
Flickr is removing Facebook and Google sign-in - nyodeneD
https://accounts-flickr.yahoo.com/account/update/default/
======
amirmc
This is (kind of) one of the reasons that I don't use third party services to
sign in to anything. I'd rather have an email+password option and use a
password manager (I'm aware that most people probably don't do this and Flickr
isn't offering this).

If/when users do as Flickr is asking, I wonder if Yahoo will redirect them to
use Yahoo Mail etc. In any case, I'm not a flickr user anymore but it would be
interesting to know how smooth they've made this process.

~~~
danudey
I've always made a policy of not signing into things with Facebook. FB
recently tried to encourage people to do so more often by allowing you to
prevent them access to your data, or even sign in without letting the website
know who you are at all, but that doesn't solve the problem where it's
Facebook I don't trust with my Flickr data and not vice-versa.

~~~
Jare
What Flickr data would be fed to Flickr if you did the Facebook sign in
option? Besides the fact that you use Flickr, that is.

------
selectnull
This is really annoying and not the direction I hope internet companies will
move toward.

What we need is to be able to login to facebook/yahoo/whatever with google
account and vice versa of course; we need to see the idea of OpenID come
alive.

~~~
silverbax88
I'm completely on the other side of the fence. I NEVER use Facebook or Google
(or Twitter) to log into anything. If a company only allows that for sign up,
I never sign up for those products.

~~~
pmontra
You're not alone on that side. Every service must have its own user/password.
Single sign on with fb/g+/etc is convenient but it is good especially for
those companies.

~~~
laumars
While I do agree with you in sentiment, I don't think it's always better than
passport sites.

The problem with every site handling their own logins is that you're creating
more vectors for attack. Most people reuse passwords (bad practice I know but
it is what most non-technical people do) and not all sites are properly
secured - in fact some don't even encrypt passwords! So at least passport
sites outsource the data protection issues to larger businesses that you'd
expect (no; _demand_ ) to have experience to handle that data securely.

~~~
borplk
Oh god every time I see this argument it makes my blood boil.

It's 2014. There's no excuse for re-using the same damn password over and over
again.

And it doesn't make sense to make the situation worse for everyone else
because they don't care about their online security.

Get a yourself a damn password manager and use a unique password for each
service then we can kiss all these password leak problems goodbye.

Time after time we see people making a big drama because company X had all
their 50 million password leaked. Oh was it hashed? Oh was it salted?

If you use a unique password for each service, the service provider can store
your password in plaintext and you will be safe.

That's what I do and I couldn't care less if all the passwords in the world
are leaked in plaintext.

~~~
laumars
You're right in principle but couldn't be more wrong in practice. I certainly
don't have time to educate all 7 billion people in the world about password
managers and you're clearly doing very little in that area either (aside
kicking off condescending rants at your peers....) so deliberately
implementing a scheme that's shit for 99% of the worlds internet users just so
it's better for last 1% who are technically minded is just elitist and wrong.

Which ever solution is implemented _needs_ to work for all groups of internet
users - not just yourself ;)

------
baby
I predict this will be a trend soon, also people are going to ditch services
like disqus. Big websites want to have total control over their client account
and comments. This is not really clever to always trust third parties,
especially with comments which are a huge part of the SEO.

~~~
stevekemp
It's interesting that the Huffington post went the other way, just this week.
Dropping their in-house commenting system in favour of facebook-comments:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/otto-toth/were-moving-the-
conv...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/otto-toth/were-moving-the-
conversation_b_5423675.html)

~~~
insky
In some way it makes sense, as you ditch the whole dynamic part of your page
generation, allowing you to effectively use a static dump for your website.
You can then update that periodically. Facebook is left to pick up all the
hosting hassles and expense. Also you tap into the Facebook ecosystem. Having
said that I doubt I'd even leave a Facebook comment on another website, I
haven't yet.

~~~
stevekemp
There are middle grounds though - if you want to have a mostly-static site,
and still allow dynamic comments.

