When did they change the Flickr site and why is it so stupid now?

grrr

They've been rolling out the changes over a couple of months. It is all pretty weird.

Well with the forward looking folks at yahoo behind the wheel i am sure that all the best decisions are being made

flickr used to be one of the best-designed sites out there and now... i dunno. i still need to re-up my pro subscription, but i probably won't use it as much as i have in the past.

word. I used to love you flickr, and now yr whole yahoo-era switcheroo has been a big mistake. I'm just not feeling it anymore, I guess it's over between us.

hello everyone, hope you are having a wonderful day. i have a question regarding flickr. i have a done the thing with the feed where if i upload a photo it automatically posts it on my twitter, but the thing is i'd like it to post the lightbox version rather than the smaller default version. does anyone know how to do that?

also on facebook i use myflickr to do the same thing, i'd like to do something similar with that but it doesn't seem possible. is there a better app than myflickr for doing that?

i cannot answer your question, but i have another question about flickr

i have been checking my stats ever since once day someone viewed 127 of my photos, which seemed a little weird to me, and i check the referrers now

i have made every effort to not have my real name or email address googleable from my flickr page, but it says that google is referring views

--> does this mean that the person who is using google to access my photos knows my username and is googling that OR could that refer to someone who's viewing through google reader?

I don't know if this is how it works, but maybe they googled something which you'd tagged one of your pictures with (say 'Buckingham Palace'), your picture came up and they like it so much they had a good long look at your other pictures as well.

^ basically this

flickr iphone app not allowing me to get the link for the image no matter what i do = totally fucking infuriating

If you click through the Google referrals on Flickr Stats you can see what search terms led the user to your photos, so you can tell whether they were looking for "La Lechera pics" or "photos of Roman temples".

One time one of my photos had gotten alot of views and i thought it was peculiar. So i opened up the photoblogs of a bunch of the people that had favorited it. Turns out it featured a girl with an unshaved armpit and that happens to be some kind of fetish among people! I had no idea!

You have been warned

Yahoo’s Flickr may have another PR nightmare on their hands. IT architect and Flickr user Mirco Wilhelm couldn’t log on to his 5-year old account yesterday, and when he asked the Flickr team about this issue they flat out told him they had accidentally flushed his entire account, and the 4,000 photos that were in it, straight down the drain.

Apparently Wilhelm reported a Flickr user with an account that held ‘obviously stolen material’ to the company last weekend, but a staff member erroneously incinerated his account instead of the culprit’s.

Hello,

Unfortunately, I have mixed up the accounts and accidentally deleted yours. I am terribly sorry for this grave error and hope that this mistake can be reconciled. Here is what I can do from here:

I can restore your account, although we will not be able to retrieve your photos. I know that there is a lot of history on your account–again, please accept my apology for my negligence. Once I restore your account, I will add four years of free Pro to make up for my error.

Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do.
Again, I am deeply sorry for this mistake.

Regards,

Flickr staff

Ouch.

...

I’ve never been a big Flickr user, but I had always assumed a simple click of the button couldn’t delete an account and its content altogether, rather than simply deactivate it.

It never occurred to me that a team member could just wipe out accounts without the means to reactivate them if it turned out to be a mistake.

And what about backups for Christ’s sake?

For what it’s worth, Flickr’s Zack Sheppard commented in the Flickr forum thusly:

We’ve been working on the ability to restore accounts for a while and hope to have it completed early this year.

We have been in contact with Mirco and may be able to restore his account. The partial work that has been done so far may make it possible to retrieve the account. It’s only a maybe but we want to try and do everything we can to rectify this mistake.

Just as people have stated above, we also believe this is an important feature to have in place for cases like this when there was an error. As many of you know we usually do not discuss features before they are released but because of the community concern we wanted to let you know in this case.

So basically there hasn’t been a way for Flickr to restore accidentally removed paid accounts since the company was founded, maybe they can do something about Mirco’s account (you have to wonder what would have happened hadn’t he raised a big stink about this in the first place) and users should be so lucky that Flickr is letting them know they might be able to restore erroneously terminated accounts at some point in the future.

Bottom line: never trust cloud storage for anything remotely important.

I find it absolutely staggering that a company the size of flickr would not do standard backups to tape like any sensible server-based company should do. That cannot possibly be right.

That said I worry about my gmail. I should find away to d/load and offsite it all, there's like 6 years worth of mail on there :/

Wise thought.

I find it absolutely staggering that a company the size of flickr would not do standard backups to tape like any sensible server-based company should do. That cannot possibly be right.

Yahoo does own Flickr so I really don't find it all that staggering.

Bottom line: never trust cloud storage for anything remotely important.

this cannot be emphasized enough

I think using both trad and cloud sources is best bet right? Like I have all my photo and mp3 media on my laptop, an ext HD and photos are also burnt to a dvd (more of a pain tho as thats static).

But a ton of my pics and docs are scattered in gmail attachments, on facebook, and on my own website.

I think using both trad and cloud sources is best bet right? Like I have all my photo and mp3 media on my laptop, an ext HD and photos are also burnt to a dvd (more of a pain tho as thats static).

But a ton of my pics and docs are scattered in gmail attachments, on facebook, and on my own website.

I wouldn't rely on cloud storage for anything other than extra redundancy though. There's three trends I'm seeing right now:

1. No advertised privacy policy is sufficient enough to prevent a third party (government, or worse, marketer) from snooping, copying, or otherwise metatagging my data
2. Web 2.x corporate consolidation > cries of the affected users. Yahoo could easily announce "we're turning everything off in 30 days. good luck!" It could very well be 30 minutes.
3. Bandwidth is no longer a Tesla-esque "free electricity for the masses" right. I expect to see more usage-based billing and failure/irrelevance of net neutrality. The fracas in Canada this week is only the beginning. Cloud storage is useless if you can't afford to copy it there.

Ah the data billing in Canada has been a source of bemusement to us down here, to veer off topic slightly - Australia's always paid for data on top of our monthly accesss fees. Either you pay x cents/mb or gb over X gb of data, or if you go over your X gb of data your speed is shaped down to dialup/low isdn speed.

We're used to it, and I always wondered why it wasnt the case in the us/canada. I mean the backchannel data costs *someone*.

