Yahoo Overhauls Flickr
May 20, 2013 4:00 PM   Subscribe

 
I think you mean 'Ovrhauls'.
posted by mikurski at 4:03 PM on May 20, 2013 [21 favorites]


Sweet redesign too.
posted by Artw at 4:04 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


I wonder how long it will be until someone turns this into free cloud storage for random data, like they did with Gmail.
posted by cosmic.osmo at 4:07 PM on May 20, 2013 [7 favorites]


Heh. Nice. Now, if I can only figure out how to merge my two flickr accounts with my one yahoo account, I might start using it again (since I hit the free limit then kept from uploading anything/going pro because I kept thinking they were just about to deep six the whole site).
posted by klangklangston at 4:08 PM on May 20, 2013 [4 favorites]


Compelling. I hope it works.
posted by Doleful Creature at 4:08 PM on May 20, 2013


Nice. I can't abide by the resolution at Facebook & instagram seems designed specifically for phone snapshots, so I've stuck with Flickr mostly through inertia. It's been great to see some positive changes over there this year.
posted by Devils Rancher at 4:08 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


Is it still steganography if the image is just a white box?
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:08 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


I finally have a reason to use start using Flickr again.
posted by asnider at 4:08 PM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


I am now wondering what the advantages of being a Flickr pro account user are.
posted by rongorongo at 4:10 PM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


Will I get back the 1,000+ photos they hid from me when I let my pro subscription expire? Because I'm not going to upload them all again, that's for sure.
posted by mudpuppie at 4:11 PM on May 20, 2013 [20 favorites]


PcMag.com announces popups free for all users.
posted by Big_B at 4:11 PM on May 20, 2013 [15 favorites]


@mudpuppie: In the past, anything that was hidden when my Pro subscription lapsed showed up again when I renewed. I'm sure it's the same now.
posted by sideshow at 4:13 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


Will I get back the 1,000+ photos they hid from me when I let my pro subscription expire?

Yes. They were never deleted. I got all of mine back after a 1 year hiatus, no trouble at all.
posted by sidereal at 4:13 PM on May 20, 2013 [8 favorites]


I let my pro sub lapse a while back but all my pictures seem to be on the site now. Actually, I don't see a way to pay at this point.
posted by selfnoise at 4:14 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


If nothing else, doing the announcement on Tumblr right on the heels of that acquisition is pretty smart, well-executed timing/messaging.
posted by crayz at 4:14 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


Can anyone figure out how they can afford to do this? Cloud storage providers are charging 10 cents per gig per month, so this would be $100 a month worth of storage, free... And unlike email it is not all that hard to take a terabyte of pictures.

Maybe they're betting that people's upload bandwidth is so limited that few will actually upload more than a few gigs?

Maybe they have a scheme to predictively offload the high-res versions to tape libraries?
posted by miyabo at 4:14 PM on May 20, 2013


Woah. Yahoo's back in the game... especially if they can avoid the forced march to social networking by way of egregious privacy violation that Google and Facebook are on. If they can do social and unobtrusive, they win.
posted by Slap*Happy at 4:16 PM on May 20, 2013 [16 favorites]


I helped build flickr (and continued working on it until 2009) and I am pretty excited about this overhaul.

I don't love everything, but then I didn't love everything before the overhaul either :)
posted by ericost at 4:16 PM on May 20, 2013 [23 favorites]


We have cameras (storage).
posted by mathowie at 4:16 PM on May 20, 2013 [15 favorites]


crayz: "If nothing else, doing the announcement on Tumblr right on the heels of that acquisition is pretty smart, well-executed timing/messaging"

"Yahoo!: We don't screw everything up anymore."
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:17 PM on May 20, 2013 [4 favorites]


I'm happy with the overhaul so far (although a little suspicious of the new plans, we'll see). But this seems as good a place as any to mention 500px, a photo sharing site targeting "creative", semi-pro and pro photographers.

They seem like a good bunch of people, a few former coworkers of mine work for them.
posted by mendel at 4:18 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm half expecting the release of the yPod tomorrow.
posted by ifandonlyif at 4:18 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


Can anyone figure out how they can afford to do this? Cloud storage providers are charging 10 cents per gig per month, so this would be $100 a month worth of storage, free... And unlike email it is not all that hard to take a terabyte of pictures.

I feel like you overestimate the amount of pictures that most people take. There are a number of power users who probably need 1TB+ for pictures but their relatively small amount of usage is already priced into Flickr's ad pricing schedule as a loss-leader.

There is probably an "average user usage" -- the number of pictures (measured in gigs, perhaps) that the average user can be expected to store over their lifetime. That number is probably far below 1TB, and so Flickr prices their services using this number, rather than the upper bound of 1TB.

Or so I would imagine.
posted by Avenger at 4:19 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


Cloud storage providers are charging 10 cents per gig per month, so this would be $100 a month worth of storage, free.

Well, you can be sure it costs the cloud storage providers a lot less than what they charge.

How many people are actually going to fill their TB quota? Probably not a lot. I'm not that prolific a photographer, but all of the RAW files I've ever taken since I got a DSLR in 2001 are only a couple hundred GB.
posted by aubilenon at 4:19 PM on May 20, 2013


This is interesting. There's a ton of Google's DNA over the new interface.
posted by boo_radley at 4:21 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


Maybe they're betting that people's upload bandwidth is so limited that few will actually upload more than a few gigs?

So long as they continue to accept jpegs only, I can't imagine much of anybody using even a small percentage of that terabyte. According to them, at the resolution of my camera, that'd be 300,000 pictures. I've been an active Flickr user since 2005 & have a tad over 2000 photos there, now.
posted by Devils Rancher at 4:21 PM on May 20, 2013


So to speak.
posted by boo_radley at 4:21 PM on May 20, 2013 [5 favorites]


Where do you find out how much storage you are using? I saw someone's screenshot of their % used of the new 1Tb but I can't find it in the UI anywhere at Flickr.
posted by mathowie at 4:22 PM on May 20, 2013


New layout is better than the old one. Nice to see the storage upgrade. Nice to see Mayer make two big moves in two days. Wonder what the rest of the week will bring. More Y! on the move?
posted by eyeballkid at 4:23 PM on May 20, 2013


Guys, can you imagine what it must cost for them to offer every user a full gigabyte of email storage?
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:23 PM on May 20, 2013 [17 favorites]


I am a prolific photographer, and at 8 months in of shooting raws and dumping them on this laptop, plus all the other shit (gigs of music), I've still got 300gb left of my TB drive. So, yeah, it's a couple years worth unless you're shooting gigs a day or you're doing sizable PShop layercake processing.
posted by klangklangston at 4:23 PM on May 20, 2013


Yeah, about cloud storage - the wholesale or owned&operated cost of well-run storage is cheap beyond belief. 10 cents per TB is way, way more than Yahoo's internal cost model.
posted by GuyZero at 4:24 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


BrotherCaine: "Is it still steganography if the image is just a white box?"

The most popular thing I've ever done (and possibly ever will do) on the internet was to scan a blank sheet of paper, and upload it to Flickr.

It's got well over 100,000 views, and I have no clue why.

Not sure I like the new redesign (the current design memes make poor use of screen real estate, which is a huge pet peeve of mine), but I'll definitely start using my account again, especially since I've been kicking myself to do more photography...

Also, did Flickr put my real name on my public profile without asking me? I don't remember that being there before...
posted by schmod at 4:24 PM on May 20, 2013


(Though I hasten to add that I'm not a pro, and pros have an order of magnitude greater need.)
posted by klangklangston at 4:24 PM on May 20, 2013


A completely bizarre side effect to this... not to be all "Story time!" about this but my dad died two years ago yesterday. He had a Flickr account with 4000+ photos on it. A while back its pro account had expired and so we could only see the last 200 photos, which hey okay, but the other photos were a lot of stuff from my childhood that I'd like to see again. Photos like this. "Fix dad's Flickr" was on the "Shit to do" list along with all the other estate stuff that is exhausting and occasionally sad-making. And I wasn't sure if I knew his passwo5rd and I was just not relishing dealing with it. I am an on top of it person and I was Not Handling This.

So today, just now in fact, I realized that this change means that I can go look at all the old photos again without having to turn this into a giant hassles. So even though I don't particularly care for the redesign (and I empathize like crazy with the Yahoo/Flickr folks who have to deal with the angry onslaught) there was one little nice part of it in there for me.

The end.
posted by jessamyn at 4:25 PM on May 20, 2013 [125 favorites]


Where do you find out how much storage you are using? I saw someone's screenshot of their % used of the new 1Tb but I can't find it in the UI anywhere at Flickr.


Hover over your avatar in the right hand corner and it appears. (It may be elsewhere.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 4:25 PM on May 20, 2013


Wow. Looks fantastic. Good for them!
posted by ph00dz at 4:27 PM on May 20, 2013


Viewing source is interesting.
posted by Artw at 4:27 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


So today, just now in fact, I realized that this change means that I can go look at all the old photos again without having to turn this into a giant hassles.

Oh hey, so can we! We opened an account for our wedding photos and only paid for a year and now I guess we can see everything again! Whooopee!!!
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 4:28 PM on May 20, 2013


And it's all YUI, JavaScript library fans.
posted by Artw at 4:29 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


Oh, wow. I need to go back and remove a few photos from my photostream...

(Doing this is also unbelievably depressing. I'm spotting a lot of now-deceased people in my old photos...)
posted by schmod at 4:29 PM on May 20, 2013


My impressions are mixed. What I see on logging in, the view of my contacts' photos, is great. Much improved, even. But I wasn't crazy before about the asymmetrical view of my contacts' photos, and I'm still not crazy about it as the default (only? say it ain't so!) view of my own photostream. Also, what's up with the Ken Burns effect on the full screen slide show?

