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

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...