We're used to it, and I always wondered why it wasnt the case in the us/canada. I mean the backchannel data costs *someone*.

Perhaps. I haven't yet seen a cost breakdown on exactly how much it costs to send a data packet over the commercial Internet. I'm sure an EFF type will make the case that geographic distance is irrelevant. I was actually thinking of who's going to be the first cable company to outright block Netflix streaming, or otherwise offer an "enhanced" service (at additional co$t) that prioritizes data. The telcos have been lobbying hard to block any kind of net neutrality legislation and given the current US political climate nothing is going to happen for the foreseeable future. I'm just wondering who's going to blink first.

So, Yahoo messed up today. They've messed up other days, too, but this was an especially red-letter day amongst other red-letter days, and this is one that has me ticked off.

For reasons I don't know, Yahoo laid off the highest level of Flickr's customer support, the people that end up filing bugs against the developers and helping the trickier cases get solved for the members. Those guys getting shown the door is as bad as it sounds.

I'm still amazed no one has come up with a superior Flickr, I thought Google would be all over it.

500px.com is okay but limits the interaction that Flickr kind of gets right.

just came to post this link. I'm a bit amazed no-one has even come up with a feature-equivalent Flickr. The state of the alternatives currently is horrible: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/12/18/6-flickr-alternatives-in-case-its-the-next-to-die/

Like, they had to pad the list with photobucket?

I've always thought Picasa was better than Flickr. I only use Flickr because all my friends do and it's easy to find their photos there. I'd be delighted if they all switched.

I do like the photo viewer you get in Picasa on G+, but Picasa itself I find confusing. The thing Flickr does p. well is let me find my friends and see their photos.

PicasaWeb's homepage shows me *my* galleries, and I actually can't see how to see updates from my friends at all.

The only reason I joined google+ is to put photos there instead of flickr. That rationale lasted about a day.

Still wondering if anyone's using Flickr?

http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/8519/screenshot20120601at313.png

Does Facebook even have a limit to number of photos you upload?

How you can take 700 pictures of Edinburgh is beyond me, but to upload them to Facebook is bonkers.

Flickr is still the best social option for amateur photographers (or even pro) who want other people to see their work - Facebook and Google+ always feel like you're posting a bunch of pictures for your friends and even they aren't going to look at them.

yup - i put up far fewer photos on flickr than fb def!

well if you put photos on google+ definitely no one is going to look at them

I used flickr to upload all my scans of grandfathers' and father's slides (covering 1945 through 1980 or so)

my wife uses it all the time

neither of us are on facebook

i would never use facebook as a place to keep photos; it's more just like an occasional mention of "here this is what i did/saw" and then flickr is where i put things to keep and look at later
i'm not A Photographer by anyone's standards but i like to take pictures of things.

Flickr is great, and I trust them w my stuff more than FB. Not that it wouldn't be easy for someone to search flickr and rip off my images, but probably less easy than with FB, and I have far more control over my stuff.

shakey I would like to see those slides if they're of nothing too personal!

Sherman G. Babcock slide archive

other two archives (of my dad's and my maternal grandfather's) are smaller

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuababcock/collections/72157626353016289/
l-r: my aunt Debbie, my dad, 1 yo me

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7060/6870382991_becc4d681d_z.jpg

that is really awesome, ty

http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6022/5885234179_971a803be7_z.jpg

New Year's Eve 1961, my grandma in the middle, workin it

These look fantastic!

these are amazing, shakey

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuababcock/5840039626/in/set-72157626852083549/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuababcock/6124823002/in/set-72157627610634344
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuababcock/6121197063/in/set-72157627610634344/

( http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuababcock/5614763684/in/set-72157626353725915, http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuababcock/5867374705/in/set-72157627039274412, http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuababcock/5867379469/in/set-72157627039274412/, http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuababcock/5867932566/in/set-72157627039274412, http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuababcock/5393559411/in/set-72157625793372785) okay i'm gonna stop but yeah these are so great!, even w/o personal dimension

Fantastic!

Yep, still use Flickr. I use FB for mobile uploads, the very occasional shot from the proper camera; I've also been using an album on FB for raiding the Lightroom archives - one shot per month, etc. Oh, and FB has "Family" albums which I update every 6-9 months.

FB is fine for instant feedback for single images; upload more than one photo at a time and they pass entirely without comment it seems. On the recent three-week US trip, I used FB for one or two images a day (worked up quickly in Picasa on Pam's netbook) as we went along; Flickr was always going to be the repository for the full record of holiday snaps (a few hundred, still going up in dribs and drabs).

Flickr is finally beginning to improve its look; the "justified" view of contacts' photos and the new uploader are pretty good. Yahoo very nearly killed it though.

Oh, and I'm sure there's a setting somewhere for better quality, but FB images are horribly overcompressed. Flickr has always had better compression and resizing algorithms (and now offers auto-resizing on the photostream page and a load more size options for download). G+ is apparently pretty good in this respect...but who uses that? I know there are better-looking alternatives to Flickr out there, favoured by photographers, but my entire kids' lives are on Flickr...

What's just happened? It's too much at once.

NU FLICKR

More here. Terabyte is unbelievable. I wonder if the individual limits have been raised, as I was running into them.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/20/4349442/yahoo-unveils-the-new-flickr-with-one-terabyte-of-free-space

Ugh, the new homescreen is annoying. Good for keeping up with contacts' shots at a nice big size - I like that. But <i>text</i> is badly shortchanged - new comments on my photos or ones I've been conversing about are easily lost in the tide. Wish this could be customized or something...I don't use Groups, the Commons, or the Flickr Blog at all, so the entire right-hand column is just wasted when it would be a great place to keep "Recent Activity."

what's the price per terabyte these days, feel like it must be really low, if youre buying in bulk like yahoo is maybe $20-30?

Agreed. I'm looking for an option to reduce the size of contacts' photos on my home screen, but it isn't there :\

Wait, the new plans are properly stupid. They killed the old Pro (which was unlimited storage for what, $25?) and now have three plans
Free: 1TB, Ads
$49: No ads
$499: 2TB space.

Eh? http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/

Who in the hell is going to shell out $499?!

