
Flickr Is Getting a Major Makeover - Slimy
http://www.betabeat.com/2012/02/21/flickr-is-getting-a-major-makeover/
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ComputerGuru
Everyone here is completely missing the most important point of this makeover:
it's not the design, but the fact that this means Flickr isn't being killed
off.

With the sorry state that Yahoo!'s been in recently, the killing off of
several interesting projects and websites, etc. Flickr dying was the number
one concern for its users.

Stagnation is the death of any website. _Any_ attention it receives from
corporate, any money sent its way, any sign of time and effort being put into
keeping it alive means they're not ready to chalk it off just yet - which
means you don't have to worry just yet about migrating your thousands of
photos (and far more importantly, the associated metadata) from Flickr to one
of the alternatives.

This makeover is an infusion of life, and is first and foremost an attempt at
extending the life of what could have been a dying website (from a corporate
point of view). For this reason, and this reason alone, I both welcome this
news and hope it accomplishes at least something.

~~~
thwarted
Then there are yahoo properties that have been in death throes for years.
There's this message on upcoming.yahoo.com:

    
    
        Upcoming gets a new look!
        December, 15, 2010
        Check out our new Upcoming Beta
    

And a link to <http://upcoming.yahoo.com/news/archives/2010/12/15/upcoming/>

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ChrisNorstrom
Yes Finally!

I can't wait for this. I'm a heavy heavy flickr user. 100+ hours just these
last 2 weeks, every day hours and hours. (I use flickr to look for creative
commons photos for my websites).

1) Flickr currently wins the award for the worst search results. I've spend
dozens of hours looking for specific photos with flickr returning the most
irrelevant results you could ever imagine. Sometimes the results have
absolutely nothing to do with what you searched for. It was funny for a while
when page after page of Asian Children turned up when I was searching for
nature photos. But after

2) Flickr's flow is broken. There's something very unnatural about the way
search results, pages, streams, and download pages are set up. Common, it's a
photo gallery with comments, I'm not sure why they had to complicate it.

3) I should not have to right click on an image to go to it's download page.

4) Flickr has a serious quality problem and is a terrible place for
Photographers. Why? Becuase Flickr is a place for shitty family photos. People
upload them by the room full. And I do NOT want random people's portraits in
my search results. Any good photography that has potential to be licensed or
commented on is lost in the jungle of family vacation photos. Yes I know
flickr is a photo hosting site, but what people are really trying to use it
for are to showcase and host their photography, which is actually useful. So
these 2 groups, average consumers and pro photographers are both using Flickr
in two different ways and that really hurts the site.

So I'm very excited at what the redesign is going to look like. I just hope
they don't turn it into some laggy ajax nonsence where effects pop up every
time you hover over a photo or all the photos are dynamically grouped using
javascript after they're loaded (which again, makes scrolling laggy).

------
asolove
I am certain Markus Spiering is a talented designer, and having not seen the
final product or the research involved, I have no idea whether the new
interface will better serve their customers. So I have no desire to attack
this makeover as a poor design decision.

But it is sad to see the famous Flickr aesthetic so substantially changed.
Flickr was one of the first web apps, but it made itself easy to use and
approachable by looking deceptively flat like a webpage. It communicated not
with gradients and flashy buttons, but with tightly-written copy and a very
precise visual hierarchy emphasizing white space.

It was also, recently, pretty fast. The previous rewrite in YUI3 emphasized
speed and I strongly hope they didn't revert back to the previous performance
problems.

As someone who designs and builds webapps, I find this a sad day. I aspire to
build something as simple, flat, and creatively-written as the Flickr
interface.

~~~
hackermom
_I aspire to build something as simple, flat, and creatively-written as the
Flickr interface._

<http://500px.com/>

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bane
Flickr is one of the very _very_ few services on the Internet I've ever taken
my wallet out to pay for when asked (there are simply too many free
alternatives)...and I've heard the same from other people.

All the recent rumblings at Yahoo have made me very nervous and it was obvious
that the Flickr site was starting to get a little old looking. Some of the
backend photo management stuff, while brilliant for 3 or 4 years ago, has been
superseded by better, newer approaches -- and certain things were never good
enough (geotagging photos in some areas was really hurt by the aging map
interface and low quality imagery). And the photo views were getting far too
small on today's modern displays.

So I welcome this change, even if I feel nitpicky about some of the
particulars. It means that Yahoo is stating their intentions to keep Flickr
going -- I suspect this is in no small part to the paying customers.

Now I only hope two things:

1) This isn't a one off, that they continue to work the design so that it
doesn't die right out the gate, and long standing problems don't get left
around.