If you're looking to get the most out of the new quota, upload in PNG. Flickr will still serve up converted JPGs on your stream but the original image link will remain an unmodified copy of your original PNG file. (At least, this was the case until today and my original images still appear to be in PNG format.)
posted by Lorin at 4:32 PM on May 20, 2013


So, if you were an old Pro, but lapsed, a) all your photos are now available, and b) at their original size. Is there a free thing that will let you download all your stuff? Last time I looked you needed paid apps to do it.
posted by curious nu at 4:32 PM on May 20, 2013


I was disappointed that left/right swipe don't move within a photostream unless you go to lightbox mode. otherwise it looks pretty nice on a nexus 7 tablet in chrome. There seems to be an unavoidable flickr watermark in lightbox mode, though.

The real barrier to switching to flickr is how do I integrate it with my blog (a very niche python thing); if I wade into the flickr API would I be able to embed thumbnails and lightbox on my own site, or am I forced to just link to flickr.com URLs and send my readers away from my site?

Hm, I can't even figure out what my flickr login is. Not that I had many photos there.
posted by jepler at 4:32 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


Now if they could make it easy to download all my photos in their highest resolution with one click. Or I'm I missing something.
posted by stltony at 4:33 PM on May 20, 2013


Not bad, but I have some issues with the redesign itself. I miss seeing every photo's shutter speed, aperture, and ISO, for example.
posted by Sticherbeast at 4:41 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


As far as I can tell, there is now no option, when viewing photos individually, other than a black background. But I don't necessarily always want to see a photo surrounded by black. Sometimes white is better. We used to have the option of viewing on black or white. So this point for me is definitely not an improvement.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:43 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


Where do you find out how much storage you are using?

Clicking on Upload also gives your current usage.
posted by jontyjago at 4:44 PM on May 20, 2013


Doesn't seem anyone is terribly clear on what's going on with current recurring Pro members. It kinda seems those with recurring Pro get to be grandfathered in and continue an ad-free unlimited experience at $25? But maybe not. Mine's due to renew in 8 days, but the system is also encouraging me to "switch to free" by sometime in August. I'm a bit confused and the FAQ seems only half-way updated.
posted by asciident at 4:46 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


curious nu, have you tried flickredit? I haven't used it for a while, but the last time I did, it let me yoink all of my photos in the original size relatively painlessly.
posted by joyceanmachine at 4:46 PM on May 20, 2013 [5 favorites]


Ah, the further pinterestification of the internet. I was just complaining how everyone is switching to cluttered, no-negative space, infinite scrolling, slow-loading ugliness and now Flickr has gone and done it too. With ads, if I don't continue to renew my account for twice the price of the previous pro account.
posted by oneirodynia at 4:48 PM on May 20, 2013 [5 favorites]


There's already been an AskMe that I think I was only able to answer thanks to an old Flickr picture.
posted by zamboni at 4:48 PM on May 20, 2013


Hmmm, I've been using the free Picasa website for a while, now I'll see if I can jump ship. A terabyte is nice.
posted by zardoz at 4:50 PM on May 20, 2013


Wow, there's a total meltdown going on in the Flickr Help Forum.
posted by plastic_animals at 4:50 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


Not a Flickr user, but I just spent twenty minutes watching slowing scrolling photos of birds and flowers, so they must be doing something right.

There's a lot of really beautiful photography out there!
posted by Kevin Street at 4:50 PM on May 20, 2013


So. I guess they're still not gonna switch over to Google maps for their mapping service anytime soon, eh?
posted by Devils Rancher at 4:51 PM on May 20, 2013


Fabulous! Now do I get back a percentage of what I paid for my Pro account this year?

(At 1TB, I guess I shouldn't bitch, but it's so annoying to have to pay more now just for an ad-free account.)
posted by octobersurprise at 4:53 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


Oh god their mapping. I had a work project a few years back where I had to add locations for a few hundred photos, most of which had intersections, not addresses, and it was HELL. Has it improved?
posted by NoraReed at 4:53 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I like this. A lot. But the maps still sucks, which is a shame since Geotagging photos is a thing I've been doing meticulously for years in the hope Flickr would improve the map display.
posted by Jimbob at 4:55 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm still kinda amazed that the most recent upload of mine there has gotten 6000-plus views in the space of about 24 hours...
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:55 PM on May 20, 2013


flapjax, those legs made Explore, which always brings in the views.
posted by plastic_animals at 4:59 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


I just now got the "Exciting changes to your Flickr account!" email. This was weirdly handled. And no more stats unless you pay twice as much per year? Huh.
posted by jessamyn at 4:59 PM on May 20, 2013 [4 favorites]


I'm still kinda amazed that the most recent upload of mine there has gotten 6000-plus views in the space of about 24 hours...

I'm not. That's an incredible photo. Plus, gams.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:00 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


It's too sluggish right now to explore much, but at least I just renewed my pro account so I won't have to worry about seeing ads for another year.
According to Adam Cahan, senior vice president of mobile and emerging products at Yahoo, Flickr had become about words, little images, and blue links.
Even though I haven't been an active user for a while, I hope those words and blue links continue to be an integral part of the site. I met a bunch of really great people in the groups and even made a few RL friends.

On preview, I just got the email, also.
posted by Room 641-A at 5:02 PM on May 20, 2013


I'm still kinda amazed that the most recent upload of mine there has gotten 6000-plus views in the space of about 24 hours...
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:55 PM on May 20 [+] [!]


You always take great pictures. That one you captured just right. It's beautiful.
posted by gc at 5:03 PM on May 20, 2013


I got the email too, but it's still confusing:
As a Pro Member, your subscription remains the same. You'll enjoy unlimited space for your photos and videos, detailed stats and an ad-free experience. However, you can switch to a Free account before August 20, 2013.
What happens after August 20th?
posted by asciident at 5:03 PM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


Does anyone have a screen shot of what the ad version looks like? My pro account was half what the "ad free" account is, and it looks like the only bonus of the $50/year "ad free" is no ads (the other pro benefits like unlimited storage appear to be gone) I have seen conflicting answers to whether I'll be allowed to keep my Pro after it expires, but why would I pay double for basically nothing? Even if the ads are hideously obtrusive, it's still a doubling of the price with no benefit to me.

I also think the new interface is ugly and I find it even harder to get to the options for doing things with my own images. But in all my years of internet and software and device usage, I've rarely encountered an interface that was remotely intuitive.
posted by crush-onastick at 5:04 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


Ha. Ha. Just yesterday I was joking to someone that Yahoo! was going to pay for Tumblr by monetizing all the porn on Flickr.
posted by octobersurprise at 5:05 PM on May 20, 2013


Also my profile pic now says when I hover over it: "upload to a bigger and better photo, please". Way to be all judgey, Flickr.
posted by oneirodynia at 5:05 PM on May 20, 2013 [4 favorites]


Oh, whoah. I just logged in, and THAT is a REDESIGN. Wow. Basically a whole new site.
posted by sidereal at 5:09 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


One annoying change, to flickrmail someone you have to add them as a contact first. Then you need to use the "compose mail" and type or paste their name into the "to" field.
posted by Sophont at 5:11 PM on May 20, 2013


So is it still possible to figure out the URL of the largest version of your photo (or other graphic) and link directly to it, bypassing all the flash new UI cruft? That's all I want.
posted by jfuller at 5:11 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


I'm excited that they're paying attention to Flickr, and I'm happy to have all my old photos back, but this redesign feels really cramped. I'm feeling claustrophobic just looking through my friends' photos.
posted by buriednexttoyou at 5:14 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


So, I used to be a Flickr Pro member back in 2004, when I was 25 and thought the entire world should see me just as I am, beautiful drunken warts and all. And I was aided and abetted by my husband, who was more than happy to stay mostly sober during parties and hijinks and meticulously document every moment with his little spy-camera, which would then be plugged into my laptop at my earliest convenience so that the whole WORLD could see how fabulously fun my life was. Thus, 2,780 photos ranging from the relatively mundane to outright blackmail material were put into my photostream over the course of a few years. I let my account lapse at some point, and my first 250 pictures were of my wedding, so all seemed safe enough.

If you, like me, suddenly find your previously hidden ghosts of years past popping up live, the function you want on Flickr is:

You->Organize->(select all, drag to batch)->Permissions->Who Can See, Comment, Tag?

This will give you a chance to breathe and decide whether downloading or nuking is your next step.
posted by Meghamora at 5:16 PM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


Yeah I think the thing that's making me happiest is that it shows Yahoo still cares. I've been fairly supportive of Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr over the years, because they never totally screwed it up, but I always had concerns that my thousands of photos (and my wife's hundreds of thousands of photos) would some day disappear once Yahoo decided it wasn't worth it anymore. This buys us a few years more time, at least.
posted by Jimbob at 5:22 PM on May 20, 2013


Yeah Meghorama Meghamora, same here - 10 years of occasionally questionable decisions, suddenly there for everyone to see. Again. What was I thinking?

I'm safe here on the Blue though, no one will ever guess my Flickr name.
posted by sidereal at 5:23 PM on May 20, 2013


Using 0.0070% of 1TB

Huh.

I'm not a huge fan of the redesign at this stage, aesthetically at least, but I look forward to seeing how they refine it. And it's a good sign that they're actually doing something with the site, so we shall see.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:23 PM on May 20, 2013


For the love of Nikon, give me an "old layout" option for everything. if I wanted my crap on Pinterest, it'd be on Pinterest.

