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

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.