2) They update the flickr uploading app. The ancient app is positively
ancient, and a buggy mess, but it's still better than the web interface.
There's not a whole lot that needs fixing, but it does need to get fixed.

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jmathai
A facelift, basically. As an ex-Yahoo! the problems which plagued Flickr run
deep. They need to perform open heart surgery on that sucker, not put some
make up on it.

Disclaimer: I work on The OpenPhoto Project :)

~~~
Domenic_S
Does openphoto have albums yet? Last I looked was maybe 2 months ago, but
their lack made OP a non-starter for me.

~~~
jmathai
We'll have albums in the 1.4 or 1.4.1 release (3-5 weeks).

We had a lot of going back and forth on how tags and albums should co-exist.
Glad to say we've resolve all that now just have to add the feature in.

Next major milestones are mobile apps for iOS and Android in the 1.4 release.

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kmfrk
I don't envy the person who has to do a make-over for flickr. It works pretty
well as it is (from a design perspective), and it feels as if it's hardened
into concrete over the years of passivity, which makes it harder to argue that
flickr needs to evolve its design like regular websites.

But Yahoo! can blame it all on themselves. How about they make sign-in and
registration less of a pain in the ass for people with no interest in Yahoo!
accounts.

~~~
replax
Well, you don't need a Yahoo! account for flickr. Hell, you can sign in using
your google or facebook account if you prefer. Only way to make it even easier
would be to also support open id i suppose...

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mortenjorck
I want this to be a great new start for Flickr, but I'm worried it won't be.
What Flickr is really missing in 2012 are more advanced community features:
Its user base is brimming with talented photographers, but the dusty old pool
system doesn't encourage the kind of individual curatorial approach that has
propelled the likes of Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram to their present
heights.

Pools are big buckets that anyone can throw a photo into. They can be
moderated, but rarely are, and so tend to be a broad cross-section of a theme
rather than a gallery of excellence. I rarely use them; most of my viewing on
Flickr is browsing the photostreams of contacts I've added because I like
their tastes.

Flickr could actually go a long way toward fixing this with a fairly simple
addition: Give me a feed of favorites by my contacts. Flickr has individual
curation; it's just hidden in dark corners of the UI.

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jlarocco
This makes me kind of nervous.

Honestly, I couldn't care less about the social aspects of Flickr or the
quality of the search, or most of the other things people here are complaining
about.

I don't use Flickr for random people to see/find my pics. I use it so that I
can organize and find my pics, so I can share them with my friends and people
I know, and every once in a while post links to them in some of the forums I
frequent. It's easier to use Flickr than it is to host it myself. All of my
pictures are creative commons licensed and open to the public, but my primary
concern is _my_ ability to organize them and view them.

The current interface isn't the best, but it's "good enough," and I've been
satisfied with it. It's nice to know it's not being killed off, but I'm
worried they'll screw it up.

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po
Please, please, please make the mobile version use the full screen width for
photos. I can't believe that it's been like this for so long.

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prawn
Goes from looking very "Flickr" to indistinguishable from so many small-time
competitors or even Google Images.

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dualboot
A major makeover? Great!

Not addressing the terrible Cut/Paste "From Yahoo!" logo?

Big mistake.

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wyclif
Too little, too late. People have moved on, it seems, judging from my
unscientific poll.

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georgieporgie
Wow, that guy is completely self-absorbed.

 _Yahoo has been paying attention to Flickr all along, Mr. Spiering insisted,
and has made a lot of improvements since it bought the site in 2005._

As a paying Flickr customer for several years, I can say that no, Yahoo has
not been "paying attention" to Flickr. At least, not in a way that is
meaningful to any one other than the product manager.

 _He pointed out that the photo page was redesigned as recently as the summer
of 2010 ... started integrating Flickr across its products ... Yahoo weather
app ... integrated into Yahoo Mail soon..._

Wow. _None_ of that means anything to me at all. Flickr hasn't improved in any
meaningful way, in terms of my end-user needs, in as long as I've been using
it. A few painfully obvious examples are: 1) give me multiple photostreams.
Seriously, my eBay photos go into the same stream as my carefully selected
landscape photos? 2) Give me an uploader that doesn't consume massive
resources and error-out regularly.

~~~
spullara
Since using Flickr for hosting your eBay photos is likely against a strict
reading of the terms of service, I'm not surprised they aren't considering it
-- especially if you are hot linking to them.

~~~
georgieporgie
Pretty sad, if that's the case. It sure as heck isn't worth $25/year to host
my family snapshots.

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hackermom
This might just be too little, too late. Flickr has been in bad need of a
makeover for 5-6 years now. Sites like f.e. 500px.com - with its unfailing
focus on photographers and their photography - ran past Flickr long ago.

