What are Flickr up to?

[AndyMcD]

I noticed changes on Flickr last night. The whole layout of my pages has suddenly changed and a message appeared telling me that everyone now gets a free terabyte of space.

However, this morning I got an email saying "As a Pro Member, your subscription remains the same. You'll enjoy unlimited space for your photos and videos, detailed stats and an ad-free experience. However, you can switch to a Free account before August 20, 2013."

Makes me wonder if they would prefer that I was a free member and if they have some other plans for the site.

Discuss....:biggrin:

 

[Darrell C]

I HATE changes, I can't find how to share pics??????:Curved::Angry::Angry::Angry:


Ok I found it now, dang took lots of time to figger it out, looking through blogs etc, lots of unhappy people.

 

[cujo]

It took me some time too to figure it out. I preferred the old layout though.

For those people who are still confused on how to share images now, you have to click on this icon.

Subscribe to see EXIF info for this image (if available)

sharing by Cujo1976, on Flickr

I think what Flickr are hoping for is that we give up our Pro accounts, find the ads too much of a hassle and then take out a more expensive Ad Free account.

I wonder how long it will be before Flickr says you can't renew your Pro subscription and have to go for a more expensive Ad Free account or put up with the ads.

 

[Anthony747]

Free terabyte of space, that's a lot of free space!

 

[Lurker]

For a long time, Flickr was practically the only place you could go to for free image hosting. That's how they got so big in the first place. And they did the right thing to position themselves not as a simple image hosting site, but more as a social networking site for photographers. "The MySpace of photography," so to say.

Then came the pure image hosting galleries. PBase, Smugmug, Zenfolio... and Flickr did nothing. It even discouraged posting your images in forums by not providing BB links. When asked for it, the response was "just build it from the Jpeg, it's not that hard" (which meant that many would not include the mandatory link back to their Flickr page) or "ask your forum host to include HTML" (completely neglecting the reason why forums use BB code in the first place). They did cave in, eventually... about a year or two ago. After the horse left the barn.

Flickr lost members because the galleries weren't pretty. Well, said Flickr, we're not a gallery site. We're more a social site.

And then came facebook. Little by litte, Facebook's image abilities increased. From ugly little pictures to arbritary size images in albums. And Flickr did nothing. So, those who just wanted to share pictures with others left Flickr.

What's left is people who've accepted the way Flickr is, and probably like it that way. And then Flickr decided to radically overhaul their site, alienating those last loyal users.


I don't blame MM for this move, change was necessary. But it should have been done little by little. That is what previous management neglected to do. Flickr used to be the flagship that pulled people into the yahoo network. It stopped doing that a long time ago and at least that was admitted when you no longer needed a Yahoo account to open a Flickr account (as it started to shy people away). The sad truth for Yahoo is that they neglected Flickr for too long. It's a bold move what they're trying now, but I'm not sure it's the right one. The customers they're after have already left and won't come back, and they're ******* off the ones that stayed.

 

[AndyMcD]

I didn't spot all of the different options that they have added in. Now it is beginning to make more sense and I can see that they do want me off my Pro account.

I renewed my pro account about a month ago - so if I go Free, I will be losing the best part of a year's pro subscription. However, it looks like I will revert to Free in about a year's time - unless I renew before it expires (am I reading it right? Also, am I right in thinking that I will remain on Pro forever as long as I keep renewing?).

I certainly won't be paying them $50/year for what I use it for, but I don't know if I will be happy having a free account.

My concern is that if I'm not paying to have my pictures hosted then they might decide that they have some additional rights over my pictures in return for hosting them for me.

Looks like I might have to look to switch to someplace else in the next 10-11 months.

 

[gwh1bass]

Image loading appears to me to have slowed down dramatically, as bad as photobucket.

 

[Mark101]

I cant even access my photostream it just sits there with the 2 round circles and never pulls up my photos. Is any one else having this issue?
I can go to my sets and see the cover pic but when I click on it nothing just like my photostream.

 

[bumeister]

I'm pretty sure I won't be renewing my Pro account, even at the grandfathered rate of $24.95/yr. I have been considering migrating to a different hosting service anyway, and even $25/yr for ad-free viewing and access to stats is too much, if all else is equal between the Free/Ad-supported and Ad-Free levels is the same.

I guess I have until August to decide on another service.

 

[Krew]

I cant even access my photostream it just sits there with the 2 round circles and never pulls up my photos. Is any one else having this issue?
I can go to my sets and see the cover pic but when I click on it nothing just like my photostream.

Same here

 

[Gordo]

I cant even access my photostream it just sits there with the 2 round circles and never pulls up my photos. Is any one else having this issue?
I can go to my sets and see the cover pic but when I click on it nothing just like my photostream.

