This is great! We have a multi-author Q&A blog at http://quezi.com/ where each question-and-answer is illustrated by a striking photo, either public domain or Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY).

This 1000-image limit: is it per author, or for the whole blog, or for all the sites operated by the same company (Uclue Ltd)?

At the moment, we only have a few hundred posts at Quezi, but it's possible that eventually it might go into the thousands. Naturally, each CC-BY photo has an acknowledgement and a (do-followed) link back.

Roger, glad you like it, and good question. I suppose for now we need to answer those on a case-by-case basis. The basic idea for the 1000 pics limit was that we wouldn't be too happy if someone downloads all 250,000 pics and then sets up, I dunno, sketchory2.com and creates the very same site. Whereas we would be OK if you want to say create and sell a book which contains nothing but Sketchory pics, because that would be cool, and we figured for a book or even a small book series, below 1000 pics overall should be OK for the moment. The Quezi case seems to be fine at first sight but I'll ponder it a bit and get back to you via mail.

PS: Just updated the blog post to show an example of how you can embed an animation showing the sketch being drawn. (We're currently working to add a border around it and make the link at the end link to the sketch in question...)

Nice work, guys!

Someone submitted to Digg: http://digg.com/arts_culture/Sketchory_CC_250_000_sketches

Very cool! I can't stop watching the animations! FYI your about page is down here: http://www.sketchswap.com/about.html

I'm jealous I don't have a tablet.

> FYI your about page is down here: sketchswap.com/about.html

Thanks, fixed!

Philipp, did you use an open source package for the tagging and tag clouds? if so, what? I've been looking to implement something similar on failpictures.com

Ryan, it's basically custom PHP and MySQL + Memcache. One table collects the sketches, another table collects the tags and the tag count (there's some other tables too). When the sketch cloud is shown, a function queries for the more popular tags and then adjusts the font size accordingly. Tag plural forms are suppressed in the output, and a certain tag character length minimum is there as well. The CSS then shows a dotted underline (technically: a bottom border) for the links, and shows an underline on-hover. A separate stylesheet is used for IExplorer due to some minor differences, included using the <!--[if IE]>...<![endif]--> syntax.

(Come to think of, I probably need to adjust the functionality because ideally, the font size should be scaled relative to the average tag count proportions, and not be expressed in relative terms just based on an individual tag as it is now. Today we were fixing some other issue: IExplorer had problems with the Flash animations due to http GZIP compression on data being loaded.)

For the tagging I wrote the PHP functionality for my server and then wrote a fallback script using Python and the Google App Engine, included via Iframe when a certain fallback flag was set – in case say hundreds of people want to tag at the same time and my server would be lagging – but then my friend Nikolai jumped to help and set up a much better scaling environment on Amazon's computing cloud. His work should ensure that new servers on the farm can be added as needed (we launched with 6 servers, just initially for a blue moon chance that we'd need them, but could add up to 20 overall – after that, you need to talk to Amazon apparently and ask for more). By now, Niko has worked on some script that automatically adds or removes servers depending on the number of connections...

Tody we also added an alphabetical overview, a random animation feature, and a sketch of the day blog:
http://sketchory.com/a-z
http://sketchory.com/random
http://sketchory.com/blog

From Sketchory Sharing

"...your books and other projects combined using Sketchory sketches may not contain over 1000 sketches all in all... e.g. you could create a website with 200 sketches and two books – but not three books – with 300 sketches each..."

I'd just like to point out that I'm sure by two books, you mean two different books to be published, which could amount to thousands of physical books?

I think this may be a little unclear, but maybe I'm just being stupid about it.

Yes, two different book projects... I'll try to clarify that in the sharing help... we're planning a bit of a clarification and a better license implementation for all this.

Great ..thanks..I really needed this for my new project currently in full swing...

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"His work should ensure that new servers on the farm can be added as needed (we launched with 6 servers, just initially for a blue moon chance that we'd need them, but could add up to 20 overall – after that, you need to talk to Amazon apparently and ask for more)."

How much traffic are you getting? Isn't it over killing to start with 6 servers?? How much does it cost? Thank you.

Alex, 6 servers are overhead for the traffic we were expecting – as I mentioned, it was just used for a once in a blue moon occurrence, a "Black Swan"*. Think about it... during the first years of SketchSwap, almost half the sketches (100,000+) were drawn in the matter of a couple of days during the first week, to a large part due to a sudden popularity peak in Japan. You can not predict these black swans, you can only prepare for them. Similarly to Sketch Swap, there is the possibility that you get rather low tagging activity for years, but then during a single day, there's say 1,000,000 people who want to tag... better not have the server be down for that occurrence! Hope that explains it...

Here is more info on the Amazon pricing:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing

*On a side note, great interesting book:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515

Nice idea guyz. The images will be really helpful to bloggers. http://www.digitalprank.org/sketchory-get-250000-sketches-to-share/

Sketchory now has an (early-release) API: http://sketchory.com/api/

Whenever I visit sketchory, I tag some images. I have a couple of suggestions that would make it easier for people to tag lots of images.

1. Can the rating drop-down become "rate to submit"? That way, when you select a rating it automatically submits and presents the next picture.

2. If I press ENTER after typing in the tags, it appears to submit successfully. What happens with the rating? If it defaults to "average" then this would be a very handy shortcut. I could forget about the mouse and just type tags, except for sketches that are above or below average.

Also, I've used a sketch for the first time here:
http://quezi.com/4216
Although the sketchory site suggests to link back to the license page, it seems better to link the sketch back to the page that contains the sketch (which includes the license details). Hope that's OK.

Rating is optional. (Actually, you can also just rate and not tag, in that sense tagging is also optional...) If you don't rate, you won't influence the score of the image... basically, it will remain average or great or bad, or whatever value it was. I'll think about how to auto-submit when you change a rating value. I would think doing this for the mouse is trivial, but just checking for a change in that box could become a problem if you use the keyboard to navigate through the box (as I do). We also considered using the usual star images, but I was fearing it doesn't make clear enough that it's optional... for many pictures, finding a rating is hard.