Flickr redesigns web and mobile apps to create a powerhouse in photo storage

Perfect example right here, which is an Ars Technica "article" from their new UK site, brought to you by a certain Microsoft product which just so happens to be worked in to the story. http://arstechnica.co.uk/features/2015/05/ken-fishers-travel...

cortesoft• 11 years ago

Yeah, "powerhouse" kinda gave it away.

state• 11 years ago

I was never a flickr user, but I was always impressed by the devotion of those who were. I rarely encountered passive flickr users — they were always deeply in to it. The growing frustration with the neglect of the service seemed logical with such a devoted core userbase.

I'd be really curious to hear from someone who was part of that loyal following. This really doesn't grab me — but how does it look to someone who used to be a core user?

bdamm• 11 years ago

I've been using Flickr since their very early days, way before Yahoo. Part of my devotion is the fact I have this beautiful photostream which I have cultivated over almost 10 years, and represents the cream of the crop of photos that I took and chose to share. There have been times when I thought carefully about which photos I want in my photostream and in what order. Looking back is always a "memory lane" kind of experience, in a much more profound way than looking at my old facebook timeline. A picture says a thousand words, and all that.

Flickr was not, to me, a place to dump photos. Rather it was a showcase of a kind, where my most meaningful photos could be put on display. Maybe picassa was a dumping ground, but not Flickr.

The initial refresh was appreciated but confusing, and my use of Flickr declined. It took ages before any decent app at all was available for the Android and iPhone platforms. They fumbled the Facebook app.

Recently my use of Flickr has picked up again, but I've started to consider other services. With this new breath of fresh air perhaps that consideration will be stalled, maybe indefinitely. It's a competitive landscape.

I'm not at my photographic peak these days, but the photos are still meaningful and become more so over time.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/slr/

bootload2• 11 years ago

Feb '05, I'm Sep '05.

The alternatives are not good. I tried a few but nothing that feels as easy to use/look as flickr. I'm still searching.

ghaff• 11 years ago

I definitely curate what I upload to pretty much the same degree as I did for "slide shows." But I've long wished for a "gallery stream" that let me flag the photos I really want to show off versus those I want to retain for myself.

I'm generally fine with flickr even if I don't really love it. I use the jfriedl Lightroom plug-in and that lets me use flickr pretty effortlessly as an online repository and sharing site for all the photos I really care about. (And in so doing, serve as a really worst case backup although my raw files are backed up in a few different ways.

bborud• 11 years ago

I have at least three possible theories:

  - Flickr was slow.  I can't stand slow services and over time I tend to avoid these services even though I want to use them.

  - I think there was an uptick in photography for me during the decade when digital cameras went from "meh" to "wow".  And then suddenly the world was flooded by meaningless beauty when everyone had a good camera (including on their phones) and a bunch of filters.

  - I think social websites filled people's need to tell their story.  Flickr, to some degree did that for many people.  Albeit in a more abstracted, indirect way.  With social media there is more immediacty and there is an ephemeral quality to how you communicate.

heleph• 11 years ago

I've got ten years of photos on Flickr and have been a paying subscriber almost that long.

For me my Flickr is my story of the past ten years: moving to the UK, share housing, meeting my husband, getting married, many fun holidays, having my son. What's important to me is the curation of my story, so features around automatically uploading photos and making albums are not important to me.

The other thing I used to like about Flickr was thoughtful community of people who created beautiful photos. There are still many beautiful photos to look through on there, but to be honest it's less important to me now than it used to be. I'm not really looking to reach out and make new friends in the way I was in 2004. My early photos were almost all public. My current ones are almost all friends and family only.

I probably would be open to considering another service if there was somewhere else I could keep my memories that was as good, but the people who are interested in the detail of my life are already on Flickr and the service is good enough that I can't really be bothered to move. I don't mind that it's not where the cool kids hang out.

aaronbrethorst2• 11 years ago

    "Gone are the days of having to create albums,"
    says Aditya Kashyap, the product lead for Camera
    Roll. "We’re doing the hard work for you."

I guess Flickr really is abandoning pros and pro-ams. That's a pity, especially given that 500px still feels really cliquey.

