A new look Flickr has been unveiled today (or last night). It seems to be part of Marissa Meyer’s attempt to make Yahoo more relevant. And of course Yahoo has also just paid an awful lot of money for Tumblr. Yahoo is a company without the letter “e”.
What follows is based on some very limited time spent using the new look site, and what immediately comes to mind for someone like me. I should first say that I’ve been a Flickr user since 2005, and currently have upwards of 10,000 photos on the site. That doesn’t represent “all” my photos however. I tend to treat Flickr as a site to show off the photos I want made public or shareable. My own NAS archive has upwards of 100,000 photos to put that in perspective. And there are still many photos and negatives that don’t exist in digital form.
In general I find the new look better. Gone are the white spaces, and every centimetre of monitor space is handed over to photos. Perhaps it’s a tad over-zealous, but it’s better than what we had before, which seemed unchanged since I became a Flickr member.
Photos by default are now on a black background – a lightbox view. This works well with my photos, and I have no objections. However, I do think that users should be able to choose between white and black. If I were an illustrator, or use predominantly light/pale colours in my photos, white might suit them better.
I don’t actually mind too much that descriptions, tags, EXIF and comments are below the fold. Perhaps this will have a knock on effect with the community aspect of Flickr, but I still like the maximised use of space.
In places the new look feels a bit rushed. There are signs of the old website still here and there. If they really did rush this redesign then they’ve done well to make it as smooth as it is. There are some rough edges to be sanded off though. And a bit more flexibility from a user perspective wouldn’t go amiss.
The big thing is that they’ve giving everyone 1TB of space for their photos. There’s no two ways about it. This is a lot. They’ve done what Gmail did when they launched against Hotmail, and blow their rivals out of the water with regard to space. Google had only recently made a big issue about their unified 15GB of space. This is a clear retort to that.
But if everyone gets 1TB, then why would I pay for “unlimited” space? Well the “Pro” account is going. I’ve paid $25 a year for nearly my entire time on Flickr. And my 10,000 photos in JPG format wouldn’t take anything like that amount of space. So in many regards, the space doesn’t really matter because nobody (well, hardly anybody) is going to use it. But free does introduce ads. So Flickr is now offering a $50 option to go ad-free. I believe that I’ll be “grandfathered” on my $25 account – which includes stats as well. But would I pay $50 to remove ads? I’m not sure. And I’m not sure that Flickr would earn anything like that much from me. It feels a bit high, and I’m not sure I understand that part of the model.
I certainly don’t understand their “Doublr” option which gives me 2TB for $500! OK, anybody who needed that amount would clearly have more than 1TB and therefore be in the top 0.05% of users in terms of space used. But $500 is absurd. If you’re using that amount of space then you really shouldn’t be using Flickr for your photographic needs. In any case, there are much better options for that kind of storage in the cloud at much better prices. I can only assume it’s some kind of psychological device to make consumers believe that they’re getting $500 value for free with their first terabyte.
You would imagine that even now, Flickr engineers are making it very easy to send photos to Tumblr blogs (there is a Tumblr button already). The marketing message of the “1TB of data” seems to be that we upload every photo we have to Flickr rather than just our selects. Then sharing specific pictures to social media or a Tumblr blog is where we curate? In any case, say you have an interest in steam engines. In amongst your regular photos you probably have a few steam engine specific photos. Sharing those to Tumblr where your steam engine enthusiast friends can see them makes sense.
I must admit I’ve never quite “got” Tumblr. The long lists of people who “like” or “reblogged” things never entirely makes sense. And does “reblogged” mean “steal”? I’ll stick with this blog thanks!
Allied to all this, there’s a very decent upgrade to the Flickr Android app, and overall I’d say that they’re on the right path. I think the service still needs some tweaks and clean-up. But it’s heading in the right direction.
Whether coming weeks and months make me regret anything I’ve said here remains to be seen…
[Update] One more obvious problem is the constantly unclickable footer of the homepage! As you scroll down to click on it, more photos load. It needs to be moved!