There are some self-hosted systems out there, including my trivial e-comments
code: [https://github.com/skx/e-comments/](https://github.com/skx/e-comments/)

~~~
insky
Perhaps that is what they already had. If they were to use your app, they'd
still have to manage and carry the costs associated. That probably isn't their
main motivation.

I remember a few years ago whenever you clicked on a Guardian news link in
Facebook it would try and get you to sign up to their Facebook app/plugin,
that would then publish on your timeline what you'd been reading, let alone
commenting on. I thought that was a bit ghastly.

I'm assuming that when you make a comment through Facebook on the Huff post,
it displays on your timeline or some such, providing additional reach for the
story.

------
mark_l_watson
I think that is a good move on Yahoo's part.

They may lose some Flickr users but this should strengthen Yahoo's walled
garden.

I still like Flickr, where I post my very best pictures. I use Google+ and
Dropbox to automatically archive every picture and video I take with my
smartphone, but use Flickr to actually look at my new and old photos.

------
mmmooo
That's a pretty bold move, given over 100k people a day/800k a month use the
facebook auth alone[1]. and though looks like its on a bit of a decline. Maybe
losing 100k users a day doesn't matter much to yahoo.

[1][https://factets.com/application/flickr-
AQkvRaEJ](https://factets.com/application/flickr-AQkvRaEJ)

~~~
onion2k
"Number of users per day" is a vanity metric. It doesn't matter to a business
like Yahoo. The thing that actually matters is whether or not those particular
users make money for Yahoo. If they're run the numbers and discovered that
Facebook users don't turn in to paying subscribers or click on adverts (and
they can't find a way to do that) yet cost them $0.25 per day in bandwidth
then turning off Facebook login will _increase_ their profits by £200k/month
due to the saving.

~~~
Ntrails
I assume that they are also handing over data to Facebook with every auth that
helps the competition with targeted advertising revenue?

~~~
mrobert
That would be a correct assumption.

------
sdegutis
We're obviously not all in agreement about how identity should work online
(let alone how it works offline), which is kind of a big problem considering
identity is something every single one of us automatically has from birth. We
may never agree on it, but we may at least mostly agree on it one day
(outliers never go away).

In the meantime, I'm okay with some level of fluctuation in the practice of
online identities, since it indicates some level of (at least attempted)
innovation, and trial-and-error at the internet level is never really that bad
of a thing.

So yeah, this would probably be annoying for a while. But let's see how it
pans out.

------
jscheel
I've had my flickr account since before they were acquired by yahoo. That,
combined with yahoo's crappy user sign-in experience, means that my flickr
account, yahoo account, and some other junk account I accidentally created
while trying to log in once 5 years ago, are now all conflated. To this day
it's still not completely worked out.

~~~
pjc50
Same here. I also went through the del.icio.us merger and demerger, thankfully
with my data intact.

------
nek4life
If they are going to remove anything it should be the purple bar at the top of
the screen. The layers of navigation remind me of someone with all the
toolbars installed on their browser. I've used Flickr for years, but unless
they step up the design of the site I'll be searching elsewhere to showcase my
photography.

------
djtidau
I used to be a huge proponent to single click sign in, in theory it's great.
The problem I found with my own startup was that by allowing Twitter, Facebook
or Google+ sign in, it was a point of confusion for the user. The amount of
duplicate, even triple accounts was far higher that what I would have
expected.

After reviewing the pros and cons, I switched to a simple email/password
combination which also solved another problem of having to ask the user for
their email address.

There really is a need for a true single sign in provider, in which you link
your identity accounts to one 'super' account and then sign in with that,
allowing whatever information is available from each as you wish, or simply a
blank profile with only your identifier to link back to you.

~~~
mikelward
Doesn't every sign on method provide the user's email address?

As far as I understand it, you're supposed to create a single account in your
database using the email address as the identifier, and link all the sign on
methods to the same account.

------
jevgeni
Again?!

I really hope they don't f* up it again, like the time when Yang-era Yahoo!
bought Flickr, forced you to get an Yahoo-ID and then deleted it after 6
months of inactivity, effectively locking you out of your own photos. That was
great.