RIP Flickr

You'd almost think Yahoo is making Flickr a non-profit thing just to lol at Google, and will try and make the big bucks with Tumblr.

it's like the same company that owns flickr owns tum oh i see.

new flickr is like new soundcloud, horrible. at least with soundcloud you can revert to the original

this looks a mess

lol $499 vs. registering a second account

i feel i must have been snubbed somehow

i dont wish to seem churlish about the storage it just seems odd in the redesign, that they left it alone for so long (and yes it was looking stale) and then changed everything in one hit instead of gradually changing to fit what the userbase wanted. right now this feels clunky and crowded

dont really have an interest in tumblr but it seems kind of like that - a bit ADD

Weird, I thought the "Stay pro or go free" box said pro had unlimited storage. It definitely said you had access to full stats, as opposed to limited stats for free.

Since May 20, 2013, Pro accounts can no longer be purchased. You can enjoy unlimited storage as long as your Pro account is active. If your Pro account expires, it will revert to a free account with a storage limit of 1 Terabyte.

So I can choose to keep my pro account with unlimited storage, but only until it expires? Great choice, thanks!

Would they have offered me a refund if I'd opted to go to a free account?

"Recurring Pro users currently have the ability to renew"

Till when? For how much? So confused!

ok if i choose to search my photostream i want to only see content from my photostream because i know it won't be nsfw.

So I pay for a 1-year Pro at $24.95 and it says "Your Pro account will renew automatically on 10th April, 2014".
Now it says "As a Pro Member, your subscription remains the same. You'll enjoy unlimited space for your photos and videos, detailed stats and an ad-free experience. However, you can switch to a Free account before August 20, 2013"

? what ?

i *think* you can either
a) stick with your auto-renewing pro account with unlimited space, stats, no ads, until such time as they decide to remove said option
ii) go free, 1tb space, no ads, uncertain about stats
3) go ad-free for twice the price of pro

ii) go free, 1tb space, ads, uncertain about stats

i dont wish to seem churlish about the storage it just seems odd in the redesign, that they left it alone for so long (and yes it was looking stale) and then changed everything in one hit instead of gradually changing to fit what the userbase wanted. right now this feels clunky and crowded

dont really have an interest in tumblr but it seems kind of like that - a bit ADD

I was going to say that from looking at the desktop version it bears all the marks of a mobile-first design and it is indeed looking a lot better on my phone than old Flickr used to. They have an Android app but that's shite.

Think it looks better full stop really.

D) move your photos somewhere else. fuck 'em

the old android app didn't support my phone, not sure why. new one claims to, but we will see.

I think I will go free and continue using my adblocker.
I will also start looking elsewhere for another decent site.

Sigh.

The per-image/per-video upload limits are tighter on Pro than they are on Free, No Ad or Doublr. But, in theory, no 1TB limit (I reckon I've got 35-40GB on there in eight years, so, unless I undertook some massive cataloguing project with a Leaf Aptus*, I doubt I'd ever threaten the Free account limit).

(* - I am available for this kind of work, reasonable rates and can I keep the gear?)

I rather wish there'd been some kind of loyalty scheme and Pro users could've just rolled on to Ad Free for a nominal sum ($10 for yr first two years if you'd had an account since 2005 or something). Losing money in direct fees vs losing money thru losing ppl.

Its definitely designed for phone/pad instead of big screen, but a reasonable percentage of userbase will be using camera+computer rather than phone (why not just use instagram otherwise?)

Despite yahoo's inability to know what to do with flickr, the community/groups aspect of it is still there and I use flickr to follow other photographers as much as anything else, so I doubt i'll go anywhere else just yet, esp with the free storage but the design is horrible and has hallmarks of belated rushed change to mimic other things

It looks fabulous! They should have done this 5 years ago.

I use a pretty hard-core ad-blocker so I don't see any reason to continue paying for this now.

They were probably losing pro users through non-renewals anyway, partly because maybe pro users actually tend not to mass upload but dripfeed, who really puts up 60+ photos in one go other than people just back from holiday and now other sites server that much better than flickr can as theyve missed the boat with that

Be interesting to see the data on that, my guess would be that the majority of users would be uploading dozens of photos in one go. Even if they're not back from holiday photos tend to build up.

The refund page isn't working for some strange reason...

Be interesting to see the data on that, my guess would be that the majority of users would be uploading dozens of photos in one go. Even if they're not back from holiday photos tend to build up.

Maybe - but isn't facebook better for that? Most people I follow on flickr tend not to upload more than 1 or 2 a day at most, anecdotal of course. People putting up 60+ in one go probably arent using flickr much until the next time they put up 60+ in one go, unless they're putting up 60 a day in which case well ive no idea who actually does that because no one is looking at 3000 pics from one person in the same month

I upload in handfuls (casual "art" shots, 3-10, direct from Lightroom), or event-specific sets (40+, using the Uploader), or individually from my iPhone using the app.

My habits on Facebook are to make individual, of-the-moment iOS uploads almost every day, occasionally a choice DSLR shot direct from Lightroom and, even less frequently, an actual album of a couple dozen pictures (from the hard drive).

I think of FB as "this happened" and Flickr as "...and this is the full account of events".

Have just gone to free account and getting refund. I have used "Using 0.30% of 1TB" so I should be ok for the rest of my life.
AdBlock working a treat.

Do you have a smartphone? If so, what does it look like on there? Concerned about ad-blocking thru the app...

They don't seem to be offering much incentive to continue paying. Which is a worry given all the comment in the wake of Google Reader that you get the service & longevity you pay for.

new flickr sucks
did this happen overnight? i feel like i checked it yesterday and it was normal and now ugh i hate it
lack of text visibility is a bummer

app looks the same on iPhone afaict, maybe that's why i was confused about the change?

i'm the same - having to mouseover pictures to see their titles is a terrible idea. am also worried about bandwidth.

there's a ddlb which purports to allow you to choose the old 'square' or 'small' display options. but the options, they do nothing.

