Flickr was years and years ago the leading site for photography/community stuff but it stagnated pretty hard under yahoo’s leadership. Other sites popped up to do something similar, but nothing quite became the same thing - facebook is probably where 80% of pictures get posted, but it’s all snapshots. Instagram is aids on a stock. 500px is excellent but not as strong on community features and not as big.
Anyway, I was shocked that Flickr finally updated their photostream page from a layout that looks like it was designed for a 1024x768 17" monitor to something that actually looks modern and uses the screen real estate on a big, widescreen monitor. Actually it looks fantastic. You can check out mine if you want to see what I mean.
Apparently some other changes like giving free users a terabyte of space. They also seem to have come up with a rather bizarre set of paid memberships (FAQ). It used to be that $25/year got you a lot of features that free accounts didn’t get (and free accounts now have some of those features), but now it costs $50 a year to get an ad-free version, and $500 a year to get 2 terrabytes of space. I have no idea who they’re going to sell accounts to - who would need more than 1TB? Just create 2 accounts. People aren’t going to pay $50 when they could just adblock.
So… layout changes, fantastic. Account changes… inexplicable. Going to dig around more and see what else they’re toying with.
One big bug: they haven’t updated all the Help FAQs to match the new Flickr.
One thing that may not be a bug, but which I hate: it’s now pretty difficult to get to collections, and I’ve organised all my sets carefully into collections. They still exist – here’s a link to my collections – but they no longer display next to your photostream, and previously when you viewed a set there was a link to the collection(s) that the set belonged to.
My wife has been using flickr for years as the place to store all of our photos. Everytime they make a change, I fear the end is near.
Does anyone know of a good method for getting the original files from Flickr and copying them to another storage location? Short of selecting each individually and choosing “download original”?
…this looks like the “show your flickr” thread, so here’s mine! (There is a conference in the middle of my photostream: not very exciting stuff but my client wanted the images on flickr so I posted it there.)
I like the change: but as a Pro-member it doesn’t do a lot for me and will probably stop subscribing. I hardly use Flickr but this might prompt me to post there just a bit more, which does seem counter-intuitive!
Heh – speaking of the 21st century, apparently it doesn’t like IE 7 anymore either. Before you ask – I have to keep that version for compatibility with our reporting system at work. Upgrade soon!
I noticed the new layout yesterday - I hate it. I’ve spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to get it back to the old way, but so far have not been successful.
I’ll probably get used to it in time, but my initial impressions are not favorable.
Eh, it’s not working too well for me. I’m struggling along with very slow internet and it loads even slower than before. I’m going to be moving soon but not sure how soon and don’t want to change internet service until I’m living somewhere else.
Oddly I was just complaining a couple of days agoabout how Yahoo has done nothing with Flickr since the acquisition.
Agree that the paid accounts are weird. I think that they are likely not meant to be sold except to professionals and that ad-supported accounts are probably bigger revenue generators for Yahoo. I am to understand that my current Flickr pro account will be grandfathered in at its current price, so I’m relatively happy there.
I don’t mind the new layout, although I’m sure there’s already a YouTube video of Hitler screaming about it. One annoyance is that when I click “change cover photo” it only gives me an option of changing it to one of the last couple of dozen photos I’ve taken, when I’d rather use one of my photos from farther back.
I hate the new layout. It loads way slower, it doesn’t default to show you the description of each photo, it makes it harder, the mouseover for photo options to look at exif info doesn’t work, clicking on the image takes it to a pseudo lightbox where I have to scroll to see info, they stopped displaying limited exif by default, and collections are no where to be seen.
Before I had no problem paying for Flickr, shit, I just renewed a couple weeks ago. I have near 5k photos uploaded on Flickr so I’m somewhat invested. I’m not liking it.
I am hopeful that the 1 terabyte means they mean business. I haven’t added any new pictures to my account for years since it was such a PITA but I just opened it up and looked and by golly all my photos there look great at the higher resolution.
I was using it for my blog but as I said, PITA, and I’ve been using Photobucket ever since, which has its own challenges.
If I abandon Flickr, I’m not sure what other site I should be using. I currently have a zenfolio site for my professional work, and I used Flickr for all my personal blog stuff. 500px would be my next choice, but I haven’t looked around in a while. Any other competitors? Places like photobucket that resize or compress images in a weird way are out for me.
I love the new look, myself. Much more modern and the pics look great.
For some reason, the profiles aren’t loading properly for me at the moment (though the front page and individual pictures work fine), but here is my photostream.