A lot of the people I know and work with just can’t help doing a little dance whenever they think of Flickr. They’re constantly raving about how wonderful it is to join this silly little community of photo sharing web pedestrians. I, for my part have always been skeptical. Everyone who blogs needs a way to incorporate photos into their posts, and to be fair, Flickr does make this easy. I, however, have always liked the idea of controlling my own content, so decided to use Gallery2 and its WPG2 integration with WordPress.
This solution worked well for a long time, but suddenly the iPhoto uploader to Gallery2 broke, and I was faced with a decision. I reluctantly decided to try Flickr. After struggling for what seemed like hours, I finally managed to find a crappy Yahoo username that I could only half tolerate. I tried it, but quickly gave up because I could never remember the cryptic username I had selected.
Casey reminded me that he had invited me to Flickr before they had merged with Yahoo, and that I had created an oldskool, non-Yahoo Flickr account with my normal human readable username. I decided to give it another shot. I hated the restrictive terms of service, and the dozens of clicks it took to get a different sized image, but I tolerated it because images were easy to upload. I even went so far as to create a Pro account.
Well, that all came crashing down around me, and thousands of other Flickr users today when I received notification that Flickr was forcing all their users to merge with a Yahoo account! I was furious! I do not have a lot of images in Flickr, but many of them are linked and presented in this site, and I really don’t want to take the time to go back and change all those links. I would have to create a Yahoo account and merge it thanks to Flickr’s Nazish new policy.
I’m not the only one who is cheesed off either. ThomasHawk.com has been following the forums and has compiled a collection of peoples complaints.
One user had this to say:
What really pisses me off is Yahoo’s God-awful ID setup. It took me over an hour this morning to set up an ID, mostly because every name I tried was taken - including random letters I got by hitting the keyboard in frustration. So now I’m stuck with a username I didn’t want, can’t change, don’t like, and won’t remember.
Another user writs:
Is yahoo offering any sort of counselling for people who go into fits of rage after the 387th attempt to find an available user ID that doesn’t suck?
I could not agree more. It took me forever to find a username, and as before, it’s cryptic, and I will never remember it. Somehow I very much doubt that my Flickr Pro account will stand the test of this betrayal. I have never really liked Flickr, but tolerated it. This will most likely be the last straw for me. I’m just glad I left my Gallery2 integration up and running!
Maybe if you would have bent to Yahoo’s will sooner, your search could have been easier. You can’t tell me you didn’t see this full merge coming…
Flickr slickr, usrs sickr …
Had to write this when I thought of the headline….Flickr, they of the Interestingness patent, have done something rather more interesting today and p*ssed of loads of their users - not only have they reduced the load on their metadatabase by limiting…
I’ve got a coworker who almost had me convinced to switch over to using flikr. I’m glad now I’ve been dragging my feet. For me it’s not such a problem as far as the yahoo account is concerned. I’ve had one for what seems eons now since I needed it for a whitewater kayaking community.
What concerns me more is the swift changes in policy such as this which leave the images you stored inaccessible by dozens to hundreds of archived links.
It also makes me wonder what might happen to your images in the future.
How about we fix the iPhoto->Gallery plugin and you just continue to use Gallery?
Come to the Gallery forums and post there and we’ll help you out.
WOW!!!! I knew there was a reason I loved Gallery! I will certainly take you up on your offer to help Bharat! Thank you so much. The truth is that I’ve been using Gallery all along, but whenever I needed to upload a large number of photos I tended towards Flickr since I could do it directly from iPhoto. If I could just get back to adding photos to Gallery with iPhoto I would be in heaven! WOW AGAIN… A developer from Gallery comments on my blog… You’re making me blush!
[...] and a half ago when this account merger possibility first came up. It was recently trackbacked from a blog entry here about the flap as [...]
What can I sat, I’ve always been a Yahoo pro hatred person and I have used it’s stupid services, now they are going inside our old school, down with Yahoo !
I’ve always liked flickr for blogging, but this whole mess has been kind of a turn off for me. And yahoo’s “new” photos tool is uber crappy to use, they’re going to ruin what used to be a really good service.
[...] Pearson likes using Gallery instead of Flickr, which is one of the services we’ve been demoing in the Hmm Labs. I’ve never really [...]
Flickr sucks for a lot more reasons than you’ve mentioned here. I hope you don’t mend me crossposting something I’ve posted elsewhere, but…
First off, due to paypal problems I was charged twice for Flcikr and now I can’t get a refund for the second year of “pro” subscription that I didn’t want to purchase to begin with. But that’s another story. After a few months with Flickr, I don’t even want my first year. I honestly cannot understand why everybody likes Flickr so much.