Litost2• 11 years ago

^This - as summed up in more detail here [1]

And these changes don't do anything for me personally.

1) Uploadr - as a semi-pro user, i.e. still using real cameras and lightroom (with plugin) to sync to flickr this means nothing.

2) 1TB of online storage, again as a semi-pro user, and i assume like a lot of other semi-pro users, i'm perfectly capable of running my own backup solution and wouldn't trust an online 3rd party online with hi-res versions of my pics anyway, so again useless.

3) Albums, search - again perfectly happy with the way these were before, i have a workflow that includes creating an album to sync to flickr which isn't cumbersome and i can guarantee the pics i want will be in it.

Flickr used to have a great community of people in it's groups (often pros), with great discussions with threads that were reasonably easy to navigate and search (much better than facebook has ever been) but that whole social side has died.

All these changes, just smack of dumbing down for the sake of smartphone users, but without any social side to it, i can't see why anyone, who already uses facebook or instagram (bizarrely considering the terms and conditions), would switch?

[1] http://www.shutterphoto.net/article/the-flickr-debacle-what-...

aaronbrethorst2• 11 years ago

    i'm perfectly capable of running my own backup solution
    and wouldn't trust an online 3rd party online with hi-res
    versions of my pics anyway, so again useless.

I'd actually be happy to, if Flickr was willing to back up RAW files. But, since they're not, their 1TB is worthless to me.

    dumbing down for the sake of smartphone users,
    but without any social side to it

Yep, totally agree.

zobzu• 11 years ago

As a non-prosummer, 1To seems plenty (i use <3G on Google photo backup), auto-album could be nice (since I can never be bothered...)

Basically, I'm the target, I guess you're not. I guess I Should give it a try. Google+'s albums are a pita...

Raphael• 11 years ago

Do they now prevent manual albums? Google+ seems to support both automatic and manual photo albums.

viraptor• 11 years ago

I haven't seen the new version yet, but that would be really bad decision - leaving all those albums with guest pass links unavailable. It's not like people would search for all those old messages and then resend the links again.

mortenjorck• 11 years ago

While Flickr may be adding new features for the mass market, I don't really see how any of it threatens to decrease the site's utility to serious enthusiasts. I'll just continue to upload through Lightroom, using the site to browse photo streams of photographers I follow and discovering new ones through their likes.

If Flickr were to stage some sort of Twitter-like attempt to rein back in its ecosystem, shutting out pro software that interacts with it, that would be something else entirely, but this is just adding first-party doodads for people who want to use them.

kayman2• 11 years ago

I know a few people that upload all their photos to flickr. Browsing albums is great and sharing them except for the occasional "Forbes style ads" that come up.

But for 1 TB free space, a few ads seem to make sense.

I personally use icloud because it's seamless and I don't have to think about it. My photos get uploaded to Dropbox as well. But still I don't feel like there is one authoritative place I can go to access all my photos.

Most people i know still store their photos on their local PC with no backup.

It's a problem people have but not pressing enough to address it immediately.

joshrivers• 11 years ago

I'm excited to see this. My big outstanding wish is reliable reduplication. My flickr is a mess of duplicate uploads from various attempts at organization and upload.

cek• 11 years ago

Still super-slow and I'm getting a lot of "Bad Panda" errors.

I've been a consistent Flickr customer (yes, I paid for Pro) since March 2005. I have about 9000 photos (I don't upload all my photos, just those I want to share) with over 2M views. The last UI update (last year?) slowed things down significantly and it seems its been getting worse. I'm crossing my fingers that this new UX will lead to perf wins too.

There's just nothing else out there that fits my use model... and I don't understand how Yahoo! can afford to keep it running.

DigitalSea• 11 years ago

I feel as though it is too little, too late. Flickr were in a fantastic position to dominate the online photo space (they did for quite a while) and then a little known app by the name of Instagram came along. Even the pros are using Instagram to showcase new photos, it has supplanted Flickr as the dominant online photo sharing platform.

That is not to say that people don't use it. Flickr is still quite popular, I use Instagram and Flickr to show off my photography (all of that space), but I think they need to start innovating and moving quickly again or risk neglecting their devote users for a third time.