Other than that, COOOOOLLL.

I think - though I am not really sure with the somewhat wriggly explanations - that pro accounts are grandfathered in and continue; mine says when it will renew, not when it will switch to the new thing.
posted by cmyk at 5:28 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


My account says "You have a Flickr Pro Account. It expires on 19th November, 2013." Also, I've received the exhortation to switch to a free account before August 20, 2013, but I can't find any indication of what happens if I stick with my Pro account after that date.
posted by chrominance at 5:32 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


Does it preserve the original file, with all its data intact, or does it resample at all? Because there's joining files.
posted by kafziel at 5:35 PM on May 20, 2013


There are two things happening. Auto-renew pro accounts will keep going. People who paid individually every year have the option to switch to free now or ... that is the unclear part. Get billed for $50 and then switch to free later? I have been reading the support forums on and off today and it's sort f crazy how little damage control is happening there. They have like five or so "sticky" forum postings for collecting feedback, there's almost no staff/moderator feedback or even question answering anywhere else and very few people (in the forums) who are like "I get it, I like it" Which, hey, internet people so of course change is a problem, but there appeared to be basically zero attempts at change management for a pretty giant change. This is simultaneously

1. a design change
2. a rate increase/decrease for basically everyone (and I think some geographical changes, though I can't tell, seemed like something special was going on in Brazil, I could be mistaken...)
3. a feature addition/removal shift in line with different fee structures (stats, storage, FlickrMail, upload throughput limits)

So depending on what you wanted out of Flickr or needed it for, it's either going to cost you a lot less (Yay!) or at least twice as much (Boo!) AND have a different feature set than before (¯\_(ツ)_/¯). They're big enough that it seems like they've either calculated that they're okay with losing X% of their membership over this or they don't care one way or the other. I'm super curious how they made some of the decisions that they made. It's all so sudden and seemingly badly managed for a company that used to be very very good at communicating with users and having clear easy-to-grok FAQs and help pages.
posted by jessamyn at 5:35 PM on May 20, 2013 [8 favorites]


A free terrabyte?!

Did you hear that Dropbox?
posted by LarryC at 5:38 PM on May 20, 2013 [5 favorites]


Even "a lot less" is relative, considering one of the new plans is a whopping $500 a year. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS. For less than you get now with a $25/year account.
posted by chrominance at 5:40 PM on May 20, 2013 [5 favorites]


The EXIF data is still available, you have to dig for it though: click the ••• button at the bottom right of the photo to get a menu, then click "View Exif info".

Yes, but I'm specifically referring to how the last version of Flickr had this data on the photo page itself - you didn't have to click through to the EXIF data page. I liked having it right there.
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:40 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


Dear Lord, Flickr is a mess. Using anything but the most basic functionality will kick you back to the old UI.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 5:41 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


Wow, I really really hate it. I mean I HATE it and I am not usually one of those internet people who hate change, but I use Flickr EVERY FUCKING DAY and have for 9 years and this is, uh, essentially unusable for me. And that's not to mention the $25 a year, religiously paid for 9 years, which is apparently now pointless? Except wait and see? Fuck this.

I use flickr - or I used to - primarily as cloud storage. It holds all my work for the past 9 years. I have almost 5000 photos on Flickr. I've also used it to share photos and even to get photos from professional gigs - weddings, head shots, political rallies - to the people who want them and wow, I don't see how I'm going to go on using it that way either. This isn't how I want to see my own photos - giant glumph of undifferentiated images - and it sure as hell isn't how I want other people to see them.
posted by mygothlaundry at 5:48 PM on May 20, 2013 [12 favorites]


Per comments on the help forum, apparently the switching to free by August 20th is for getting a pro-rated refund applied to either your card or paypal. Still unclear on whether Pro just continues indefinitely with its current features or not, but I suppose no one but Yahoo/Flickr can answer that and they are silent on it at the moment.
posted by asciident at 5:48 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


wait, the $500 a year plan is not a typo?
posted by jepler at 5:50 PM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


Not being able to see the number of views on one's photos without clicking on each photo and scrolling down is somewhat annoying.
posted by acb at 5:51 PM on May 20, 2013


I commented over in the Tumblr thread. tl;dr: it's very... monolithic. As in 2001.

After the novelty wears off, there's a real sense of "so, what am I supposed to do here now?" Which may, itself, wear off once the Flickr team has the time to do more QA than they apparently managed in the rush to get this launched.

wait, the $500 a year plan is not a typo?

It's priced not to be bought. It should really be "Call our representative" or "reserved for people with an equity stake in Tumblr."
posted by holgate at 5:52 PM on May 20, 2013


"The article failed to mention no more Pro, instead there will be ad supported 1TB Free..."

You mean that Flickr actually has ads? I wouldn't have noticed...!
posted by markkraft at 6:00 PM on May 20, 2013


Just got back from the press event announcing the changes to Flickr. Well. I'm slowly figuring out how to do the things I used to be able to easily do on Flickr. The free drinks have not convinced me to accept that I'm going to have to click on two different pages to find out if anyone has anything to say about my idiot photograph or if I want to label my photographs.
posted by sciencegeek at 6:01 PM on May 20, 2013


And suddenly, I'm using Flickr again.
posted by offalark at 6:04 PM on May 20, 2013


boo_radley: "This is interesting. There's a ton of Google's DNA over the new interface."

That sounded way more pornographic to me than it should have.
posted by symbioid at 6:05 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


The Edit view is pretty much the old interface with the new top bar. But I guess that only works for your own page.
posted by Devils Rancher at 6:07 PM on May 20, 2013


As far as I can tell, there is now no option, when viewing photos individually, other than a black background. But I don't necessarily always want to see a photo surrounded by black.

"BUT ARE WE NOT, AT ALL TIMES, SURROUNDED BY BLACKNESS," COOES A KOHL-EYED MARISSA MAYER, "THE BLACKNESS OF LIFE ITSELF?"
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:08 PM on May 20, 2013 [8 favorites]


New Flickr doesn't seem to like iPhoto. I'm trying to upload from iPhoto and it is limiting me to 1024x1024 because I'm not Flickr Pro.
posted by entropicamericana at 6:10 PM on May 20, 2013


Also, I'm surprised there's no nerd rage over the ads yet. Ah well, nobody ever accused the mob of being consistent.
posted by entropicamericana at 6:17 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


Also, I'm surprised there's no nerd rage over the ads yet. Ah well, nobody ever accused the mob of being consistent.

Everyone who cares has Adblock Plus running, and if it's a professional portfolio and ads aren't desired on that for everyone else then $50 a year is not horrific.
posted by jaduncan at 6:25 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


OK, with ads and scripts blocked this much still works:
= google image search string "baby raccoon site:flickr.com"
= size large
= pick a thumbnail, open link in new tab
= clicky "full size image" link
Bingo.

OTOH with ads and scripts blocked you can't look at anyone's photostream any more. All you get are bunches of grey rectangles. OK, fair enough, from now on all rather than just most of my interaction with flickr will be via google image search. For youtoob sometimes I go temporarily bonkers and can't resist unblocking stuff. But for just flickr? Hehhehhehhehheh no.
posted by jfuller at 6:25 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


2TB Ad Free account for $500/year

Hmm. This actually tells you a lot about their pricing model. A 2TB user is guaranteed to be storing at least 1TB, since otherwise they'd just get the free/cheap account. $500 per TB per year is much more in line with what Amazon and Google would charge for that much storage. (Once you include power and cooling and redundant copies, it's hard to run a data center for much less than that.)
posted by miyabo at 6:29 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


jessamyn: I looked into getting a Pro account a few months ago, and if I remember correctly Brazil had a different payment scheme then. I think it had something to do with alternate payment methods, but the costs were also different. No idea on the details.
posted by 23 at 6:29 PM on May 20, 2013


I hope iPhoto gets updated soon so that I can switch everything to actual size from the 1024x1024 uploads it did for free accounts.
posted by sparkletone at 6:30 PM on May 20, 2013


I have no confidence that Yahoo! won't fuck me again but I'm willing to use them as a tertiary backup for my image files so this is good news. I'm a little leery that they might expose images marked private to the world though. Anyone know/recommend a program to hash an image file with a key and output another image file even if the output looks like line noise?

Devils Rancher: "So long as they continue to accept jpegs only, I can't imagine much of anybody using even a small percentage of that terabyte. According to them, at the resolution of my camera, that'd be 300,000 pictures. I've been an active Flickr user since 2005 & have a tad over 2000 photos there, now."

I think you are right. I'm a medium prolific picture taker although since moving to digital mostly with consumer gear and most of that point and shoot and it's all jpeg. My digital photo folder since 2001 is 130GB + the 3.5GB I took this weekend still living on my SD card. However most of the people I know don't really get past filling up their camera or phone memory.

entropicamericana: "I'm surprised there's no nerd rage over the ads yet. Ah well, nobody ever accused the mob of being consistent"

Ad block must be killing the ads so that'll lessen the rage.
posted by Mitheral at 6:32 PM on May 20, 2013


I wonder what will happen to their partnership with Getty Images? I have a feeling Yahoo might be thinking about starting their own stock agency or building licensing directly into Flickr.

I mean, it's been obvious for years that that is what they should do. I wonder if Meyers has a plan for this, Getty owns like 95% of the market and the terms for photographers are amazingly bad.
posted by bradbane at 6:36 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


Slow as sin.
posted by signal at 6:41 PM on May 20, 2013


...


So, uh, Flickr down for anyone else but me?
posted by entropicamericana at 6:42 PM on May 20, 2013


On using flickr as general cloud storage: this could be very simple, or it could be harder.

