FlipperVolt is an image feed aggregator and viewer.  It is a program/system that pores over nearly 100 Tumblr RSS feeds and dozens of Reddit feeds, gathers information about images from those feeds, and then presents those images for you to review. You get to select the topics you are interested in and you will only be presented with images from feeds that (roughly) fit that topic.

Flippervolt gathers information about images via two types of image feeds:  RSS and JSON.  These feeds are accessed via web addresses that tell the website (like tumbler.com or reddit.com) that a stream of data should be provided rather than the standard visual webpage that a human would view.    Flippervolt reads the data from these feeds and finds information about the images in them, and then displays those images for you.

If you curate a Tumblr blog, you have the option to turn off the RSS feed for your blog.  If you do not turn it off, then the content of your blog will be accessible to anyone using an RSS reader.  If you post to Reddit, however, we are not aware of a method to prevent your post from appearing in a feed.

The term topics is used to describe the interest areas on FlipperVolt.  These are generally broad terms, like Dogs or Home Design.  We have included (and continue to add) Tumblr sites — and to a lesser extent, Reddit sites (“subreddits”)  —  to these topics.

Visitors are welcome to submit Tumblr and Reddit sites via the contact form.   In the future, there will be a membership level that will permit members to create their own personal lists of Tumblr, Reddit (and other) sites that have image feeds.  However, at this point, the only way to propose a site be added to a topic is to complete the contact form.

FlipperVolt is configured to display JPG, GIF and PNG files, including animated GIF files.  At this point, FlipperVolt is not configured to index or display video files.  This feature will be added in the future.

FlipperVolt permits you to save any image you wish to your desktop.  However, once the video feature has been added, you will be able to add the video to your favorites, but you will not be able to save the video to your desktop.

FlipperVolt only deals with data about images, and does not store any images.  If a Tumblr or Reddit (etc.) site is removed, then images from that site will no longer be viewable through FlipperVolt, even if you mark those photos as a favorite.  But you do have the option to save any image to your desktop.  It is advised that if you like an image, you save it to your desktop and not rely on it continuing to be available indefinitely.

If you change the download “Save Action” option in the settings page, you can opt to download-and-hide, download-and-favorite, or download-and-do-nothing when the “J” key is pressed or the floppy-disk icon is clicked.

Re-posting and re-blogging images is just part of the nature of image blogging sites like Reddit and Tumblr. Many images are shared among blogs and subreddits, so you may see the same photo many times.

Our software does not compare the actual contents of one photo to the next. Rather, the images are indexed on FlipperVolt based on the Tumblr subsite or subreddit source.

FlipperVolt is free (for right now.) In order to provide a great experience for as many people as possible, we need to limit the number images you can mark as favorites.

Remember, you can always download any image you like. (In fact, we highly recommend you download the images you really like as we cannot guarantee that any one image will be available again.)  If you change the download “Save Action” option in the settings page, you can opt to download-and-hide, download-and-favorite, or download-and-do-nothing when the “J” key is pressed or the floppy-disk icon is clicked.

We monitor the volume of images that are “favorited” and downloaded from each of the subsites we pore through. If we find that few or no users are interested in images from certain subsites, we will remove those subsites from our index. By doing this, we can keep FlipperVolt indexing the more popular and interesting subsites.

Additionally, twice a day, we run a process that preserves a specific number of the latest images from each subsite and remove any images that exceed that quantity. Images that are favorited by as few as one user are protected from deletion from the index. Additionally any image that has been downloaded more than 10 times also is protected from being deleted from the index.

The goal of our housekeeping procedures is to ensure that the index of images does not get unwieldy and slow down the system. It is highly recommended that you visit FlipperVolt often to see the latest images. If you skip several days, you are likely to miss images from the more active subsites.

Please be aware, however, that even if you favorite an image, it is no guarantee that the image will remain available to you. We do not store images. If the original image is removed from the source, then your favorite will not appear any longer. If you really like an image, you should save/download it.

FlipperVolt is strictly an image viewer, and simply displays images found on image feeds. FlipperVolt does not claim copyrights on any images displayed in the viewing window.

Please note that images you see in the viewing window may be copyrighted. If you are copyright owner or have another reason you’d like an image to be prohibited from appearing on this site, look for the “report this image” link under the viewing window. The image in question will be marked in our system so that it will not appear again for other users. Upon our review of your explanation for blocking the image we may or may not return the image to circulation.

Please also note that a particular image may get re-blogged and/or reposted over many sources. We can only block an image as it appears on a particular feed, and have no means for blocking that same image if it appears on other feeds, unless each appearance is reported.

The best way to reduce the chances of images appearing on FlipperVolt is to remove them from the original feed source (e.g., Reddit, Tumblr, etc.)