

Flickr redesigns web and mobile apps to create a powerhouse in photo storage - rchandra101
http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8562387/flickr-camera-roll-uploadr-mobile-redesign

======
aaronbrethorst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] [http://www.shutterphoto.net/article/the-flickr-debacle-
what-...](http://www.shutterphoto.net/article/the-flickr-debacle-what-we-can-
learn-from-flickrs-mistakes/)

~~~
aaronbrethorst

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

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

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

Yep, totally agree.

~~~
Litost
That's a very good point about RAWs, in my haste to dismiss it out of hand, i
hadn't realised it doesn't backup RAW. But then just another sign of where
it's target demographic is.

------
whysonot
Does this read like an advertisement to anybody else?

~~~
kayman
I find myself wary of these types of articles.

As people become desensitized to clicking on ads, these articles seem to be
the new ads.

~~~
tombrossman
Perfect example right here, which is an Ars Technica "article" from their new
UK site, brought to you by a certain Microsoft product which just so happens
to be worked in to the story. [http://arstechnica.co.uk/features/2015/05/ken-
fishers-travel...](http://arstechnica.co.uk/features/2015/05/ken-fishers-
travelogue-i-came-i-saw-i-launched-ars-technica-uk/)

~~~
dublinben
ArsTechnica has always been a leader in sponsored articles. You can pretty
much tell what any new product article will say, based on the company behind
it. Most of their authors have a pervasive pro-Apple bias, with the notable
exception of their resident Microsoft fanboy, Peter Bright.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/slr/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/slr/)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
film42
The "Camera Roll" beta removes the "scarlet letter" of a purple bar, but I
don't have the full update yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
nek4life
I mostly hope they are fixing the terrible performance issues. Seems like I'm
always waiting for photos to load properly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 years on flickr in September.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read:

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

[http://www.fastcolabs.com/3026418/open-company/this-story-
ab...](http://www.fastcolabs.com/3026418/open-company/this-story-about-slacks-
founder-says-everything-you-need-to-know-about-him)

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

[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596102357.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596102357.do)

Slack: Latest Company by founders:

[http://www.fastcolabs.com/3026418/open-company/this-story-
ab...](http://www.fastcolabs.com/3026418/open-company/this-story-about-slacks-
founder-says-everything-you-need-to-know-about-him)

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

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

But there are some problems:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
javabank
Too little too late.

~~~
MichaelApproved
Can you (or anyone else who feels the same way) elaborate on that?

~~~
javabank
Instagram?

~~~
fletchowns
I feel like it's quite a stretch to compare Instagram to Flickr, they have
totally different purposes.

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