Flickr’s “organizer” is totally buggy. I spend hours with it alternately showing me my pictures and then suddenly telling me I had none, even though I have over 2000 uploaded. If you hunt, they provide a link to an older organizer version, which has the same problem.
Flickr is totally inflexible. They give you abolutely no way to control other order photos are displayed in your “photostream” except by upload order. Whose brilliant idea was that? Also their display options for your main page layout are all bad. I don’t like any of them.
Flickr’s support is, if my experience was typical, completely nonexistent. Having paid my money, I contacted support about the issue I was having with Organizr. My support request was ignored completely. All I ever heard back was a survey questionairre from Yahoo two weeks later asking how my support experience was. You’d better believe I told them.
Above all, Flickr’s ideas about how your photos should be presented are awful and, once again, this is not flexible. Universally throughout Flickr, your photos are cropped into little square partial thumbnails which, unless you’re taking snapshots where you care solely about the subject and not the composition of your photos, make it literally impossible to tell what your photographs look like (not to mention that it violates the “no derivatives” Creative Commons license that Flickr itself offers.)
I challenge you to go into the Flash-based Organizr - when it’s not telling you you yor photos don’t exist - and put together a gallery of your best shots. If you are like me, and take many photos of a subject, you’d better have the best shots tagged before upload because you’re not going to be able to evaluate your composition in Organizr once your photos have been chopped into little squares. On occasion, I’ve been unable to identify what a photo was even of because they cropped out the most important details (and this wasn’t an unusual subject, It was a friend of mine standing up… they cropped his head out of the thumbnail so I couldn’t even tell what it was a picture of. Brilliant.) And aside from any rational reason, the fact is: I don’t want people seeing my photographs displayed as little partial squares, or to be required to click on an altered version to see what the photograph actually looks like. Ever. That’s why I picked a “no derivatives” license. But Flickr seems to feel that I don’t need a say in this, or that they’re above the restrictions of the CC licenses they promote.
Finally, I had the frustrating experience of posting in Flickr’s “improvement suggestions” forum that, y’know, maybe Flickr shouldn’t be arbitrarily cropping our photos and showing them to the public that way, or should at least give us an option to turn it off and leave our photos unmolested. I got hit with a tidal wave of strongly negative reactions (including a some personally incensed sounding oes that have since been deleted.) Several users with “pro” accounts replied that that square thumbnails were crucial to Flickr’s “site branding” and page layout, among other things and that they’d hate to see them go - it was like they cared more about Flickr than about their photographs. I was also then cautioned by them - the “pro” users - to do my photo organizing offline if I wanted to be able to see what my photos actually look like, and that Flickr is no more reliable than my own hard drive for backing up my photos, and that most people do not use Flickr for archiving their photos, either. In fact, one highly-active user told me doesn’t upload 90% of his photos. So, pro users feel that Flickr is not good for photo organizing, too unreliable for backup, and don’t even even upload the vast majority of their photos to it in any way… I was left questioning, what the $#$%# did I just pay $50 for? I felt like I just paid good money for nothing more than to join a bulletin board, a glorified version of MySpace, except with a vague focus on posting snapshots for strangers to see. I’m left having paid my money (twice, due to Paypal’s lousy design and policies) and *still* shopping for a decent photo hosting service.
flickr really sucks horribly.
I can’t stand flickr– the most difficult to use photo website and its not free!!!! what a ripoff!!!
Another reason Flickr sucks is because they have no customer service and they delete accounts without warning and without explanation for violating their intentionally vague and corny sounding terms of service. I lost my “safe” rated pro account last weekend over for no apparent reason. There was no porn, nudity, or stolen content on it. Also, I orded prints from them every couple of months as well. They were making money. That said, Flickr probably has millions of worthless free acounts that either contain no content, or else only stolen porn and “my d__k” pictures taken on a cellphone. Given their policies, that’s exactly what they deserve.
Perhaps I just blocked someone who was too closely connected to an employee or perhaps my account fell victim to a disgruntled employee. Hopefully, when microsoft takes over, they will end the free reign of flickr employees and start thinking about rational things, like making money, rather than allowing a bunch of adolescents to run the show. They run things way too much like one would run facebook or myspace, without realizing that photos are what make them money and draw views to their advertisers. When they delete high-end accounts like mine that were getting lots of views and ordering lots of prints, they are not maximizing profits. They need to go back to buisness school.
@Former Flickr User
I have my compassion with you. and also i blame myself for not reading your post earlier. My PRO account deleted in exactly similar fashion:
DELETED by disgruntled flickr employee (you may guess who) who believe themselves to be sitting at the doors of flickr and consider their pro users to be assholes who have no sense of community ethics.
Flickr seems to be extremely creepy about their behaviour. Dont’ go for account on flickr, you will end up paying heavily for a account that gets deleted at the whim of f*cking flickr employees.