Simple: if flickr preserves all JPEG metadata, then simply upload small images (e.g., 1 8x8 DCT block) with all your data in APPn markers; overhead on large files: probably under 1% (each APPn block has 2 bytes for APPn (FF En) followed by two bytes for length, followed by up to 65534 bytes of content, so you have 4 bytes overhead for every 65534 bytes content, or way under 1%)

If you can't find a way to do it in metadata, then you have to do it in image data. The first obvious-seeming way is to make grayscale images where each 8x8 block is an identical luminance. As an example, I encoded a 1169-byte file from an earlier draft of this message into a 1184-byte arithmetic-encoded image and a 1368-byte huffman-encoded image; in each case, the decoded image was pixelwise identical to the original. I skipped writing the part that converts the image back to the input data, but that's the easy part. Using this method, you could encode around 64 megs in one 65496x65496 jpeg image (cjpeg stops at 65500 for some reason; it looks like the file format should go to 65535 though).

Empirically, it looks like the overhead for random input data is around 12% with arithmetic encoding and 20% with optimized huffman encoding. (cjpeg -arithmetic and cjpeg -optimize respectively); it's nearly double with default huffman encoding, so don't use that. The first figures, which were for ASCII text, show that when abused like this jpeg is actually able to find some of the redundancies that exist in ASCII (though to a far lesser extent than even gzip -1).

So anyway, yeah, someone should get around to turning flickr into around 800GB of free cloud storage for anyone with a yahoo account.
posted by jepler at 6:47 PM on May 20, 2013 [9 favorites]


This is what it must be like to have a weird fetish on the dating scene. Companies are just looking for people to be their product, and I have to make everyone uncomfortable by trying to be their customer.
posted by Riki tiki at 6:53 PM on May 20, 2013


mygothlaundry: Fuck this.
I use flickr - or I used to - primarily as cloud storage.


So buy some basic cloud storage instead then. And how is 'new product available!' making the fact that you used an old product for 10 years pointless?
posted by jacalata at 6:56 PM on May 20, 2013


This isn't how I want to see my own photos - giant glumph of undifferentiated images - and it sure as hell isn't how I want other people to see them.

Yeah this is just...ugh. Flickr Pro user here too and I got an email today with the message saying I should essentially switch to free. WTF? You don't want my money, is that it? I don't want 1 free TB and the glumph. A terabyte sounds like a lot of data but it massive for a lot of folks' archiving, which is what I use it for - among other things.
posted by jimmythefish at 7:08 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


So buy some basic cloud storage instead then.

Um...the primary use is cloud storage but you also want to be able to share photos with clients and family etc. I pay (paid) for public and private viewing and unlimited storage. I don't want the mess and the limited storage.
posted by jimmythefish at 7:10 PM on May 20, 2013


jepler: "On using flickr as general cloud storage: this could be very simple, or it could be harder."

Shouldn't be hard to have the equivalent of UUENCODing using QRCodes though if I was Yahoo! I'd make that sort of thing a TOS violation. And because QRCodes are limited to 177 columns and rows the best density/per image would be obtained with a grid of codes to the maximum resolution yahoo permits.
posted by Mitheral at 7:10 PM on May 20, 2013


"And no more stats unless you pay twice as much per year? Huh."

Yeah, I'm a Pro user, have been for years, and I've already today been annoyed by this. I look at stats (aka referrer logs) for pictures all. the. time. and today I posted a photo somewhere, went back to check the stats, and ... no link to the stats. I could still access them by manually appending /stats/ to the end of the photo's URL but that's clumsy.

I have been willing to pay $25/year for Pro status but if they take away my stats unless I pay double ... no go. I won't pay that much.

I will, however, keep using Flickr. I've been a big fan since 2005, have ridden out the long trough of suck and slow decline of the userbase, and have had faith that something good was coming back ever since they released a usable and attractive iPhone app a few months ago. This redesign looks a whole lot like what that app brought us. Whether or not it's good, well ... I'll sleep on it.
posted by komara at 7:11 PM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


> the best density/per image would be obtained with a grid of codes to the maximum resolution yahoo permits

So, you mean like Optar?
posted by scruss at 7:16 PM on May 20, 2013


"Whether or not it's good, well ... I'll sleep on it."

Actually, no, I've got an opinion already, I just hadn't realized that it had crystalized. I really don't like the page for an individual picture. I like that the photo itself is by default bigger, like browser-sized, but I don't like how it switches from black background of picture to white background for info and comments as you scroll down. Seems clumsy.

I really don't like how clicking through to a picture takes you to fullscreen (okay, that's fine) and then clicking again takes you to some Ken Burns effect slideshow (hell no). I just want an easy way to click back to the photo's page, not go deeper into showoff land.

However, I really do like the display for a single user's photostream. I've always been reluctant to upload more than a handful of images related to any one subject for weird neurotic reasons like, "If anyone clicks my photostream and sees just those on the first page they'll think that's all I'm about." I was thinking about this just last week when uploading a few detail photos of a tree carving. Now, well, if someone clicks through to my pictures they'll see a whole big river of my photography, a better sense of my style and subjects. I like it. It feels more like what I want to show the world when all I might get is a single glance.
posted by komara at 7:26 PM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


how is 'new product available!' making the fact that you used an old product for 10 years pointless?

Two things: firstly, it was the established community that asked Marissa Mayer to put vigour and resources back into Flickr. Secondly, the biggest complaint from users who have persisted with Flickr for the past decade (and paid yearly to do so) is that the redesign takes away a lot of the curation that the old UI enabled: particularly, the descriptions and titles and the textual wrapping. That's a lot of work blown away by the new product.

Right now, it really does have the feel of something that demoed well internally and got relatively little user testing. I assume that some of the UI is going to be put back in an iterative process. Make that: "I hope."
posted by holgate at 7:28 PM on May 20, 2013 [5 favorites]


I've been a Pro user for some years now, even though I'm not actually a professional photog - I just have a lot of scans from vintage magazines and carousels of slides from my dad, plus whatever silliness I was taking photos of and wanting to share.

I'm a Tumblr user, and this new format is still giving me the twitches. It's all one big glumph, and I don't like it.
posted by PussKillian at 7:31 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


Is Yahoo responsible for the (awful) full-screen graphics that are taking over tumblr front page and making it hard to find the log in button? Because if so, DISAPPROVE.
posted by subdee at 7:36 PM on May 20, 2013


Optar looks perfect.
posted by Mitheral at 7:39 PM on May 20, 2013


I look at stats (aka referrer logs) for pictures all. the. time. and today I posted a photo somewhere, went back to check the stats, and ... no link to the stats.

Hovering over 'You' in the big black nav bar at the top leads me to a Stats link.
posted by asciident at 7:52 PM on May 20, 2013


Hovering over 'You' in the big black nav bar at the top leads me to a Stats link.

I'm sorry, I did not word my statement well. I did find that link you mention, but I was referring to an individual picture's stats page which used to be accessed by clicking on the number of views the photo has. I can't find a replacement for that quick access to an individual photo's stats page other than changing the URL.

Thanks for reminding me to check my overall stats, though. Now I have another one of those weird situations where a photo has gotten 80+ views in the past hour and they're all from 'Unknown Source'. That is my least favorite kind of mystery.
posted by komara at 7:55 PM on May 20, 2013


Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, it seems for now you have to go through the overall stats instead of the quick way. Seems like a minor tweak for them to add that back in at some point. Hopefully the new layout is still evolving.
posted by asciident at 7:59 PM on May 20, 2013


I've had a lot of stuff parked there for a long time. I still like it better than all my other options, but was always reluctant to pay for Pro, and never did. THe functionality of sets is what I really wanted.

I am certain now that the random "here's 3 months of Pro for free!" was an important user/datagathering test and a way station to this decision.
posted by Miko at 8:07 PM on May 20, 2013


I follow a lot of photographers and a handful of groups on Flickr and this redesign absolutely destroys their work. Photostreams can no longer be described as a gallery of images, now they're a unending assault of colour and shapes. The new layout pretty much sums up all that is bad about photography in the digital age.
posted by quosimosaur at 8:09 PM on May 20, 2013 [7 favorites]


It seems Mashable was able to contact Yahoo for some clarification. In summary:

- No plans for Pro to go away, but you have to already have it
- It's still the only(?) account type able to see stats and replace photos (I'm surprised by this, as surely if you're paying $500 a year you should have these too?)
- Pro still has 50MB static image file size limits; if you want 200MB file size limits, you have to convert to the new account types
posted by asciident at 8:12 PM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


I'm pretty sure Flickr's designers know what they're doing, so I have to assume they're targeting a different set of users with this redesign. I can understand why too. Nowadays, there's a whole host of competing online portfolio services for photographers, artists and designers, so it may make sense for Flickr to head in another direction.
posted by quosimosaur at 8:14 PM on May 20, 2013


And one of my favorite flickr friend has just announced she is taking a break from the site.
posted by Room 641-A at 8:18 PM on May 20, 2013


So there's a small community of people who have been using flickr to discuss architecture, using the caption and comment functions to have basic but serious discussions about buildings and landscapes.

This redesign pretty much kills that functionality.

For example this is now functionally broken.

So for me, flickr just destroyed a big part of my life.
posted by jann at 8:27 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm sorry, I'm not being snarky, but I don't understand how it's fundamentally broken. I can still see the caption and comments. Please help me understand your concern.
posted by komara at 8:32 PM on May 20, 2013


What's broken about it? The photo is still visible as are the comments below.
posted by plastic_animals at 8:32 PM on May 20, 2013


It's a rare day when Flickr's stats shows me less than 75% "Unknown Sources".