Yahoo discrouarges working from home

Not a good mobile fit for me either. Wasn't easy to expand the image nor close it to move on to the next one.

i guess it's to try to get people to click on the picture in order to read the caption or something? i don't think that's really 1) going to work for me or 2) important to me -- i'd rather be able to see words/privacy settings without having to click on my own pictures.

most of them are there for me anyway -- why not let me control what the page looks like?!

me me me

Phone seems fine for me, old style flickr. No adverts on phone either.
My account was changed to free instantly, but refund will take 7 days.

Go free with AdBlock if you want to keep using.

Only thing that I seem to be missing is the stat's.
I don't really mind that as all I did there was worry about how many of my photo's were appearing all over the net that I couldn't access.

Still not taken with the layout though.

did someone say they changed teh name to fcker?

i use the stats a lot -- are they totally gone if you switch to free?
not sure why i am so attached to flickr aside from the fact that ALL OF MY MEMORIES ARE ON THERE
this sucks

i literally just renewed for two years!!! wtf?!?!?!
can anyone figure out how to adjust the layout - the pics are scrunched so close together it does none of them any justice!!! WHAT THE FUCK!

ALL OF MY MEMORIES ARE ON THERE

You do have the original files on your computer/eternal hard drive don't you?

i literally just renewed for two years!!! wtf?!?!?!

If you get free account now, you will be refunded the difference.

yeah, i have the original files but i like having them accessible online because i am the kind of sap who likes to revisit time/place from various locations, not just home computer :(
also original files are not nearly as well organized as my sets on flickr

i just realized that i've been using this site for the better part of a decade, no wonder i'm attached to it.
ilx too, i guess, yikes

if i get a free account - i might as well just close it and start anew on 500px.com or something - since there's (I think?) limits on the number of sets and number of images in that set...

I was just concerned you didn't have them backed up. Some of the comment on flickr suggest people have been using the site to save space on their drives.
One commented "I will now be downloading all my pictures" Bit silly really.

Having them accessible wherever you are is great, I agree.

I have been using it since April 2006, one of a handful of sites I visit most days.

also, not_goodwin - any idea how i get in touch with someone at flickr to give me my money back? i'm actually furious about this and cannot find any way to contact them about this - only some bs feedback threads about bugs etc.

x-post

Or you could do what I'm doing is keeping a free account and using the money to find an alternative.
I haven't been happy about how a lot of my pictures have been viewed from external sources which I can't access.
I was going to start looking soon, this change, has made up my mind.

I'll get the link for you, bear with me.

This is great for me, I had hundreds of photos on there for which the originals were on a HD that was stolen two years ago. I had let my Pro account expire so couldn't get back the full resolution originals, and now I can!

thank! what do you think about 500px? a photo enthusiast coworker of mine really likes it.

Anyone tried ipernity.com?

xxxpost

Try the link here in the "If you would like to switch to a free account and see if you are eligible for a prorated refund, visit this page."

http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633531669359/page6/

link doesn't work.

It worked for me earlier, maybe it's erm a little busy. :/

I can't see how to get a refund... am I being incredibly stupid? It says that cancelling my subscription just means that it won't auto-renew. FFS.

they probably are pretty busy, yes - judging by their feedback page. i talked to paypal and yahoo hasn't accepted the payment yet... so maybe they'll be smart enough not to take money for something that changed three days later.

The Ad Free option needs to be clarified. Sure, I can ad-block if I go Free, but visitors to my stream won't necessarily be doing that. And if I shell out $50/year for the Ad Free option, does that extend to people surfing my private sets on a Guest Pass (e.g. events I've been commissioned to shoot)?

There's no way I want anyone who has paid me to take photos of something to be exposed to a load of ad content I have no control over when I give them access to the online contact sheet.

So I s'pose I'll continue to renew the Pro account...

Didn't even think of that. For ad free it just says "No ads in your browsing experience" so I doubt it applies to anyone else viewing your pics.

Okay, I've downgraded and they're processing my refund. It's just the 'switch to free' thing.

I will miss stats but tbh nobody ever looks at my photos so I don't really need them.

will they take notice of all the people moving to free accounts and maybe change their minds?

'From what we understand from a person close to Flickr, dropping Pro isn’t going to make much difference to the company because Pro never did very well.

“It has always been a relatively small percentage of the overall user base,”

http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/20/yahoo-drops-flickr-pro-to-compete-with-facebook-still-offers-two-paid-tiers-for-ad-haters-and-power-users/

not really worth $45... i seem to have missed this, "switch to free thing"!

ooooohhh - found it!

Not sure if it's the whole changing of flickr or the turning 40 and getting (more) set in my ways is the issue here with me?

it also suffers from the same problem the gawker sites like lifehacker have recently - there's a footer with useful navigation links in it but you can never see it because it loads more images when you scroll down.

I used pro for a few years and used this site religiously but recently i let my subscription lapse, then i finally got a smart phone and instagram and all that stuff so i don't really see using this site much in the future.

Have been using the site religiously since 2005, really not sure how I could ever leave at this point. I have my photos on my drive, but the texts, comments, and sets/collections are another matter. I'm going to do a massive super-download with Bulkr to at least have some kind of archive of that in case they fuck things up more but what's really annoying me right now is how the new interface really steamrollers over the exact things I use Flickr for - text, comments, and organization. Really going for "wall of photos" here but that's not how I use the thing, I like having conversations that use other people's photos as a kind of starting point...

Agree with everything Dr.

I don't just want to see a picture, I liked to see the comments and photo info, I learnt a lot from the camera settings too.

All of that is still available, though, in the photo page where it always was.

i use this for work

can't see the titles/dates/etc

also it is forcing me to select "search your photostream" *and* "sort by recent" anew every single time fuuuuuuu

1. you used to get a little preview of text when scanning through the photo stream so you could see where the action was

2. when you click on the photo page you now have to SCROLL to see the text

3. the recent activity is buried in the home screen so you can easily miss the conversation

4. i think there was something else

it looks like shit.

The old design could've used a little less whitespace, but this is gross. It's cramped and a pain in the ass to navigate.

i liked the whitespace, miss it!
the big black box is not my steez and the profile-forward design is not to my liking either -- i was trying to figure out what it was that i didn't like, and that's it. i don't want to stand out in front of the pictures i put on there. i just want to be a little tiny square in the corner.

flickr app works but is odd - lots of swiping and, yes, lots of buffering

seems like it's crashed now.