Mine is extremely rough on my computer - loads, but slow. The endlessly-loading stream of images a'la tumblr is horrid. Maybe OK for the newest computers, smartphones and tablets with unlimited bandwidth, but not the rest of us. Oh - and there are site links at the bottom of the page, which disappear as you reach the bottom because it starts loading more photos. Makes it difficult to use those links.

The official announcement/ feedback thread on flickr is almost at 10000 replies. Vast majority are negative. And not one reply back from anyone at flickr that anyone has seen - yet(?).

 

[Lurker]

I actually like it. Nice clean look, functional.

The problem is that they shouldn't go from the old interface to the new interface in one big step. I'm sure Yahoo's reply is “we had no time to do it step by step,” and my response to that is “you should have thought about that five years ago when you decided to stop any Flickr innovation”

They could have started with just the menu bar.
Then the cleaner "windows 8 look"
Then revamp the sidebars

And I'm sure the response would have been positive. But now? Yes, the interface was outdated and inflexible, but that was the price you're paying for being able to navigate the site blindfolded. And now you can't do that either.

 

[DABO]

I'm new to Flickr. I opened an account a few years ago just because I was in a workshop where the instructor had us all share our photos that way. Never used it since.

Now I see that you get 1 TB of free space. To me that seems like a potential game changer.

I see that people are having problems right now, presumably because of new software changes. But my questions are:

Can I use that 1 TB to "back up" all my pictures? Not necessarily dump everything from my hard drive, but selectively put ten thousands of pictures into galleries? Is that too cumbersome and take forever?

If that's too much, can I use that space to create dozens of galleries with a few thousand pictures to share between my phone and ipad?

Right now I have about 7 GB of space on Dropbox that I use between platforms, and that amount of space is too small.

DAB

 

[Lurker]

Now I see that you get 1 TB of free space. To me that seems like a potential game changer.

I see that people are having problems right now, presumably because of new software changes. But my questions are:

Can I use that 1 TB to "back up" all my pictures? Not necessarily dump everything from my hard drive, but selectively put ten thousands of pictures into galleries? Is that too cumbersome and take forever?

If that's too much, can I use that space to create dozens of galleries with a few thousand pictures to share between my phone and ipad?

• You get what you pay for. Using space for free? Don't expect too much commitment from your vendor towards you
• Space is one thing, bandwidth is another. How are you going to upload it. And when using it as a backup, how do you download?
• For around $50 Zenfolio will give you unlimited space.
• If cloud backup is really what you're looking for, why not sink some money in that dropbox account? 100 GB goes a long way and it's by far the most flexibile and transparent solution.

 

[DABO]

• You get what you pay for. Using space for free? Don't expect too much commitment from your vendor towards you
• Space is one thing, bandwidth is another. How are you going to upload it. And when using it as a backup, how do you download?

Got it. That's what I thought.

• For around $50 Zenfolio will give you unlimited space.

I just checked - for $60 Zenfolio will give you unlimited space, but with a 36MB file size. I'm not home right now, but I'm pretty sure that D600 raw files are larger than that. $120 gets you a 64MB maximum file size. That's probably fine for most (but not all) my pictures. Does Zenfolio make it easy to upload thousands of pictures into different galleries and share them between platforms?

• If cloud backup is really what you're looking for, why not sink some money in that dropbox account? 100 GB goes a long way and it's by far the most flexibile and transparent solution.

I like Dropbox a lot, but 100 GB (at $100/year) is not nearly enough as a backup, although it probably is enough for a few thousand pictures.

Thanks for the advice.

DAB

 

[Joseph]

The new layout is rubbish. It loads extremely slow!

 

[Pete]

Weird, I have been using the old site until today. I guess because I had not closed the browser, it kept me on. I did not even know what you were talking about until today when I logged on fresh. I only use it to get into a couple of the groups, it is not my main photo site.

 

[morcguy]

It seems to have some major performance issues, loads slowly, loses its formatting. I do like the layout though. The white blue and pink was very dated looking. Curious to see what the ads look like, seems certain that ads would wreck the pretty layout.


For those of you having trouble with the desktop, it's nothing compared with the bugs and slow performance in the ipad browser versions.

 

[Gordo]

It seems to have some major performance issues, loads slowly, loses its formatting. I do like the layout though. The white blue and pink was very dated looking. Curious to see what the ads look like, seems certain that ads would wreck the pretty layout.

With the performance issues, and the horrendous amount of data on each page... I wonder how much more performance will suffer once the ads finally get installed? I have pages that take forever to load right now.

 

[Bracer]

Same here

What browser are you using? I have the same problem on my computers at home and at work which all run Internet Explorer 8 (the most up to date browser for Windows XP which most, but not all, of my computers run). When I load the site with Firefox, I can actually see photos, I don't like what I see but I can see them.