This is not unique to Flickr. I've been responsible for analyzing the stats for my organization's various web sites since 1994. In those 19 years it's been a rare day when the majority of referrers are not unknown. Even more so now that the use of cell phones and tablets is so popular.
posted by plastic_animals at 8:37 PM on May 20, 2013


I just want an easy way to click back to the photo's page, not go deeper into showoff land.

Hitting Esc or the back button on your browser seems to do the trick.
posted by zsazsa at 8:40 PM on May 20, 2013


I cannot have my work being displayed in this manner. As a pro member, this is absolutely not anything close to what I've paid for. Having this sprung upon me out of nowhere, I am furious.

I no longer wish to be a member of this site, but if I leave here for some other hosting service I will be leaving behind all of the groups and the community that I have come to be a part of. I enjoy posting my work to a number of groups, and I have discovered and learned so much and gained inspiration from everything that is posted in them. I really don't feel like I will find a comperable community anywhere else.

Going to hold out hope that they will give the option of a "classic" layout. It's the least they could do.
posted by wats at 8:46 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


I was a casual pro user wats so could you explain how flickr has changed that causes you so much angst?
posted by robbyrobs at 9:01 PM on May 20, 2013


jann: Did that photo have notes on it that disappeared? There are other pictures that still have notes. Or is something else missing?

wats: I doubt they'd do something like that. Staying with their old design and functionality for so long was turning the site into a graveyard. They'll probably just tweak the new design.
posted by zsazsa at 9:01 PM on May 20, 2013


robbyrobs, the major one is the justified viewing of my own photostream. I find it cluttered, and I don't like the asymetry. I don't see how cluttering up the negative space around a photograph enhances it. It's distracting, it's far too 'busy'. I definitely prefer the simplicity of the old layout.

I do kind of like the justified effect in other contexts though, such as pinterest or tumblr, but there was a reason I chose to focus on using flickr over either of those. It's just, not the effect I want at all on a photo site that I actually do take quite seriously (as silly as that may be).

Also the bizarre scrolling effect during a slide show.. When I look at a photograph I would like to see the entire thing, not see cropped parts of it scrolling by.
posted by wats at 9:19 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


I also don't feel as though I have control over the continuety of my photostream any longer.. they're all just seemingly mashed together into this layout.
posted by wats at 9:25 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


After some further thought, and some further looking, I am fully and officially hacked off at the Photographic Barf thing they've got going.

If I wanted my stuff to be on pinterest it'd fucking be on pinterest. I wanted my stuff to be organized on a minimalist site with easily-reachable information about it, mostly for my own reference.

ARGH.
posted by cmyk at 9:28 PM on May 20, 2013 [8 favorites]


I don't see any indication of my Pro membership like I used to. Apparently everyone is Pro now. lol
posted by rmmcclay at 9:43 PM on May 20, 2013


I didn't say fundamentally broken, I said functionally broken.

it is now such a poor interface for reading that even though the caption and comments are still there, the disincentives to reading them are strong enough to repel most people.

that's breaking the functionality of the caption and comment space.

mere existence of such options isn't good enough, they have to be designed well enough to be actually used.
posted by jann at 10:14 PM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


I'm so happy with this redesign. I mean, is every piece of the redesign a perfect fit for me personally, as someone who's used Flickr since 2004? Nope. But a site as large as Flickr was never going to redesign in a way that made every user happy, and my priority is seeing development of the site, and its community energized.

I'm mostly happy with the redesign, and more importantly, I'm SUPER happy that Yahoo seems to be really investing in the promise that Flickr had -- and hopefully still has. There's no way of knowing if it will work, but god I love seeing them try. Don't let the ol' girl go down without a fight! I'd rather a redesign that fails miserably with some users than an abandoned entombed shrine to 2005 web design. The atophy of Flickr was more painful for me than any of my small pain points with the redesign. (I do miss Collections as a way to cluster my Sets, but it's minor.)

Even if it ends up failing, I have a huge amount of respect for what the folks at Yahoo are trying to do with Flickr.
posted by arielmeadow at 10:15 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


"it is now such a poor interface for reading that even though the caption and comments are still there, the disincentives to reading them are strong enough to repel most people."

I'd argue against that, or at least the hyperbolic "most people." I personally have no issue with the new way the title, description, and comments are laid out - so much so that I couldn't figure out what you were saying the problem was until you specified this. Out of all the things they've changed, this one registers on my Upset Meter at about 1 out of 10.
posted by komara at 10:22 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


it is now such a poor interface for reading that even though the caption and comments are still there, the disincentives to reading them are strong enough to repel most people.

Yes, it's because the the alignment and background colour changes between the image and the comments.

My main gripe is still that photos have no room to breathe in this layout. The only advantage is that it's easier to browse large collections of images. But what is the point when this comes at the cost of making everything look shit and devaluing individual images? This is what photographic inflation looks like.
posted by quosimosaur at 10:34 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


(I do miss Collections as a way to cluster my Sets, but it's minor.)

Is making a collection one of the vestiges of the old pro account now? Because I can still create a new collection in the organizer, and view others' through the top right menu on their sets page.
posted by Lorin at 10:51 PM on May 20, 2013


not to be all "Story time!" about this but my dad died two years ago yesterday ...

So today, just now in fact, I realized that this change means that I can go look at all the old photos again without having to turn this into a giant hassles


One of my best friends, 3 years ago, similar story. I once logged into their laptop a year after they died just to renew their Pro account.

Thank you, Yahoo.
posted by zippy at 11:16 PM on May 20, 2013


Ironic that some years ago, they couldn't afford to keep the terabyte Geocities took around.
posted by ymgve at 11:23 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


My Dad has used Flickr every single day for over 4 years to keep in touch with his sister in the United States. He is Very Confused and she is worse. I'm a little disoriented myself. It looks nicer but less functional to me.
posted by aesop at 12:57 AM on May 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


I just now got the "Exciting changes to your Flickr account!" email. This was weirdly handled. And no more stats unless you pay twice as much per year? Huh.

Wow, they really are being opaque. I have an auto-renewed Pro account since their promo (yeah, I bit on the 3 free months) and this is what their email says:
As a Pro Member, your subscription remains the same. You'll enjoy unlimited space for your photos and videos, detailed stats and an ad-free experience. However, you can switch to a Free account before August 20, 2013.
I guess it means stats disappear for people who renewed manually, meaning yes, you have to pay $50 instead of $25? But if you're an auto-renew Pro subscriber, you get to keep the stats for $25 a year? It's not entirely clear. I'm pretty much on the fence, which does now seem was a calculated move by Yahoo with their "3 free months if you renew your subscription automatically" promo. I've been using it weekly if not daily since February 2005 (says my photostream helpfully), and got Pro starting a few years ago because I blog and get a lot of views on past photos, which would have disappeared with the 200 limit. Now they've got me in a limbo area... thing is, I don't like that they did that, because the whole point of Flickr for me was that with the Pro account, there was no limbo. I knew I was paying for extra storage and bandwidth, which are concrete technical things worth paying for. Now I pay for... stats? I have AdBlock, I wouldn't see ads in the first place. I could set up my own photo gallery for stats, and it would cost me nothing on top of the host options I already have (pretty nice independent host in France who's generous with bandwidth and storage space).

I went into the forums to see if clarification was forthcoming from Flickr, and there isn't any yet... there are links to 404s... it is not at all reassuring when you're an amateur user who wants stability. Especially as a blogger. I used the stats every other day to check referrers: it's how I found out Wired was using one of my photos; the Guardian as well; LGBT organizations and news blogs; fan sites for Peugeot bikes; forums on the Riviera; people here and there who would link their own memories and experiences on their blogs to photos I took... social uses I never would have discovered were it not for the stats. And, this is the key to the limbo: uses that might never have happened outside of Flickr, since it is the go-to site for people/orgs looking to easily search a huge database of tagged, licensed images.

You can't just say "move to the cloud": who is going to cross your photos on a private storage system? If you stay on Flickr but move to their new free, then you lose knowledge of the third-party users who aren't going to write you an email to say "I used your CC-licensed photo just like the CC license allows". In nineteen (nineteen!!) years of blogging, I have had maybe five requests by email to use photos, and they were all for "All Rights Reserved" ones, AND they were all for magazines/books/paid work. No one contacts you to say they'll use your CC-licensed photo for free...

I'm peeved, yet two decades on the 'net have also taught patience. I'll keep my renewable Pro for now, but yeah, I am definitely looking at going back in time and returning to a self-hosted photo gallery. For the social aspect I could always adapt my usage of FB and G+. Flickr needs to get on the ball in their responses to the forum questions. At the same time, yeah, they targeted blogging-type users for a reason: few care about our complaints, and yet we use it enough that one way or another, we're more likely to be stuck than others.
posted by fraula at 1:51 AM on May 21, 2013 [4 favorites]


Been on Flickr since late 2005, several relationships, family funerals, homes, life changes and countries ago. It's been my one, and only, online constant over those years. Apart from a few glitches e.g. panorama shots don't render well on the new photostream page for some reason, it looks good overall.

The 'share this via', 'grab the link' and 'grab the code' are still there, which is good; nay, crucial. And, frankly, means that Flickr makes it much easier (for me anyway) to use my pics in other places than if I'd put them on Facebook or Instagram.

There's three months until have to make a decision about staying as Pro, or not, so am in no rush to decide. Will wait for the dust for settle and clarification over what exactly one gets for the $50.
posted by Wordshore at 2:57 AM on May 21, 2013


Pro since 2004 here, 15k photos, and like Wordshore, I'll wait and see how it feels in a week or two before I start freaking out. I'm happy Yahoo is doing *something* with Flickr, and I've got guarded hopes it'll be moving in the right direction. That said, I hope they clear up the confusion with the pro accounts--that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense right now.