Desktop version is still poking along, definitely not lightning-fast today. I wonder how many other people are doing as I am and taking this as a good time to run a full photostream backup....

pretty sure everyone bumrushing flickr to see how awful their photostream looks can't be doing the bandwidth any favours.

I have a Flickr account. I use it exclusively as a holding tank for the pics I post on ilx. These changes do not impress me.

doesn't anyone use a fucking computer anymore, why does everything have to be designed as a gripless infini-scrollling picture-pane

with those aggravating little scrollbars too

and a COVER PHOTO, WHY, the thing is already full of photos!!!

anyone else's videos stop loading?

i dont like how i cant see the dates photos were posted right away like i used to

FYI: The app 'Flickr Studio' for ipad/iphone can be downloaded for free today. Normally it is $5,00.

the square and small format thing seemed to be working today for groups. but they've taken the option away from 'you' and 'your contacts'

The Help forum thread for feedback on the changes is up to 17,000 replies. From skimming through, my ballpark estimate would be that 16,500 of them are negative.

The Help topic has passed 25,000 photos and only a few very minor changes have been made so far. Starting to really get bummed out by this...it really puts a damper on my long-term hobby/project of catching up on film/blogging if the text and the sets/collections are so marginalized. What's the fun in writing some rambling 1000-word post about a building eight people care about if even those eight people probably won't notice the text is there? Ugh.

Currently writing a script to download all my wife's photos from flickr and upload them to ipernity.com. They have a bulk tool already but it only works with Pro accounts and she already deactivated hers.

I'm interested in this and I bet a lot of other people are too - - - as far as I can tell the ipernity script can only do a certain number of photos at a time.

I Bulkr-downloaded all my Flickr photos so as to save all my tags and texts - don't know if it carries things like membership in a set, which is what would be REALLY great to keep. Something that could re-upload the same 14,000 pictures to ipernity with all tags/descriptions/set memberships intact would be a great insurance against Flickr doing anything more to fuck everything up.

I've got as far as downloading photos, tags, comments etc and storing it in XML, this was pretty easy so far because some kind souls already wrote flickr.py so I don't need to write anything special to use Flickr's API. I will have to write something to upload to ipernity's though. And I will be adding set membership in a minute... so if this works out (I'm not massively experienced with online APIs although I have done quite a bit with SOAP and REST at work before) I'll put it online somewhere.

Colonel, forgive me if it's mentioned already, but is Ipernity basically what Flickr was before the overhaul? Does it seems like a good alternative for the long run?

Apparently so, I don't really use photo sites but my wife likes it so far.

I can't stand to be on it anymore and it was my favorite site.

I can't really complain about the redesign. It mimics how it looks on my iPhone and I've spent more time in Flickr using the iOS app these last three months than I have on the site generally at any time since about 2009. It's true that it relegates commentary and discussion to an afterthought and that's partly why the response has been so negative; the folks on the Help forum are the most active and vocal (and the biggest moaners about any kind of change too ("get rid of video NOW, Flickr", etc)). I'm sure they're custodians of various Groups and all the debate and exchange of ideas in those has been entirely marginalised (not even literally! If it popped up on the right, that would be better I think) in favour of prettification.

The pages of tiny images and white space were looking pretty tired. Finding a way to keep the old schoolers onside and overhaul the look of the thing was apparently beyond them (or financially not a concern). I can't really complain that my photostream gets 30 hits a day instead of 200 as it once did because I'm not really putting much up there.

It's funny that so many dissenters on the forum are saying "that's it, I'm off to 500px". As far as I can tell, 500px went through the same painful overhaul a few months back and basically looks like Nu-Flickr. It's nice, and I've started to throw a few pics up (which get more hits and comments than anything I put on Flickr these days), but the Popular ("pulse" over 90 or whatever) stuff generally leaves me cold - HDR landscapes, ultra-slick "fine art" constructions, fashion shoots, just lots of over-processed, polished cliches (that I wish I could do!).

Yeah, see, I feel like the marginalized text/comments/sets thing is much bigger than some minor feature used mainly by the moaners - it was one of the distinctive things about Flickr as opposed to posting my photos in, like, Facebook albums (or Myspace, when I started) or Photobucket or whatever. As you say, there's plenty of other screen real estate to put that stuff in, and since there are other really obvious seams and glitches in the redesign (like how you CAN get back to the older design - very jarring next to the dumb 'cover' image - by clicking to 'edit' something) I'm not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was this perfect unified rollout and there was just no more money they could possibly spend on giving you an option of two or three different ways to display your photostream. How much could it have possibly hurt to give a 'Classic View' option somewhere down in the options? The new crowd they're trying to attract would never even need to know.

Not sure if this script is ever going to work :(

I'm having real problems uploading a photo via the ipernity API, which is a bit of a deal-breaker. I just cannot get it to work. If I send the request as a multipart form I get an error saying API key is missing (it isn't). If I send the request as a regular post I get an error saying the signature is invalid (it isn't).

Stumped :(

maybe they ran the numbers and just figured, hey we got 94% photo-dump users and 6% caption-boxers so fuk it

xpost to self

n/m figured it out

Went to look at ipernity, the first pic I clicked had loads of Flickr-pop and a "I snifffffffed this out! Here's my top dawg award!!" comment on it.

The old entitled guard are welcome to it.

http://www.infinitehollywood.com/the-new-flickr-sucks-and-heres-why/

Like this guy is bad, and the commenters worse.

Doctor Casino - getting back to the original design by hitting edit, only seems to be for editing tags etc (unless that's been changed). i don't think anyone else will see your profile like that - even the next time you go back to your profile, you view it in the new layout again - i'm pretty sure "edit" is only displaying in the old style for editing purposes.

and i'm in the same boat as you, i have a small backlog of images i had wanted to work on / upload this weekend and now i'm just not sure it's worth uploading there now.

Doctor Casino - getting back to the original design by hitting edit, only seems to be for editing tags etc (unless that's been changed). i don't think anyone else will see your profile like that - even the next time you go back to your profile, you view it in the new layout again - i'm pretty sure "edit" is only displaying in the old style for editing purposes.