------
MattBearman
Any good reason for this, or is it just to push their Yahoo accounts on
everyone?

------
lnanek2
I wish they would keep it, since I really don't want another account to log
into just to use the site, but I admit they handle it a lot better than Hacker
News did with this transition page. With Hacker News the Google login and
whatnot just disappeared one day and I lost my account and had to start over.

------
kunstmord
The account creation page (for those who like me used Flickr without a Yahoo
account) is a mess – for any account name I tried entering, it said that an
account with the same name already exists. Finally managed to create my Yahoo
account somewhere else in the settings.

~~~
andyhmltn
I've had that problem as well. I'm not sure if it's a bug or it is genuinely
taken

~~~
kunstmord
I just went to my settings, changed the password somewhere in them, signed
out, signed in using my gmail address and the new password, and it worked.

But yeah, flickr is buggy. The Android app on my tablet never seemed to load
anything (except on rare occasions), and I uploaded a large amount of photos a
couple of times, edited the names and tags, and some of the names/tags were
lost. But I enjoy some of the groups there, got some good advice on buying a
medium format SLR.

------
shime
hey, it looks like we don't have any good competitors now! let's just push
Yahoo accounts on everyone, because yeah.

------
Justsignedup
THANK GOD! I tried signing up with my G+ account once. Holy shit, 30 minutes
later a developer cannot figure this out.

------
lewisflude
What is a good Flickr alternative?

~~~
pjc50
Depends what you want to use it for ...

Tumblr? Dropbox (I've used this for sharing a large album to family and it
worked well)? Self-hosted (maybe Owncloud, could do with more suggestions)?
Picasa?

Presumably there'll be a service that lets you host photos out of S3
somewhere.

------
nvartolomei
Flickr did this already, now the story is repeating

------
LeicaLatte
Go yahoo!

------
hughstephens
"OH NO HOW DO I SIGN INTO FLICKR NOW" said the 0.00001% of people who still
use Flickr.

~~~
RobinL
Flickr does have one huge selling point, which is the 1tb account size for
free accounts. Combined with a python upload bot, you can backup all your
photos and videos for free to private albums.

The newest version of the UX is also very nice, IMO. I often use it to show
friends and family photos over and above just using Windows because the albums
look so nice on a big screen.

------
jbverschoor
Time to ditch flickr.

~~~
Argorak
Sure, but where to? I had worse experiences with many other such services, or
they have a very narrow focus.

~~~
euank
Well, if you don't mind Google, Google+ lets you handle images pretty well. I
would have said picassa before, but that was merged into G+ (and some features
were lost I think).

~~~
Argorak
G+ is not focused on pictures. Picasa only allows 1GB (used to be 200MB). I
take multiple Gigabytes of pictures on all photo trips.

Flickr is the perfect match for amateur photographers without ambition ;).

~~~
reitanqild
Excuse me?

Google+ share the quota with gmail. Gmail currently offers 7 or more free GB.
Additional GBs are cheap (although they have new price structure now.)

Also pictures 2048px (*) or smaller doesn't count towards the quota (and you
can easily, in g+ settings on phone, choose to only upload photos resized to
that size if you don't want to pay for extra storage.)

~~~
renuxa
> Excuse me?

Unrelated to your original comment, but as a British person when I see the use
of "Excuse me?" it seems very coarse and sometimes can appear rude.

It is interesting, because my wife (who isn't British and English is her
second language) uses this often (as do her friends) and sometimes it appears
out of place and is misread as rude (which she is not usually trying to be).

I'm not complaining or dissing you at all, I find these small linguistic
nuances very interesting :)

~~~
test1235
As a brit, I agree with that sentiment. It comes across as passive-aggressive
way to tell someone you think what they just said is utter nonsense.

You heard them just fine, but you don't like what they said, so you exagerrate
your reaction and pretend they're an idiot.

Of course, it depends on the tone of your voice as well, so everything comes
across in the worst possible way when all you can see is the words :)

~~~
pjc50
Funny how this works. Normally on the internet people disagree with one
another point-blank with no niceties, so a "polite" "excuse me?" stands out.

(Brit here as well)