The one thing I REALLY wish they'd fix is the integration into Facebook. Links to FB or Instagram pics show up big and beautiful, but if I link to a Flickr photo page or set, it shows up as a tiny thumbnail. On second thought, that's probably Facebook's responsibility. Has anyone found a solution for this? I hate putting pix on FB itself.
posted by muckster at 3:49 AM on May 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


I downloaded all my photos and cancelled my subscription several months ago but never got around to deleting my actual account. I took a look at the new front page with it's eye-hurting wall of photos (god, so awful, why do they do that?) then finally got around to deleting everything properly. Which is fine, I was going to anyway.

I hadn't used Flickr very much ever since they screwed up the login leaving me unable to get into my account for a long time. I eventually managed to figure out the hidden username after a lot of trying and fortunately had set up a still-working email address to change the password and get back in. Then I wrote it down somewhere. I was out of the habit by then anyway and I stopped using it for good once we got smartphones and realised that nothing really worked for mobile. First I couldn't upload photos easily from my husband's Windows 7 phone and since that was our main internet device while travelling, no more holiday photos on Flickr. Then I couldn't zoom in or really see anything when someone else linked to a photo there when I was using my Android phone, so no more looking at other people's photos unless I'm on a computer (which is only about half the time these days). I have a huge Dropbox account that came with my phone so backup photo storage and syncing between computers is covered there. I'll pay for that once the free trial year finishes because it works seamlessly in the background. Then I started using Instagram because it works really well with my phone, lots of holiday photos there, and my friends had moved over there too, and that was the end. I just don't need Flickr any more.

I am pleased that they are still working on Flickr and trying to keep it a viable service. I'm clearly no longer the target audience. I've heard that they may have fixed a lot of the mobile problems I was having and giving more storage to everyone is clearly a good move. But it is all too late for me really, it was broken for too long so everyone I know left and I found other ways of doing the things I care about. Only better now because I can do it straight from the camera in my phone and I don't have to worry about Yahoo storing my credit card details without my permission.
posted by shelleycat at 3:57 AM on May 21, 2013


The photostream has that prominent "Member since February 2004" thing which made me realise how in that entire time, Flickr is the one constant record of my life. Almost makes me wish there was a Flickr before that I was using.

I've always tried to throw up a few pics here and there. Mostly representative pictures of what I've been up to. But you can read the photostream like a diary, see me getting married, moving out of San Francisco, living in London, moving out of London, traveling through Europe, visiting family in the US and Mexico. It's all there.

I like the new changes. And they haven't broken anything important. So I'll keep this photojournal of my life going.
posted by vacapinta at 4:02 AM on May 21, 2013


Yeah since 2005 here. I think I signed up because of mefi actually; was flickr one of the first 'link your account' options here?

I'm cautiously optimistic. There's still plenty of room to fuck this up but the place has been so ignored for so long that I'm happy to see it getting some love. I hope my pro account gets grandfathered in of course, that not happening will somewhat sour my enthusiasm for the whole deal.
posted by Skorgu at 4:30 AM on May 21, 2013


I haven't spent much time with the new interface - Flickr has basically become a place for me where I look at the baby photos of friends of mine with good cameras (as opposed to Facebook/Instagram, which is the baby photos of people who primarily use phone cameras).

However, one immediate change for me is that I've been renewing my pro membership primarily out of inertia - because I have a whole bunch of photos in one place, and losing Pro status would have made them annoyingly inaccessible. I guess that no longer happens...
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:42 AM on May 21, 2013


The new Flickr interface looks exactly like the Instagram profile page, and since what I really need for my photosharing purposes I'd for it to be accessible via the web without a login, this is actually perfect. I always felt bad about letting my Pro membership lapse, so I'm very excited about this. I hope it isn't a part burst of life before death, though.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 4:53 AM on May 21, 2013


I guess it means stats disappear for people who renewed manually, meaning yes, you have to pay $50 instead of $25? But if you're an auto-renew Pro subscriber, you get to keep the stats for $25 a year? It's not entirely clear.

Yeah there's some verbiage in one of the articles about it that they gave people the three free months thing so that everyone was on auto-renew which may be what they think is happening but it's definitely not true. As usual, I'm one of those edge case people who signed up for auto-renew to get three free months and then cancelled it figuring I'd manually renew when the time came. So no idea what my status is and not really confident about getting a clear answer for a while.

It's a terrible position they're in where people have been hassling them forever to actually give a shit about the place and spruce it up, but anything you do that is actually different is going to get some serious blowback because they have a longstanding vocal community who really really cares about the place. And the weirdest thing, to me, about the design changes is that they are actually pretty serious, in places, and then in other places all you really get is the black bar on top and it looks like the same old place (I'm thinking specifically of the activity page which I use like Recent Activity here and which looks a lot the same). So either they're going to slowly roll out the rest of the new design at some point (terrible idea) or what they really have is some new pages bolted on to old pages (not much better)?

And I don't mind the new design stuff as much. Don't love it, but trust people to make decisions that will be acceptable and figure that's part of the price you pay for living on the web. I like that it's easier to click through a series of photos now (I just clicked back and forth through my dad's photos for a long time last night and it was nice) but I do think they've minimized commenting and especially highlighting sets/collections, EXIF data, tags and some other things I cared about. And I'm trying to make my peace with not having stats because $50/year just isn't what I want to pay for that.

I totally hear where the super-pissed off people are coming from and maybe it's just that I've been in the "community management" side of things for too long but I feel I've got a take it or leave it situation here and if I want to take it, and I think I do, I'm going to spend some time offering some considered feedback and then spend some other time trying to figure out how to make this work for me.
posted by jessamyn at 6:46 AM on May 21, 2013 [3 favorites]


My main gripe is still that photos have no room to breathe in this layout.

Having looked at Flickr this morning, this is my biggest peeve as well. Worse, there's no choice to use any other arrangement, or see a picture against anything but a black background. There's an appeal to a cascade of pictures (I like the Flickr iPhone app), but it's a real step backwards visually and technologically to force that arrangement on every picture by every user on every platform.

And it still isn't entirely clear what being a Pro user means now.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:51 AM on May 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


Fabulous! Now do I get back a percentage of what I paid for my Pro account this year?

Turns out... yes!

I just cancelled my Pro account, thinking it would cancel at the end of my current year. Instead, I got a message that my Pro account would be cancelled immediately and I would get a pro-rated refund.
posted by The Deej at 7:10 AM on May 21, 2013


Yeah, I still don't like it and while apparently most of the functionality is still there, albeit hidden and harder to get to and, as jessamyn and others note, in exactly the same state it was in before the change, I really hate the new layout. Nothing has any room to breathe and I sincerely object to the thought that, oh, we have to be like pinterest, we have to be like instagram, we can't be anything unique. At least pinterest puts some information beneath each image and sets it off a little bit. This glumph (it really is the best word I can come up with, I don't know what else, undifferentiated mass maybe or salon style run amok) takes away the individuality and interest of each photo alone and that is not how I want to look at images. Flickr was a gallery site and one that allowed a fair amount of curation, which is important as hell to me and to others, and now it's not. That's a huge change without any kind of warning or consultation.

Oh and when I went back and checked this morning (OK I perhaps should have waited until the wine wore off last night) I actually have over 10,000 photos on Flickr. Moving them somewhere else is going to be a giant PITA but I'm already resignedly planning my askme question as to where and how.
posted by mygothlaundry at 7:22 AM on May 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


The sunkencity java app barfed for me with an ubuntu desktop. Does it work under Windows or OSX currently?

I'd like to grab an archive of my Flickr content (at full size, please) before figuring out what I want to do about my Flickr account.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:55 AM on May 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


I've always been reluctant to upload more than a handful of images related to any one subject for weird neurotic reasons like, "If anyone clicks my photostream and sees just those on the first page they'll think that's all I'm about."

I can relate to this. For a long time it felt like uploading more than 5 photos at a time guaranteed the average visitor would only see those newest photos. The oft quoted reason for not being able to rearrange one's photo stream (something something blog format) doesn't seem to apply anymore—being able to drag and drop photos would go a long way to improving the aesthetics of the photostream view and allowing for a bit of the thoughtful (personalized) presentation that I've always appreciated in others' photos. That, and a bit of extra padding. I've been experimenting with removing all shots that deviate from my most common aspect ratio, and I must admit that the almost perfect grid does have its appeal.

Ultimately, I see this a reminder of something I already knew, and was already true before the update, which is that no amount of painstaking organization is going to change the fact that people on all conceivable manner of device will look at your photos on different size screens, through different widgets, apps, browsers and phones, and the number of people who will actually notice attention to details such as order and thematic grouping is vanishingly small.
posted by Lorin at 8:04 AM on May 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


I am definitely hating it less this morning using Chrome than I was last night using Safari on an older machine.

But it's also pushing me to totally change my behavior and invest in building myself more of my own site somewhere else.

That's probably not a terrible outcome on the whole, but not what I wanted to spend my week thinking about.

And I still think they could have come up with a better solution.

I'm not at all against bigger images or even black backgrounds, I just wish they had given more thought to accommodating existing user behavior for accompanying text.
posted by jann at 8:54 AM on May 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


The old design gave you a few options--it wasn't much, but you could pick between 3 or 4 layouts (large, small, highlight sets/collections.) I'm hoping they'll introduce something like that here: the glumpfh, Flickr Classic, glumpfh plus set thumbnails, etc.

