generation and the olders. A lot of great artists simply don’t publish on the internet. Come on!

Das für investigativen Journalismus bekannte berliner Stadtmagazin Zitty entdeckt den Street Art Hype, zitiert mich als Graffitiopi (richtig!), zeigt Fotos von Just und fragt was eigentlich Street Art sei: Kunst, Vandalismus, oder politischer Kommentar?

Naja.

Piclens (http://www.piclens.com/) is a free Firefox plugin to browse and view all kind of media in a stylish 3d way FULLSCREEN. Streetfiles supports Piclens on certain lists like “new & popular“.

Please keep on supporting us with feature requests and bug reports (we know there are still a lot of them). Write us a mail or even better post something in the developing corner.

[update] We updated the rss feeds a little bit to browse all photos. We really hope traffic won’t kill us.

We produced a few new Streetfiles stickers. You tag your name on and promote your name and streetfiles at the same time. These stickers get distributed by stylefile and overkill (thanks).

Stasi 2.0 by Dataloo

Susan wrote ‘How posting online can get you busted’. We advice: you should read it.

On our website your IP adresses get stored:

• In the firewall of the server for seven days to protect Streetfiles against hack attacks;
• In our web analyzer ‘Clicky‘ for a year. We chose Clicky not Google Analytics to be a bit more private;
• On our own adserver for seven days.

In addition we save each Streetfiles members e-mail address. We have to do so to make sure not to get bombed by spambots. We suggest you use an e-mail address just for this purpose which can not get connected to you personally. You can even change the e-mail address afterwards in a non existing e-mail, whichs is on the other hand not so good, because than you should not forget your password and you will not be notified on anything.

And yes: we use cookies.

We delete all photo metadata (EXIF, IPTC etc) after the upload!

We check each photo before publishing. We will not publish photos which are too hardcore. Streetfiles is about interesting stuff, not about hardcore actions.

You can allways upload photos anonmously without being logged in as a Streetfiles member.

So we try to care about your privacy as much as we can. Please do so too. You can start by NOT saving your login data to Streetfiles in your browser.

We suggest you use an anonymity service like Tor. Read our privacy policy for more info on this topic.

We still have goosebumps! Yesterday 2.000 visitors wanted to know what Streetfiles looks like. We got 77 new members, and 496 new photos on the first day!

We spended about a year in a dark Kreuzberg backyard developing. We had no idea if people will like it or rather understand it. It just feels great.

We hope to see more international visitors and members soon. Berlin is the Graffiti & Street Art captial of the world. But there must be some more stuff from other metropolisis as well.

And we are not done yet. We have plans on extending functionality and adding more features. Right now we are focussed on bugfixing. So please report bugs and problems to hello@streetfiles.org.

We integrated about 17.000 photos from the old graffitinet.com website and uploaded about 3.000 new ones (mostly from Berlin). Beside the anonymous upload you are now able become a Streetfiles member to manage your photos, write comments and join groups. Membership is free and only takes 2 minutes at Streetfiles.org.

On the frist day we had 545 visitors and about 25 new members.

We did not placed a big BETA button. Although we still expect a few errors here and there. Please do not hestitate to contact us hello@streetfiles.org if something strange happens.

It was in 1998 when Berlin-based Moritz von Recklinghausen had the idea of founding a database for graffiti-pictures that anyone could join. Three years later graffitinet.com went online. Although there existed just very few digital cameras at that time, the project still was very successful.
In 2007 Moritz and his team decided to incorporate with the office community of Esher (Berlin graffiti artist) and Control-B in order to realize an entire new development of the project. After six months the platform now re-opens as streetfiles.org.
The internationally laid-out website is in English. Its aim is to document the movement of street art, graffiti and art in public space with the help of its users. Approximately 17.000 pictures were taken over from the previous database and more than 3.000 were uploaded in the two months testing phase.
And this is only the beginning. Next to the possibility to anonymously upload pictures, registered members can now communicate and interact with each other.
A unique tool is that pictures are being graded by how popular and up-to-date they are. This creates a mixture of editorial supervision and user-performance. In this way not only the dimension of this global urban movement is shown, but also its quality.
The registered association Graffitinet is the supporting organization of the website.

Warum soll ich bei Streetfiles veröffentlichen?

• Nutze unsere Plattform um dein Zeug dem richtigen Publikum zu präsentieren.
• Trete mit deinem Publikum in Kontakt, durch Kommentare und Nachrichten.
• Streetfiles kan dein Online Portfolio sein. So sieht deine Adresse aus: streetfiles.org/deinname. Bei Streetfiles Photos hochzuladen ist einfacher als ein Update auf der eigenen Homepage (, die Du natürlich von Streetfiles verlinken kannst).
• Pflege und erweitere Dein bestehendes soziales Netzwerk zu Anderen, durch Freundesbeziehungen und Gruppen.
• Bestimme, wem Du welche Photos zeigst und mit welchen Rechten Du veröffentlichst (Creative Commons, oder All Rights reserved).
• Veröffentliche deine Eigenen Arbeiten, oder die von Anderen, die Du gut findest.
• Finde Photos deiner Arbeiten bei Streetfiles und lad sie Dir in Originalauflösung runter.
• In Zukunft wird es bei Streetfiles Schnittstellen geben, mit denen Du deine Streetfiles auch auf anderen Plattformen (z.b. Myspace) oder deiner Homepage veröffentlichen kannst.
• Streetfiles ist kein Multimillionendollarkonzern, sondern eine Privatinitiative organisiert als Verein.

Ich möchte meine Photos lieber nicht im Netz veröffentlichen, warum sollte ich das tun?

Aus dem gleichen Grund, aus dem Du Kunst im öffentlichen Raum betreibst: Du möchtest, dass dein Werk gesehen wird. Wir sehen das Internet als die perfekte Publikationsmöglichkeit für Street Art und Graffiti. Schnell, aktuell und fair.

Aber ich möchte meine Sachen lieber als Buch publizieren!

Wir glauben nicht, dass das Netz die Bücher verdrängt. Photos in einem Buch zu erleben ist etwas ganz Anderes. Wir lieben Bücher und haben einen extra Bereich, wo Bücher vorgestellt werden. Wir helfen Dir dein Buch zu verkaufen, z.b. über unsere Amazonschnittstelle.

Ich habe Angst vor polizeilicher Verfolgung, schließlich sind meine Arbeiten nicht immer ganz legal. Helft Ihr nicht der Polizei eine grosse Datenbank aufzubauen?

Na, wir hoffen doch nicht! Wir machen uns aber viele Gedanken um dieses Thema. Wir wollen so wenig persönliche Daten von Euch wie möglich und wir speichern diese auch nur so lang wie nötig. Wir brauchen eine E-Mail von Euch, um zu validieren, dass ihr wirklich Menschen und keine SPAMbots seit. An diese E-Mail senden wir dann auch Benachrichtigungen, und sie wird zum Login genutzt. Wir haben nichts dagegen, dass ihr dafür eine Wegwerf E-Mail Adresse benutzt, die es nur für diesen Zweck gibt. Wir speichern IP-Adressen für Statistische Auswertungen. Wir haben nichts dagegen, dass ihr einen Anonynmisierungsservice (wie TOR) benutzt. Wir werden keine Photos freischalten, die Euch belasten könnten (z.b. Trainaction mit Posse drauf). Wir löschen alle EXIF-Daten aus den Photos. EXIF-Daten sind Metadaten, die Rückschlüsse über das Photo erlauben (Kameramodell, Aufnahmedatum).

As long we don’t have videos at streetfiles we post them here in the blog.
Enjoy the tour of Above thru south america.