― Porto for Pyros (The Cursed Return of the Dastardly Thermo Thinwall), Monday, May 27, 2013 9:58 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh, no, I agree totally with that - - - just saying that if that much of the old-school format is still in there, can it really be impossible to offer a "Standard Look" and a "Classic Look" or whatever? They used to give you various choices of how to present your photostream, would really appreciate having that back is all.

But half of the complaints (well, the non-How Very Dare You subset anyway) is about how other people are viewing people's photostreams (and not seeing their captions etc). Switching your view to "classic look" wouldn't help that.

btw don't want to keep spamming this thread about script I'm working on but if any of you are interested I've got this thing basically working now, it transfers tags, description, camera (puts in tags, as there doesn't seem be a separate place for it) and it loads all the comments up as 1 comment (titled Flickr Comment History). It also creates albums (aka sets) and puts the photos in them. Still doing some testing and tidying up the code so it's not totally embarrassing...

The options in the old system had to do with how your page presented to others as well as yourself - showcase collections vs. show big pictures of the most recent uploads with sets down the side, medium size photos with sets...can't remember exactly what they all were but they were presentation options. This doesn't seem nit-pickingly old-fashioned to me either - I've never used Tumblr myself but they seem to have all kinds of different templates which I understand are customizable by the users.

CP, that script is sounding pretty sweet. My current plan is to give Flickr a little more time to see if they actually do implement any kinds of fixes (they seem to be testing out a few minor things at least...black background vs white seems to have flipped a bit) and if it remains intolerably non-texty I might make the leap.

Dunno if I'm being dumb but you used to be able to search Flickr with keywords then have a slideshow of the results, now if I do a search, click on a photo and initiate a slideshow it forgets the search and cycles through that person's photostream. Any ideas?

Have seen the same complaint a few times on the help forum - it's either a bug or a feature but I don't think there's currently any way around it. Really annoying.

Thanks Dr C, dang it all.

i figure that since i already have about seven years-worth of my life, in image/video form, on that site; i'm more or less compelled to keep posting my stuff there until it gets really bad. already have so much put into it, with the tagging and groups and contacts, that starting over at another site - no matter how unhappy i am with the changes - would still be shooting myself in the foot. also, they gave me a refund for the pro account a few days ago... rage has subsided.

The new design is ugly, but I never saw the Flickr 'community' as something worth fighting for - photography forums (particularly I Love Photo!) seem much more rewarding and useful if you want criticism or even just to get someone else to see your work.

Flickr makes - or made - a very nice host for linking photos to forums, Facebook, blogs, tumblrs, etc., with decent stats if you were a Pro (though most of the linkbacks didn't work - I had several that were popping up from Google searches but I could never tell where in Google search rankings those images were). I assume that functionality continues on - and may even be improved re: Tumblr.

Can't speak for the Flickr community at large, if such a thing exists, but I stumbled into a really supportive micro-community of architectural photo-bloggers, where the discussion is really about the buildings or the things the poster has written about them, than the photos as photos. It's a very small group of people but it's been really great learning from them. The redesign hasn't sundered those ties yet, but it makes it a lot more annoying to click and read what people have said - it's just really unfortunate.

Got my refund, nice and quick and without quibbles once I worked out how to do it. So I'm pretty much fine. I don't like things about the layout as much as I did the old style, but I can live with that. I can definitely see how people more invested in the community aspect would be riled, though.

how do all yalls adblockers do with flickr? they don't have one of those irritating adblock detectors, do they?

I'm not going to go Free; I'll hang on to the recurring Pro account as long as it's available. No 1TB limit (not that I'll ever get near that), no ads (blockers probably won't work on the iOS app, or for people browsing my stream / private sets on Guest Passes), retain stats, only $25/year; I can live with the image/video limits being tighter than for new users.

Similar to others above, I've got 8 years and 12k+ images on there; I've played with 500px this last week and I might build a portfolio on there, but I'm never going to use it in the same way.

I think I might upload everything I've got to Flickr now; set to me only. These new views are way better for browsing my own stuff on my big screen than the teeny-tinies of yore.

poor google plus/drive (which i am liking more and more for media sharing)

looking at sets / collections / groups whatever so much better now, imo

did it always do that awful moving photo thing when you double click? it's nauseating and unnatural and awful! maybe i just never saw it before. not a big fan of slideshows that move at their own pace anyway.

If you mean the 'Ken Burns effect' on slideshow view, that is new and it is horrible.

Yes, that is what I mean. It's hideous!!

Awful.

i can't figure out how to make all the gross cover photo crap go away or possibly re-vamp my photo page : /

Annnnnd now there's a 90s-style Yahoo toolbar across the top.

EW

Maybe Marissa Mayer can get around to hiring designers one of these days.

mail news sports finance weather all things that are super boring and distracting from my world of photos :(

not on my account!

thank you, grandfathered flickr membership

???

no yahoo toolbar across top

oh wtff, it suddenly appeared on refresh, I blame you all

yr welcome

on a related note, I realized I haven't uploaded more than two or three pictures to flickr in a couple years

Colonel Poo, how'd that transfer script shake out? I'm pretty interested at this point. The things that've kept me from jumping to ipernity are not wanting to lose comments and sets and it sounded like you had those sewn up. I guess we can't do much about the awkward name or the sort of clunky search interface but still, anything beats Yahoo gradually grinding Flickr into a fine powder.

I managed to get something working (just about) for my wife's account but tbh ipernity's API is or at least was flaky as hell so I couldn't be arsed doing a general one because I didn't want to have to deal with people asking for help with it :P

Might be able to do something if you're desperate though, if you already have an ipernity acct I'd need your password, but otherwise I could just make one and hand it over once it's finished copying? Don't need flickr password just username and the photos have to publicly viewable.

Problems with ipernity API include:

photo uploaded rejected as invalid (this happens A LOT) but works on retry. occasionally the supposedly "invalid" one loaded anyway, so you get a duplicate
photo supposedly accepted never appears
photo upload ETA is permanently stuck on arbitrary number of seconds between 1 and 10, never finishes (script gives up after something silly like 1000 retries) may appear the next day or may not
a set HAS to have a cover photo, so I do all the sets right at the end to make sure the photo is there. except it might not be (see above)

Ewwww. That's not so encouraging - not so much re: your script as re: working with the site at all, sounds more frustrating than I'd been led to believe.