To me this is a trade-off. I also used to be super conscious of my last few uploaded pictures because that's what anyone would see first. With so much white space, individual pictures mattered more. With this wall-of-pix design, I'll be much more likely to upload more because, hey, they're all right there!

On the downside, I do miss the visible titles/views/faves/descriptions and that sweet sweet white space. A few basic layout options to pick from would go a long way toward making people happy, I think.
posted by muckster at 9:04 AM on May 21, 2013


There are so many photo sharing services on the internet. Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, 4ormat, Cargo Collective, imgur, Photobucket and ImageShack are the ones I can recall off the top of my head. Photographs are taken for a whole host of different reasons, so it's no surprise that so many competing services exist. To varying degrees, each photo sharing service proposes unique methods of producing and relating to photography. I haven't yet figured out the implications of the Flickr redesign, but I'm interested to see what it leads to.
posted by quosimosaur at 9:25 AM on May 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


So, "edit" shows you the old stream without sets, and adding "/?details=1" to the URL does this for any user.
posted by muckster at 9:40 AM on May 21, 2013


The section for my contacts' recent photos has always been my point of entry on flickr, but it has become apparent over the last 24 hours that's not the case for many people. (Yes, I noticed this in snarky threads discussing removal of contacts with shit photos, but still.) It's too soon to say how much is a temporary bump from the announcement, but the increased prominence of contacts' photos on the main page seems like it could actually increase engagement.
posted by Lorin at 9:43 AM on May 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


So, regarding Pro accounts..

From what I understand, they are offering 1TB free. Thats a large amount but still a limit.
For $50 a year, you can get rid of ads. For $500(?!) you can get another TB.

But, right now, I have a Pro account which allows unlimited storage and no ads. For $25 a year. Can I just stay on that plan? Because that looks pretty good to me.
posted by vacapinta at 11:04 AM on May 21, 2013 [3 favorites]


From what I've read if your Pro account is set to auto renew (check your settings, it will say something like "your account will renew on...") then you should be able to maintain the Pro status. If your account is set to expire ("your account will expire on...") then you will be bumped to the ad viewing free account on the Pro expiration date.
posted by plastic_animals at 11:23 AM on May 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


vacapinta: But, right now, I have a Pro account which allows unlimited storage and no ads. For $25 a year. Can I just stay on that plan? Because that looks pretty good to me.

According to the Mashable article per their contact with Yahoo, yes, if you're already on auto renew for pro, you can keep the ad-free, unlimited experience indefinitely for $25/yr.
posted by asciident at 11:31 AM on May 21, 2013 [3 favorites]


Can you still not upload animated GIFs to flickr? Cuz if *I* owned flickr and tumblr and wanted to get the same users to use both platforms and see ads on both.......
posted by elr at 11:45 AM on May 21, 2013


Not but just flicker, they recently bought tumblr too.
posted by onemelonicecream at 11:53 AM on May 21, 2013


I'm aghast at the community response in the Flickr help forum... I understand some members being frustrated and taking their business elsewhere, but there are people threatening physical violence against the Flickr and Yahoo staff. Yikes.

Community management question: do help forums scale to a community as large as Flickr?
posted by arielmeadow at 12:16 PM on May 21, 2013


Not but just flicker, they recently bought tumblr too.

And they've got Sloane Peterson's grandmother wrapped up in this, too.
posted by entropicamericana at 1:02 PM on May 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


Community management question: do help forums scale to a community as large as Flickr?

Yes but the scaling is confusing because instead of needing a new CM person every time you get a new X amount of users, you need like 8X new CMs every time the userbase doubles, or something similar. restless_nomad talks about this some, I can't remember the numbers but it's not a 1:1 thing.

I firmly believe that this is the sort of thing that can be handled and that there is no such thing as a community "too large" to manage. However I feel that most for-profit businesses have absolutely no incentive to do anything other than the minimum necessary to keep the community from revolting. And sometimes they don't even do that. I agree that there are people being awful. And this is also to be expected and there should be processes for handling that. If you're in a situation where some people being awful (1% of Flickrs users is how many people? Here it's maybe 10-100 people depending on the timeframe and that would take this website down in a hurry if they all got pissed off together in one place) basically keeps your CM people from interacting with people with legitimate questions and concerns, your system is broken.

I just think Yahoo/Flickr decision makers decided to sacrifice their CM folks this week instead of making better clearer change management decisions and documentation, for whatever reason. It's ugly and sad to watch. I hope their CM folks are well paid, but I bet they aren't
posted by jessamyn at 1:19 PM on May 21, 2013 [5 favorites]


Yahoo/Flickr has made it clear for some time that they don't give a good goddamn about their CM people. The help forums have always been a really terrible morass; good luck getting anything resembling a helpful response. Granted, with a community as big as Flickr a lot of that is to be expected but I never got the sense that any Yahoo/Flickr staff were even reading the forums. I have asked questions before on there and gotten precisely zero response; it's always been frustrating. I just assumed that the very existence of the forums - and, by the way, good luck finding them with the new layout; I had to actually use the search box - was only a fairly cynical sop to the community and nobody was ever really monitoring them. I don't think that's changed and the absolute silence on the part of any mods in that thread is rather deafening. It would be nice if they at least acknowledged that there is an overwhelming lack of support for their changes but I doubt they will.
posted by mygothlaundry at 1:31 PM on May 21, 2013


Oh and I just wrote a(nother) lengthy comment on that Flickr thread, hit the preview button and. . . it just disappeared. Frustrating is too calm a word for it. I also have never missed favorites as much as on that thread, favorites or upvotes or something, there are good and cogent points being made that are just getting lost in the shouting.
posted by mygothlaundry at 1:34 PM on May 21, 2013


To be fair to Flickr, they have always made it clear that the Help Forum was primarily user-to-user and made no guarantees that people would get assistance from staff.
posted by plastic_animals at 1:44 PM on May 21, 2013


It would be nice if they at least acknowledged that there is an overwhelming lack of support for their changes but I doubt they will

Most of their user base won't care.
posted by Mitheral at 1:44 PM on May 21, 2013


There is an overwhelming lack of loud support. I'm not in that help thread because I think new Flickr is great, and I've spent all day uploading stuff to my account I haven't used in three years. I know a lot of existing Flickr users are unhappy, but I think Yahoo! is planning to find out via use data how popular it is.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 1:58 PM on May 21, 2013


"To be fair to Flickr, they have always made it clear that the Help Forum was primarily user-to-user and made no guarantees that people would get assistance from staff."

Yes, even before the sale to Yahoo I don't think there was an expectation of an on-call help staff. There may have been a little bit of email support for more technical issues, but maybe that was just for billing.
posted by Room 641-A at 2:00 PM on May 21, 2013




oh, if you can upload pngs then it's much simpler than I was making it.
posted by jepler at 3:00 PM on May 21, 2013


So, are the ads appearing yet and if so where are they / what do they look like / how intrusive are they?? That's an important bit of the puzzle that I'd like to know about before jumping out of pro.
posted by peacay at 3:14 PM on May 21, 2013


Log out, clear your cookies for Flickr, visit the site anonymously. That's probably the easiest and most accurate way to have a look.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:26 PM on May 21, 2013


Yeah, I don't see any ads. Wasn't sure if that's a country thing or if flickr's going to wait until the numbers stablize. I guess there are ad blocking options if it all gets to be too much.
posted by peacay at 3:45 PM on May 21, 2013


I suppose if they didn't make the vast majority of accounts free then they'd have to set up a fee-splitting arrangement with the image owners for advertising revenue. I haven't looked but presume that part of the sign-up or changeover to a free account process confers advertising rights onto flickr.
posted by peacay at 4:13 PM on May 21, 2013


Well the bugs seem to have reared their ugly heads. Uploading is not working. Parts of the site aren't loading correctly.

I'm still not in love with the new design, but am hoping to get used to it when the bugginess gets worked out.
posted by sciencegeek at 6:26 PM on May 21, 2013


Does the paid account mean that when *you* browse the site logged in you don't see ads, or that when people view *your images* they don't see ads?

There's a single banner-style ad about two rows into "explore". That's the only ad (well, ad-hole for me :-P) I've spotted in the new layouts so far, but I haven't looked too hard.
posted by jepler at 6:36 PM on May 21, 2013


I just think Yahoo/Flickr decision makers decided to sacrifice their CM folks this week instead of making better clearer change management decisions and documentation, for whatever reason. It's ugly and sad to watch. I hope their CM folks are well paid, but I bet they aren't

Jessamyn, I think you're right. Yahoo has definitely invested big in Flickr development -- but the question remains to be see if they're going to make an equal investment in Flickr community management. I sure hope they do...
posted by arielmeadow at 8:25 PM on May 21, 2013


Date based advanced search is not working. I went looking before reporting it, and found this list of acknowledged bugs.
posted by fings at 8:31 PM on May 21, 2013


Also, I'm not a fan of the infinite scroll. With pages, I could jump forwards and backwards several pages at a time, many if I edited the page number in the URL.
posted by fings at 8:59 PM on May 21, 2013 [3 favorites]


Also, I'm not a fan of the infinite scroll.

Big-ticket web apps are like high fashion. What you like is irrelevant. It's what the designers are doing this season.
posted by GuyZero at 9:59 PM on May 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


mathowie had some ideas around flickr sets earlier this month.
posted by muckster at 11:08 PM on May 21, 2013


Also, I'm not a fan of the infinite scroll. With pages, I could jump forwards and backwards several pages at a time, many if I edited the page number in the URL.