Anyone else feel as though this new interface looks like the Google Plus Photos interface, like a scaringly close copy of it? Even the interface seems to act in similar ways to Google+

ignoramous• 11 years ago

Facebook Photos contributed to the kill as well. To an extent, WhatsApp is doing the same to Facebook Photos.

sabon• 11 years ago

This is the photo I see in about 80%-90% of the cases: http://prntscr.com/72r7h8

At some point I was even a paid flickr customer. Last uploaded photo was from 2009 I think. Or 2011? Can't remember now because when I want to check I see the photo mentioned above.

dmd• 11 years ago

I assumed this was a joke post; that's all I've seen in the last 45-60 minutes.

alphakappa• 11 years ago

No matter what the Flickr redesign does, Yahoo cannot resist putting their purple toolbar on top, even if it completely clashes against the rest of the website's design. Have some respect for your own property.

nek4life2• 11 years ago

Looks like they removed it in the screenshots. It's not fully rolled out to my account yet, but it also seems to be gone from some of my pages.

film42• 11 years ago

The "Camera Roll" beta removes the "scarlet letter" of a purple bar, but I don't have the full update yet.

I'll be honest, their last update turned me from a power user into a once-a-month-at-most user, and I haven't uploaded a single picture since. I'm hoping this new update recaptures my interest, because the old flickr wasn't perfect, but it worked very well.

mherdeg• 11 years ago

I'm excited to see Uploadr, which shares a name with Aaron Swartz's uploadr.py and does much the same function (syncs a bunch of files from my local computer to Flickr).

It's great that Uploadr does local duplicate detection (do not push the same file twice) and it's great that it automatically creates albums based on the folder name or iPhoto event name that contained the imported pictures. This is good. Super excited that I can pause and resume sync of folders to Flickr; this is way better than the old iPhoto connector.

But there are some problems:

* It looks like Flickr Uploadr, unlike uploadr.py, does not preserve the original filename in a metadata field. It's super hard for me to trivially prove that file DSC_9470.JPG or whatever got uploaded correctly because I can't just search for it.

* I don't love that Flickr Uploadr tries to auto-import stuff from my Desktop; I've got a bunch of screenshots there that were interesting at the time but are not photos I'm trying to preserve.

* Flickr Uploadr does not really do duplicate suppression, although its messaging suggests otherwise. If I run this program from my two laptops which both have some subset of my photos, it will push all the files from my local computer (but the same file no more than once) to the remote location. I have already carefully imported 5 of 11 albums exactly once into Flickr, and Flickr Uploadr is now carefully pushing all the photos from all 11 albums again (but is at least doing it exactly once!).

I have some utility code for de-duplication which hits the Flickr API to (1) download each photo that does not yet have a "checksum" tag, (2) compute its checksum, (3) set that checksum metadata. Then, in a second step, I have some utility code that (1) grabs each photo's checksum tag and (2) deletes all but the oldest version of each "duplicate" photo (same checksum tag).

I was hoping not to have to run this code ever again; I was thinking it was great that Flickr had finally started doing this work in the back end, and I figured that the 2-3 minutes of startup when Flickr Uploadr started doing work was time it was spending downloading checksums to compare against files on my disk. Evidently they have not done this although they have auto-added tags like "food" and "indoor" to my photos…

I'm now looking at files "sorted by upload time, newest" and seeing lots of exact dupes (fairly clear if I then "sort by date taken" and scroll down to the recently uploaded areas) and it looks like Uploadr does not actually do the duplicate suppression I was hoping for.

So Uploadr is currently busy pushing thousands of exact-duplicate copies of photos I already have in Flickr, which differ only in that they lack a checksum tag and all have title "Untitled" vs. the filename-as-title I got with uploadr.py.

I'll have a bunch of junk to clean up, which I am used to doing…

The messaging that Uploadr gives, which gave me a lot of hope, is like

""Of the 10844 photos found, 2643 are new and ready to upload, 4110 are duplicates, 3987 have already been uploaded to Flickr, and 104 are either too small or in the wrong format to upload with this utility.""