I can't remember if it pulled all the comments, etc. but I ran a script to dump my entire flickr account and pulled it into Aperture for the hell of it a while ago.

obviously the comments weren't in aperture

I mass-DLed my Flickr with Bulkr after 5/20. That brings texts and tags though not, sadly, comments or sets. Also for whatever reason these are stored in fields that Windows Explorer doesn't recognize, so the only way to view/search them is to load everything into Picasa. But at least they're there.

Uploading/using Flickr more than I have in months. Even dumping my more interesting iPhone shots to there (something my wife has always done).

I'm not getting this Yahoo toolbar.

I would prefer something from alta vista.

xxpost Where are you? Some people in Canada have said they don't have it, maybe that applies other places as well. I just added the Stylish extension to Chrome and the "block Yahoo universal bar for Flickr" script and that got rid of it, but I sure as shit don't want it draped across my photostream for visitors.

I am stunned to report that dogpile.com still exists. I can only wish they had acquired Flickr instead.

I'm in the UK.

I'm in Canada, and the bar has appeared for me. Baffling.

Ugh, the thing is, I'm checking some of the other sites - 500px, ipernity - and none of them seem to really get around the thing I hate most about NuFlickr, which is the suppression of image descriptions. They all have big bulky bars across the top and waste the space to the right. 500px has this nutsy "Pulse" crap at the right which I guess is an image's stats or number of "likes" or something but it takes up so much room. Ipernity is below-the-fold just like NuFlickr.

Maybe I just need to learn how to use some kind of automatic blogosystem and move my writing off-Flickr...just use the photostream as a back-end for blogging. I've long been frustrated trying to tell multi-image stories through one Flickr description, but the hassle of inserting Flickr images into my blogspot via HTML cut-and-paste stuff really put me off of that. (Apologies if I've said this before.) Is there a blogging platform that makes it relatively clean-and-easy to do this? I'm pretty ignorant about this stuff.

This toolbar honks

omg it's always there

they're gonna have to do a lot to make me walk away from years of comments and stuff, but they're trying

just out of chance i had to use this site just now. pure shite.

Maybe I just need to learn how to use some kind of automatic blogosystem and move my writing off-Flickr...just use the photostream as a back-end for blogging. I've long been frustrated trying to tell multi-image stories through one Flickr description, but the hassle of inserting Flickr images into my blogspot via HTML cut-and-paste stuff really put me off of that. (Apologies if I've said this before.) Is there a blogging platform that makes it relatively clean-and-easy to do this? I'm pretty ignorant about this stuff.

FWIW, I use a blog editor called MarsEdit that has built-in support for embedding photos directly from your Flickr stream. MarsEdit front-ends into a dozen different blogging platforms so you don't have to change anything on the backend. Even if that app doesn't work out, there are competitors.

As long as there is still a RSS feed for pictures from my contacts, I fortunately don't have to deal with the Flickr web page all that much.

yahoo, whatta company

Thanks, Elvis Telecom! In hindsight it seems obvious that that would be a whole genre of software, but the last time I thought about creating web content offline was, like, 2003 using Microsoft Frontpage.

Yr welcome! Ever since I became a Working Laptop Nomad (a.k.a. unemployed), offline behavior has become the rule/drool deal breaker for me.

The only thing I have ever used flickr for is as a holding tank for pics I want to post to some forum that doesn't allow direct uploads. If they force a Yahoo toolbar into my browser they will be in the crapper so fast they won't know what hit them.

I don't see a Yahoo toolbar on Flickr when i'm logged in at home or when I looked at it at work yesterday without logging in.

I don't like it, it's a bit annoying, but...I don't quite understand why it's a deal-breaker for some people.

I think it's more a case of ''all that and now THIS?'' after both the nuFlickr changes and the horrrrrrible way they were implemented/handled at the level of staff-customer interaction. Yahoo has basically no credibility on the Flickr help board at this point.

Ok, fair enough. I've ad-blocked it away. Now it's a transparent strip above the Flickr bar.

yahoo tool bar is so small, idk why ppl care

Is fugly line of purple type across the top of all photographs now is why

i'm still not seeing it.

i mean it goes away when you zoom in and doesnt block any portion of the photo

The nice thing about Nu Flickr was that you didn't have to zoom in, the default view was a nice lightbox pretty much as-was.

i'm still not seeing it.

I have two Flickr accounts. When logged-in on the Pro account I am not seeing the Yahoo toolbar, but I can see it on the other (free) account. I am guessing the kind of account you have determines whether or not the toolbar is displayed.

It's supposed to be coming to all accounts. I have a Pro account and see it

it's on my yahoo fantasy pages and it's A) unnecessarily large B) ugly as sin

yahoo is cool cuz I guess marissa mayer or someone said "hey we need to tie together all of our properties with yahoo branding and a common toolbar" and someone said "ok we'll get a team working on how to integrate this in a way that makes sense" and then someone else said "eh whatever I mean just throw up some purple text don't knock yourself out over this one you know? anyone else getting drinks after work?"

it's on my yahoo fantasy pages

are you kidding.

still no toolbar here.

i hate the way that when you scroll the left hand side, the right hand side scrolls up with it just enough to hide the top two links (your groups), but not enough to hide their stuff (commons, blog).

The latest in a long line of dubious changes: computer-generated tags based on an image-recognition algorithm can now be seen displayed next to photos. The reaction has been predictably poor, not only because this is an obnoxious and basically disruptive intrusion, but also because the algorithm is essentially always wrong. A few picks from the thread:

No, birds are not airplanes, and vice-versa! And bicycles are definitely not motorcycles, last time I checked.
Coral instead of Rotten Apple
All of my Native American dancer photos have been autotagged with "costume"
ELECTRONICS and COMPUTER KEYBOARD on a photo of playing cards. DOG on a photo of my cat.
Here's a photo of a sad and dirty street kid auto tagged as an animal. Nice insult.
Flickr's tagbot considers a skull and crossbones on a 17th century headstone as "pet"
What exactly is 'SURREAL' about using a laptop?
A Coca-Cola bottling works is not a country house.
I'm really, really not happy to see erotic photos tagged 'child' and 'baby'
I have just removed “Surreal” from a photo of a memorial to student victims of the Hiroshima A Bomb.
I have found a photo of Auschwitz auto tagged “sport".