Perhaps its just a UI in transition, or its just me, but it appears to be a finite scroll. Then the old pages interface appears at the bottom.
posted by vacapinta at 2:12 AM on May 22, 2013


They've REALLY broken the iPad version. I tried to look at it last night with my aunt - looking at images on Flickr on her iPad is one of the things she still really enjoys, 5 years into stroke induced dementia - and instead of the old layout or the new horrible layout, there was a line of thumbnails overlaid by text, all bugged out. Man I hate this.
posted by mygothlaundry at 5:21 AM on May 22, 2013


New Flickr Layout Sucks Flickr Group pool.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:56 AM on May 22, 2013


I've always thought of flickr photostreams as being kind of like photo galleries. There's a reason why photo galleries (as in actual real-world gallery spaces) don't cram in as many photos as will fit on the available wall space. You need some empty space separating the photos so that you can look at each one individually. The horrible mess that they've turned photostreams into shows that they aren't interested in people who care about photos. It's all about creating a wall of snapshots with which you can serve ads. Yahoo wants a piece of the instagram action, but flickr isn't instagram. The people who want something like instagram are already using instagram. The people who want something like flickr (well, what flickr was until a couple of days ago) seem to be inclined to leave. From what I've been reading, the most popular alternate destinations seem to be ipernity and 500px.

I do hope flickr fixes things. For me, if they give us some better options for the photostream layout (it dosen't have to be the old layout, but there should be something available that has more of a photo-gallery-like feel) and make it less of a resource hog (making the infinite scrolling optional would probably help a lot there), I'll probably stick around. But I suspect that I'm not in their target audience, and they probably won't turn it back into something I like. Sigh...
posted by klausness at 7:26 AM on May 22, 2013 [3 favorites]




The New Flickr: Goodbye Customers, Hello Ads.

[Full Disclosure: Derek Powazek has been a Flickr member since before it was called Flickr, is a friend of the founders, and the husband of Heather Champ, who was Flickr's Director of Community from 2005-2010.]

Hey, it has always been called Flickr.
posted by vacapinta at 1:13 PM on May 22, 2013


I thought it used to be sort of a photo sharing thing built into Game Neverending?
posted by jessamyn at 2:00 PM on May 22, 2013


It was - hence the .gne file extension. So, what DP probably means is that was involved in the testing of GNE...
posted by running order squabble fest at 2:16 PM on May 22, 2013


It was never a part of GNE. Flickr was a spin-off from the very beginning.

They worked on Flickr simultaneously and ultimately decided to go with Flickr and shut GNE down.
The first Flickr was a chat site where you could throw photos into your chat. Here's a screenshot.

So, Flickr was always Flickr. Us GNE folk got invited into flickr of course as some of the first seeds. So it was the GNE community that was there first.

Also, I seem to recall they wanted to call it Flicker but Flicker.com was taken so they decided to drop the 'e' and made history.

It was - hence the .gne file extension.

Supposedly they reused some code from GNE to make Flickr, thats the reason for that.

(ericost, one of the founders of flickr, commented in this thread, so he can tell me if I am misremembering)
posted by vacapinta at 2:21 PM on May 22, 2013 [1 favorite]


Flickr has updated/clarified their policy on Pro Membership renewal.
If you’d like to keep your Pro membership:
  • Anyone who was Pro at 12:00 am (midnight) GMT on May 20, 2013, may be eligible to sign up for recurring Pro in order to extend their Pro membership beyond its expiration date.
  • This applies to:
    • those whose one-time or gift Pro memberships expired after 12:00 am GMT.
    • those who are on a gifted Pro account.
    • those who have purchased one-off Pro and are set to expire in the future.

  • To keep your Pro status by signing up for a recurring Pro subscription, visit the account order page.

  • If you cancel your recurring subscription or opt for the prorated refund, you will no longer have the option to sign up for a recurring subscription.

  • If your recurring subscription expires after May 20, 2013, due to a failed payment, please contact the billing team.

posted by 1970s Antihero at 2:48 PM on May 22, 2013 [1 favorite]


Oh how nice. This seems like that stupid new search box on facebook where I spent a ton of time thinking "People aren't going to get that that blue space is a search box, they're going to have to make it white eventually, right?" Sometimes it's nice to be correct, that you understand things better (or more completely) than the people who set them up. I'm sure there were 10,000 tiny details about this new set of policies/design things that Team Flickr needed to deal with, but I'm glad they sorted this one out in a way that seems somewhat dignified and sensemaking. Thanks for the info 1970s Antihereo.
posted by jessamyn at 2:52 PM on May 22, 2013


Ah, sorry, Vacapinta - I must have misremembered tipsy conversations at the Rat & Parrot. Although that takes us back to the "was there a Flickr before it was called Flickr?" question...

Also, am I failing to see the benefit of the "doublr" account? 2TB of storage instead of 1TB for $499/year feels like a lot of money for not that much more. Am I missing something big?
posted by running order squabble fest at 3:31 PM on May 22, 2013


It's almost cute that some people are disappointed by aspects of this.
posted by item at 16:45 on May 20 [5 favorites +] [!]

Almost.
posted by item at 16:45 on May 20 [3 favorites +] [!]

Flickr Update Sparks User Backlash as Thousands Are Almost Cute
posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:31 PM on May 22, 2013


Marissa Meyer is going to take the backlash as an indication that she's doing the right thing here. It means the site still has users.
posted by GuyZero at 3:39 PM on May 22, 2013


Also, am I failing to see the benefit of the "doublr" account? 2TB of storage instead of 1TB for $499/year feels like a lot of money for not that much more. Am I missing something big?

I was thinking about that too. Here's my speculation:

They wanted to go out and say that 1TB was a hard limit. That is all you get. Then someone pointed out that eventually they'd get whiners: "What?? Why a hard limit?? I need more space! I want more! Do you hear me flickr? I'm a customer and I am willing to PAY you for more space!!!"

So they figured, ok lets say $500 a year for for more space, shall we?
posted by vacapinta at 3:43 PM on May 22, 2013 [1 favorite]


My guess is that Doublr = "for the pornographers," of which there are many hundreds of thousands on Flickr.
posted by arielmeadow at 4:00 PM on May 22, 2013


$500 for 2TB is another way of saying "Just make a second account so we can boost our user numbers for our advertisers."

I think we have a winner! That sounds just about exactly right to me (as the closer bullet point in the meetings).
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:15 PM on May 22, 2013


There are pornographers on Flickr? Like, en masse?

Huh.
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:21 PM on May 22, 2013


Aha! http://sunkencity.org/flickredit is working for me on windows (after failing on ubuntu). yay! backups at full size!
posted by rmd1023 at 4:34 PM on May 22, 2013


the increased prominence of contacts' photos on the main page seems like it could actually increase engagement.

That might be true, but Flickr's established social model has always tended towards using "contact" as a loose bond -- for instance, people with similar thematic interests, where you might want to browse their favourites but not see their photostreams -- while "friends" and "family" are strong bonds, with explicit filtering tools for semi-private photos. That was pretty innovative back in the day, before fully-fledged socnets offered networks and circles, and an advance on everyone being your friend(ster).

Having contacts as the home page view seems to break that established social graph (ugh) in disconcerting ways.
posted by holgate at 5:59 PM on May 22, 2013 [1 favorite]


"According to the Mashable article per their contact with Yahoo, yes, if you're already on auto renew for pro, you can keep the ad-free, unlimited experience indefinitely for $25/yr."

Seriously? Hell yes! (I never win the grandfather lottery...it appears my luck is changing!)
posted by iamkimiam at 11:00 AM on May 23, 2013


I'm with iamkimiam. This is awesome. I wish they'd done a better job of explaining this earlier, to avoid some of the community freaking outing.
posted by arielmeadow at 11:05 AM on May 23, 2013


So... if I currently have a Pro account, how do I _keep_ it?
posted by running order squabble fest at 12:48 PM on May 23, 2013


There should be information now on your account page that will explain how you can re-up ("extend"), whether or not you had a renewing account or a regular old expiring one. I think Flickr vastly underestimated the number of people with various special account types and so this angle, which I think was supposed to be like a sekrit special thing to old school Pro users, wound up seeming like a "fuck you" to them instead (absent all of the other design things they did)
posted by jessamyn at 12:54 PM on May 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


Looks like I'm set to autorenew - who (autore)knew? Thanks, Jessamyn!
posted by running order squabble fest at 1:24 PM on May 23, 2013


I'd suggest they invest some of the ad revenue they make into hiring some new writers:

What’s a byte, you ask? All right, we’ll bite. A byte is a teensy unit of measurement for digital information, usually containing 8 bits. (One byte generally contains enough information for a single character on a computer.) Even though one byte is itty-bitty, a trillion bytes is a whole lotta space .

Jesus Christ. It has that smarmy, false tone of someone with power and authority trying to dumb it down for the rabble. Like your father wearing a baseball cap backwards, or Homer rapping.
posted by anothermug at 9:49 AM on May 26, 2013




New interface is ugly and slow.
Earlier it was about photography.
But looks like Marissa missed those cat videos and mirror shots with an "yo yo" pose.
posted by amar at 8:43 AM on June 8, 2013


amar: I don't get your point, which is also the same as in the article flapjax at midnite posted above: the argument that the site is no longer about photography, and is now about throwaway snaps. I feel the total opposite from the new Flickr: it's showing people's pictures larger and with more detail than ever, and letting everyone store full-resolution photos.
posted by zsazsa at 7:02 PM on June 8, 2013


The thing is, if you had a pro membership, which many of us did, you were always able to store full resolution photos.
posted by mygothlaundry at 3:08 PM on June 10, 2013 [2 favorites]


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