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

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.

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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.