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

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