And:

And "pet" "animal" and "dog" on photos of my wife? Not cool, Flickr.

EDIT: I almost thought this was racism (my wife is black), but then I found my nephew and brother are also pets, dogs, and animals.

EDIT2: And my daughter, son, and mother are dogs too.

Pages and pages of objections, as usual. So far the only response:

Hi all,
We see your feedback and we're sorry to hear that some of you are frustrated by this update. A few points of clarification:

(1) As promised above, we will be adding batch editing capabilities. If you want to change or remove lots of tags, this will get easier.

(2) We understand that some of the tags seem generic to some of you. But the overwhelming majority of searches on Flickr include some very general terms -- sometimes alone and sometimes in conjunction with other, more specific terms. When people search Flickr, general tags often help in getting your photos found. Of course, if you still don't want them, then you have the power to remove them.

(3) For those of you who don't want your photos to be found in search, you can always make that change, either for your entire account (www.flickr.com/account/prefs/optout), or on a per-image basis using Organizr.

Quoth the British Library (the British Library):

We have over 1 million illustrations uploaded to our Flickr Commons account. We are very interested in the use of ML in interpreting these and we are excited by the prospect of increasing accuracy of these tags.

However, I'll reiterate. We have over a million images uploaded. Over 1 million and no API and no batch means to remove false positives or to query what the auto-generated tags are. This is an ill-thought out release.

If the account owners are the only authorised account allowed to remove them and the only option is to do so by hand, it's just not going to happen. I am not going to waste my time doing it. A disappointing effort for something that could've been exciting and useful.
Posted 9 hours ago. ( permalink )

afaics, they are courting the frustrated feedback of users as a possible means to improve their algorithm. Personally, I'd much rather that Flickr continue to have a stupid, myopic wrongheaded program looking at my photos, because I have no control over what use they make of the data and I figure, why hand corporations any more power over our lives than they already have?

I am constantly amazed at how Flickr completely blew their chance to be THE photo site and how it is apparently STILL limping along. It's like finding out Friendster still exists or something.

It's like finding out Friendster still exists and has big plans to turn into MySpace

Basically the only reason Flickr is still going is because you can grab the static link for a picture for use in forums etc.

Plus it has heaps of CC images for publications with no budget

Yahoo's desperate hope, I think, has been to capture ad revenue on searched photos, for example by urging people to dump every photo their phones take online, and let the robot load them up with searchable tags. But it's really incompletely thought through, and in the meantime they just piss off everybody using the site in any other fashion.

I still use Flickr regularly and know lots of people who do. Admittedly most of them have been using it 10+ years, I doubt it has much take-up among younger people.

I was really disappointed that all of the pics of my kids were boringly tagged "indoors"/"people"/"children"/"groupshot"/"baby"/etc

Closest I got to outrageous was a p.o.'ed looking lady at the Las Vegas Airport slot machines being labeled "Shop".

Flickr could tell from the pixels that it was a 'Shop

flickr serves it's primary function fine for me - which is sharing and archiving family photos. beyond that idgaf about it

tbh for a number of features, there are no really good photo community websites available as an alternative to flickr, even if it's stagnant as hell

I always wanted a Flickr competitor to be closer to art class critique sessions, but even 'serious' photo communities are awful at that, so I can't really fault the stagnation that much.

There are social networking sites where you can find interesting communities related to visual topics, but if I wanted to look for, say, images of brutalist architecture or a group interested in the same, I'd find a lot more stuff on flickr, instantly, than most other places outside of specialist sites.

I like Flickr because it allows you to store big-ass full-resolution images.

Checked out the tags on some of my drawings, nothing egregious although one of them was tagged 'ancient surreal cartoon', which wasn't quite what i was going for.

Staff have, with rather little fanfare, introduced an option to not have tags display on your stream (or see them on other people's): https://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/autotags They're still there and still affect searches - pretty annoying when you're trying to search your own stuff - and it also still defaults to "on," which is pretty stupid given the number of dormant, deceased, or simply unknowing users whose work has been affected. But at least it means my stream no longer looks like it was tagged by a psychotic ignoramus. No word yet on whether or in what way they'll honor the earlier promise to introduce a way of actually batch-deleting the things.

Flickr acquired by professional photo hosting service SmugMug

I am excited. Though SmugMug are waaaaaay out of their depth. It’s like Be buying Apple in 1997

Hey, maybe they can help me re-access my photos after Yahoo ate my password like a bunch of dopes.

I feel like this has to be good news - certainly beats it just being one of two dozen properties acquired by Verizon when they bought Yahoo. That felt extremely tenuous, like I was just waiting for the day I'd load up the site and find they'd just discontinued it or turned it into an online gambling portal or god knows what. At least SmugMug are photo people and it would be hard for anything they do to be worse than any of the changes made in the last half-decade.

I think it’s a decent fit. I think SmugMug is still independent and owned by one of the dudes who was big into the Quake community when I was in like... 1996. Seems like they’ve kept a niche active for years and have an actual interest in delivering a consistent product

New owner making all the right noises on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16888876

audiometry 12 hours ago [ -]

Don— I was a paying customer too. Then Flickr changed their login, forcing me to get a yahoo account, which I then lost over time. So for years now, my account, and all the photos of my 1-3yo kid are buried and locked behind the “you need (login) and pay premium access to see all your photos”. All because that stupid yahoo login integration. Unrecoverable.

reply


onethumb 12 hours ago [ -]

I will move heaven and earth to solve this for you. We're moving off of Yahoo Auth as soon as we can, but can likely fix before that (which will take awhile). Raising this up the flag pole.

heroes

"FINAL NOTICE: You are in violation of our free account limits."

they've nerfed the free accounts, only 50 "friends and family" photos now. i've deleted all the ones even vaguely personal, literally anything with a person in it, but still, that language...

When I kepot getting those emails I just thought FUCK YOU and deleted everything, they can go fuck themselves.