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

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.