The Agrinautica

   So I presently hve 7,041 photos up on flickr. If I cease paying for a paying account they'll delete 6,041 of those. I could migrate them all to google photos except then they won't be searchable and I'd kind of like most of them to remain in the public sphere. I haven't even uploaded any photos to flickr in the last two years though since facebook photos and livejournal photo hosting have both improved enough to be the more practical way to share on either of those platforms. Anyway I thought I might as well at least continue to make use of it as long as I'm paying for the paid membership, so today I uploaded my best pictures from the last 2 years, totalling I think just shy of 100 pictures. Anyway they all fit on one screen so if you fancy seeing my last two years as seen through the best pictures, click here. (: (that is to say, everything on page 1 there I just uploaded, down to the surfacing whale, which I had uploaded at the time, two years ago)


And here's, for example, a previously unposted photo of Cristina and I (:

   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 ):