Good God, Yahoo, WHAT have you done? What photosharing website can I use now?

In My Humble Opinion
1

So it appears that somebody important at Yahoo got to the office one fine recent morning, called a conference, and made the following announcement:

“What we need to do now is to make Flickr absolutely suck. I need ideas. Give me ideas on how we can make Flickr aggravate and disappoint our users. Impatient sighs and eye-rolls aren’t going to be enough. ‘Adequate’ isn’t going to cut it here. I want to see tears of frustration and hear howls of rage, so much they’ll forget about that free terabyte of space we gave each of them last year.”

The VP of website development piped up. “Suppose we take away the ability to usefully share pictures on third-party websites, like the Straight Dope Message Board? Instead being able to click on the picture link and see the image in their browsers immediately, our stupid users–I mean, our valued customers–will have to download the picture and use a picture viewer. It’ll completely wreck the flow of reading any posts from anyone who wants to share a picture.”

“Make it so”, said Marissa, beaming at the VP as if to say, this is what comes of my inspired leadership. Damn it, I’m good.

Quoth the Director of Mobile App Products, “I got it! Up to now, anyone using a Flickr link in mobile forum apps, like Tapatalk, can simply tap on the link and see the picture immediately. Suppose we make them go through the download/save dialog just like we’re going to do for third party websites? I do know, some browser apps will let the user avoid this hassle, but we’ll get the extra screen taps out to them too, eventually. I promise you that.”

And Marissa said, “Brilliant! Get on this right away, please.”

Apparently this is what comes from the elimination of telecommuting.

I know, this doesn’t have the same negative impact on all browsers, but it’s pretty far reaching. For instance, on my Android device, I can make Flickr links default to use Firefox instead of Opera, and I can configure Firefox to show the picture immediately, without needing any further prompting from me. Fantastic, except Firefox consumes about 100MB of internal memory, far ahead of the rest. And now I have twice as many reasons to keep two browser apps on my device.

On my PC, Photobucket links still seem to work as they always have done, so I’m pretty sure this is not a case of Mozilla having decided to throw away the ball on this one. I suppose I could go back to Photobucket, but it’s a shame. Flickr was such a great service, and now it’s gone bad.

What on earth were they thinking?

Are there any decent photo sharing apps I can use instead?
(And to think, just today I was shocked and astounded to learn that Boar’s Head sells yellow cheese process cheesy product slices. Too late, of course, because I’d already brought the vile product home and opened the package. It was mixed in with all the real cheese, near the front of the store. The depths of decadence and depravity to which the culture sinks continues to horrify us.)

2

Posting to subscribe. I have persevered with Flickr over the years and only just yesterday I wanted to take a copy of a photo taken on holiday and got stuck in the Flickr/Yahoo login loop and eventually gave up.

3

So true.

(And to make it worse for me, Indonesia (where I live) has just blocked imgur. That doesn’t matter for the SD but it was my go-to tool for posting pics on the message board I post on that allows photos, avatars, and all those new-fangled thingies.)

4

Voting for imgur over here! Easy peasy. It was made to host images people posted to reddit, so it was made pretty barebones and has stayed so since. Not the most feature-filled, but the quickest and easiest to use, in my opinion. Minimal ads.

5

I’ve stayed clear of Yahoo ever since my Yahoo mailbox would overflow its 3 MB (or 1.5 MB) limit with a day’s worth of spam and even though Yahoo knew this mail was Spam and had marked it as deleteable, they discarded incoming real messages, however tiny, without even sending an “Undeliverable” message to the sender! I’m sure the goal was to “encourage” free users to upgrade, but even the paid mailbox was tiny enough to have a similar problem. There were other Yahoo mail bugs which made it almost useless. Whether this was incompetence or deliberate nastiness, I’m surprised the company still exists.

As far as hosts for images, etc., I’m surprised more people don’t use paid hosting services with no restrictions. At, say $6 per month, ten Dopers could get together for their own domain at 60 cents per month each.

6

Picasa still works for me.

