Flickrpocalypse

[aggienaut]

   So who here uses flickr for photo hosting? Have you been to the site in the last 24 hours or so? Curious what you all think.

   They've radically redesigned the site, with the most immediate effect of one has to relearn how to navigate tee whole thing all over again. The secondary effect is that there's now wall-to-wall photos on just about every screen. Flickr became the web's premier choice of professional and avid amateur photographers because of its simplistic yet elegant design. Now they (or rather yahoo, who bought them a bit ago) are throwing that winning successful design scheme to the wind. Apparently they think they know better, and everyone wants something that looks like google image search right? Right?

   As a few commenters in the flickr forums have pointed out, "do you ever go into a museum and find inside a wall-to-wall mosaic of photography? No, you don't." That format is fine for google image search, where by and large you're aiming to quickly peruse a lot of images for the best picture of a geoduck to insert into something (unless people have other uses for it than I do...), but if you want to actually appreciate individual pictures, you're going to need some nice "quiet" whitespace around them.

   If you're logged in and you go to flickr.com itself, it used to bring you to a nice central "home" page that showed you recent comments to your photos, some stats, and if you scrolled down a bit a row of thumbnails of your contacts' most recent uploads. Now you load that page you almost fall out of your chair because you're looking right at a full size photo one of your contacts has uploaded (for me at the moment it is this, which is a bit frightening to suddenly be staring at full screen). And my bandwidth is good here (thank god this didn't happen while I was abroad), but I'm told things slow to a crawl if you don't have plentiful bandwidth, because it loads up a whole bunch of other pictures as well, so if you scroll down you see more full sized recent photos from your contacts.

   Altogether it's like they've declared war on whitespace. I can't imagine what it must be like for people that have ads thrown into the mix. I have a paid account, but apparently they've also upped the paid account costs from $24/yr to $50.
   Altogether this whole thing just seems.. pretty terrible.



   In unrelated news, one of these days I'll finish blogging about the Egypt adventure. The whole thing got sidetracked when just about none of you commented to the entries I did write. Its no fun talking to a wall ):

Comments

[selucius.livejournal.com]

I used Flikr before, but stopped because I didn't use it enough to justify paying for it. I use Picasa for sharing photos.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Flickr worked alright for free but that you could only access the most recent 200 photos was a pain.

They've majorly increased the storage space for non paying accounts, and my chrome adblocker seems to pretty effectively zap all ads so I might just end up going to non-paid..

I think I got so far as creating a picasa account but ended up going with flickr.

[selucius.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you'll be pleased to hear that the very next post on my friend page was someone saying how much they love the new Flikr design. Some people are weird.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Lol!

[zhent.livejournal.com]

I'm on Flickr. I sent in my pro account renewal less than a month ago, but they didn't take their money when I did it.

I just cancelled it and they've already processed my refund. There's no point in it since free uses are now getting what I was paying for...

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah I'm not sure what the paid benefits are any more other than no ads (which my ad blockers is pretty good at blasting away)

I've heard it said that they WANT to make everyone go non-paid so they can get maximum ad revenue

[zhent.livejournal.com]

I'm sure they think they'll get ad revenue. I'm with you though with Ad blockers in place I won't see them anyway.

All I use if for anymore is a convenient place to toss images I'm going to link elsewhere. If I'm going to actually put them on my site they go on my own storage.

They made the "share" icon more difficult to find, and that wall of photos when you first get there is more than a little off-putting. And of course the CEOs comment about there not being any more professional photographers is going to come back and bite her on the ass...

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

What was this comment??

[zhent.livejournal.com]

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO
On May 21, 2013, she said: "There's no such thing as Flickr Pro anymore, because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, there's no such thing as professional photographers."

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Wow.

I googled around for news about the redesign today to see if they had made any public response to the criticism and just hit a lot of sycophantic tech blogs trumpeting the wonderful rollout d:

[magenta-girl.livejournal.com]

I am sorry I didn't comment on your Egypt trip. I love your posts. I tend to read them at night when I'm on my phone and commenting from there is kind of sucky.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Thanks! (:

I know a lot of people read without commenting, and I myself am often guilty of it. But it seems things have just been much quieter around here lately than they used to be d:

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Oh, I have MANY thoughts and feels about this, Pro Account of many years standing as I am: http://athenais.livejournal.com/963220.html

P.S. I am one of the few who commented on your travel shenanigans. I feel a bit awkward saying much as you never comment on my blog. I mean, parity is nice, but not required. I just don't want to be all Commenty McBlabberpants when we don't know each other.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Sorry I really have been terrible terrible about keeping up with my friends list these last few months ):

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Dude, it is totally okay. You've been traveling and working without a lot of time to just cruise the interwebs. Your photos are awesome. I showed everyone I knew the images you took of the aftermath of the cyclone back in January.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Haha thankws (:

[beki.livejournal.com]

I can't comment on Flikr as I don't have an account there. I have images up on LJ, and I will eventually want to move those pics.

That being said, I don't think I've seen any posts from you regarding Egypt?

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

There's only one entry so far: http://emo-snal.livejournal.com/207366.html , but that only gets as far as my arrival in Egypt I believe. And it was friends-only so one might not see it if one wasn't logged in at the time.

[belleweather.livejournal.com]

Here from LJ Idol and I probably should be commenting on your idol entry but your header image is so awesome, I figured I'd gush about that a bit, because it captured what it was like to be right there, with the pyramids and smoggy cairo in the background perfectly. I never got to see them from that angle, so the image was a total, lovely surprise and it's my favorite picture of the pyramids yet. So yeah, way to go on a fresh take on the most photographed thing ever. :)

The idol entry was also awesome.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Usually I specifically avoid taking pictures of things there's already a million pictures of, such as the pyramids, so I really appreciate your saying it doesn't look just like every other picture! (:

[gaeln.livejournal.com]

sorry about not commenting on Egypt, I will, I just need to find time. Also, sorry but I rather like flickr now, it all operates just the same, just with a fuller, richer look that I find appealing. I just wish I knew how to make it default to my sets and not my photostream but well, such small tribulations. It looks like tumblr's archive page. I guess everyone, including LJ is trying to look more like tumblr :)

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I think all the websites are gradually becoming more like eachother until they're going to all be the same!