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

^ 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.

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.