I hate Google+ so I am careful to not use it.

I’m too old to care much about posting pictures to face book but the wife uploads pictures she takes with her smart phone directly to FB

The biggest hassle for me is getting a clean ULR for web pics in general. They seem to not like me posting their stuff… Hummmmmmmmmmm

IMO, the average picture on FB sucks rocks just because they are smart phone pics and not properly edited, taken, have any composition, etc… Gah !!!

7

I use Google photos, I don’t know why some people whinge about it. I like the feature that puts a map up to show where the picture was taken. It’s easy to link photos to web sites, and you can do some basic editing.

8

it used to be a lot more seamless and organizable on your flickr page as well
the whole thing sucks now

9

I’ve been using Photobucket for years and it works well. I use it for photos on blogs.

10

Ha! So it isn’t just me!

I completely forgot I had a Flickr account until I got an email: “JoeBlow is following you! Follow them too? If you don’t know JoeBlow, he is probably a fan of your photostream”

I get all curious: what the heck did I use Flickr for? What’s up there?

I go to log on and the logon screen is a YAHOO screen. :confused: “Did Yahoo buy out Flickr or something?”, I ask. “Yeah”, she says from downstairs, “I think they did, sure enough”. OK. I do have a Yahoo logon credential that appears to be associated with this Flickr acct—at least it’s the one whose acct name is filled in already when I clicked the Log On button on Flickr. I fill in my password and click the continue button…

“We’re sorry but there’s a problem. Your flickr_acctname ID uses the same email address that is already associated with the Flickr_AcctName ID on Flickr.”

I stare at that for quite some timel, willing it to mean something that isn’t nonsensical, before I finally realize my acct is showing all in lowercase in the first mention and with capitalization in the second mention. “I don’t bloody HAVE two different accounts, one with caps and one all lowercase, WTF?!” I switch the logon attempt from flickr_acctname to Flickr_AcctName. Same issue. OK, so I need to change the associated email so they aren’t both pointed to the same email? Pain in the ass. I don’t believe two different accounts exist, but I try to log on to make that change and of course I get the same message no matter what.

So I click the link to change my password instead. It won’t let me “change” my password to what it already was, so I change it to “IdiotsAtYahoo2014”. Attempt to log in to either account and again, in both cases, get the message about the email being the same on both accounts.

Call tech support. :: onhold music :: ==> give up eventually
Finally occurs to me to try to follow the link I would follow if I were someone else and seeking to look at (either alleged version of) my Flickr albums. There’s nothing there!

11

No, it’s me, too.

Boy did Yahoo screw up a good thing. I understand the need to add ads. But, the ads have made it very painful to just browse the Explored pictures.

I got an email last month from Yahoo saying they couldn’t process my credit card for automatic renewel. If they had only asked before attempting it, I could have updated the payment information with the new card. Attempting to charge for renewel before asking is a shady business practice, in my opinion.

12

With the latest incarnation of Flickr, it’s even more difficult to pull the static image URL to link to the photo only and not the photostream. I can be done though. If you go to the sharing icon you will get a long link that is to the stream. You have to extract the isolated URL from that string each time. It makes trying to display images on other hosting services very difficult.

Places like google or picassa don’t actually host images that well. On display they are not as nice as Flickr. 500px is okay, and there are others, but Flickr started mostly for enthusiasts. That and I have over 5K pictures uploaded there, it would be very annoying to switch. That’s why I’ve endured all the crap that Flickr has put out there for the last year or so.

It really does look like shit now. I absolutely hate the default view of the infinite photo stream.

13

I disagree. Picasa is real easy to hot link from, gives no ads to me or the place I am posting the picture.

The default size max is 800 pixels on the long side but is you just have to link giant pictures, you can do it with one more step.

I forget what their max KB per picture is but it is way bigger than I would ever post anywhere.

If you just have to have the RAW picture I start with & I am willing to let you have it, I will send it you in an email. I don’t make money from my pictures and a pro making money would not be selling with straight downloads from Flicker, Photoshop or the like. IMO