Also, it looks like this is currently a very popular tool! I got to see this adorable "fail panda" when I use the Flickr Web UI to click on photos and try to see the photo page: http://i.imgur.com/YomGPfq.jpg

bobbles• 11 years ago

I use flickr to upload my photos to share with Facebook friends and colleagues:

1) I dont want my workmates all on my Facebook account

2) The Facebook album uploader fails 100% of the time if I do more than like 10 photos.

3) Easy presentation of camera/exif with location tagging if I used my DSLR is great for me.

For those wondering, the new app update still has my existing albums, it hasn't deleted anything that I can see

nek4life2• 11 years ago

I mostly hope they are fixing the terrible performance issues. Seems like I'm always waiting for photos to load properly.

nemo• 11 years ago

The web site is agonizing, been slow for weeks, and today I've been seeing the bad panda a lot. The iPad app is screaming fast, which makes it more painful since I really only want to use the web UI on a desktop.

silveira• 11 years ago

I have been using Flickr for almost 10 years. I got the 2 years of Pro Account for free in a event, and since then I have being paying a pro account, mostly as a backup service. Recently they changed their pricing and I was said I should not be paying anymore. It was very strange being a happy pro account customer and then being said I don't need to pay anymore, usually is the opposite happens.

ojbyrne2• 11 years ago

Interesting. I just noticed the credit card attached to my 1 year Pro account expired in 2013. Still seem to have all the privileges of Pro.

msravi• 11 years ago

Uploadr doesn't work with Snow Leopard (10.6.8). That's a dealbreaker for me.

bootload2• 11 years ago

"On Flickr.com, a new feature called Camera Roll organizes them into a reverse-chronological timeline."

10 years on flickr in September.

Retarded idea. Where does the time information come from? The upload time (user & flickr controlled) or EXIF (camera controlled). My bet it's the EXIF which relies on a camera having the correct date. With 20K+ images a lot without correct dates. That's why I generate the dates in tags and titles for own search. Yahoo search is a joke.

"Using Yahoo’s image-recognition technology, Flickr will generate dynamic albums for you across 60 categories including people, animals, landscapes, panoramas, and architecture."

I don't want Yahoo's stupid idea of organisation of images. This isn't for users, people who pay. It's for viewers who search, don't pay but consume and so Yahoo makes $$$.

"But the real opportunity is in helping people manage and browse their smartphone photos"

Nope, still like my choice of camera, pre-processing and manual uploading.

"What’s impressive is what it’s doing for free:"

One of the great things about the web is you can put a face to the words. Casey you missed the chance to ask why the site is un-usable to show a page, why the front-end is rendered at the client and poor user design decisions like reducing the screen usage area. Flickr screen clutter has increased over the years making it harder to view and use.

Flickr never recovered after the departure of Butterfield, Fake and Henderson.

Read:

How flickr started: "This Story About Slack's Founder Says Everything You Need To Know About Him"

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3026418/open-company/this-story-ab...

Technology behind it: Cal Henderson, "Building Scalable Web Sites"

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596102357.do

Slack: Latest Company by founders:

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3026418/open-company/this-story-ab...

lukaslalinsky• 11 years ago

It's one thing to see image recognition as a research project, a very different one to see it work on your own photos. I really like the "magic view".

grk• 11 years ago

What would you use instead of flickr? My usecase is uploading a bunch of photos to an album to share with friends/family.

trumpete• 11 years ago

Imgur seems to be quite reliable for the most part

dummyfellow• 11 years ago

Facebook, easy to upload and share.

junto• 11 years ago

If you don't care about privacy then Facebook or Dropbox Carousel.

If you do care then self host using OpenPhoto or Lychee.

jeena• 11 years ago

I was a pro user for many many years and was really happy to pay. But I have basically stopped using it after they made the 1 GB for free. I don't need more so it felt a bit weird to pay for the remaining pro features. But without paying for a service you're the product as we know so I moved my photos to my own website instead and basically stopped uploading anything to Flickr.

Flickr redesigns web and mobile apps to create a powerhouse in photo storage

Related Stories