And I’m a little confused about the whole “stats” thing. It’s being sold as something “Pros” get. But it’s not mentioned in any of the now available plans. So if I join up today and pay nothing, $50 or $500, it’s not clear that I get any stats. To be honest, I’m not sure that this should be considered that special! I’d expect any site to give me that kind of granularity. You get it on YouTube for example.
Some First Thoughts on the New Flickr
Tags:
Comments
4 responses to “Some First Thoughts on the New Flickr”
I couldn’t disagree more, Adam!
I don’t want all my photos packed up against each other with hardly any space between them. I want to be able to see the titles and tags, maps and comments, that have taken so long to curate and build over eight years.
For me Flickr was both a place to record the photos of the events in my life, to explore and comment on other people’s photos, and a place to share photos for use by the community (pretty much all of my public photos are CC licensed, and a fair number have ended up on Wikipedia, blogs, etc.). All of that just feels harder to do with the new UI.
It’s the second time in the last few weeks that a major internet company has taken something I’ve valued for a long time and trashed it. I’m increasingly coming to the view that if I care enough about something, I’m better off hosting it myself in some way. At least then it can’t be changed for the worse, or closed, without my consent.
It’s also pretty clear that the user community on Flickr mostly hates the changes. There are currently over 14,000 comments on the official feedback post on the help forum, the vast majority of which are negative. The forums are awash with people commenting on the merits of various other photo sharing sites and trying to decide whether to leave and where to take their business.
It will be interesting to see whether Yahoo respond sensitively to this community backlash, or try to ride it out.
Another long time user here (2004 for me) and I absolutely love the new look. With the update to the iOS and now Android apps, I think Flickr is certainly heading in the right direction. But, as a quick peek at the forums will tell you, not everyone is happy. Far from it.
While I understand that people are generally resistant to change, this amount of outrage is somewhat surprising even for a vocal bunch of users which Flickr enthusiasts have always been. I dunno, perhaps this too shall pass once people have gotten used to the new look.
I must say though that I did find some changes rather annoying, mostly related to unnecessary clicking. You can’t see number of views or date uploaded on the photostream page any longer. You can get that by clicking ‘Edit’ but it’s not the default view. Sometimes I Tweet my photos, and this functionality is now buried 3 clicks deep inside menus instead of a button just above the photo. Comments are only loaded as you click ‘load more comments’ instead of loading them all as you view a photo. But other than that, I’m very impressed with their new rollout.
I like that Pro users are grandfathered in at $25 a year for unlimited. I suspect I’ll keep paying for that, even though our beloved ‘pro’ badge is now a thing of the past 😉
First off, an apology for not getting these comments up earlier. Basically my site was broken and I didn’t realise.
Having had a bit more time to play with Flickr, I’m perhaps not as impressed as I was initially. On the other hand, I’m not as aghast as others are.
I think the first thing to say is that although there are many thousands of comments from people who don’t like the new look, I’m not completely certain that wouldn’t have happened whatever they did. 14,000 comments is a lot, but I always feel that you’re much more likely to comment if you dislike something than like it. I know I certainly wouldn’t want to get involved in that conversation over there as I’d be torn apart.
I think further, the issue is that Flickr has been so relatively unchanged for so long, that this worsens the issue when they do make changes.
That said, I definitely don’t think that they rolled this out the right way. I think that the way people like Facebook or even Google (who are currently doing it with Google Maps) is much smarter. By drip feeding the changes to limited users, it’d have certainly allowed them to catch many of the issues that could have been fixed.
Sadly, I think that the big tanks of Google were getting too close to Flickr’s lawn, and they felt that they had to move far more quickly than was sensible.
I did read somewhere – The Verge I think – that these changes have been made in a relatively short period of time, and below the surface that definitely seems to be the case. I certainly think that there are things that have been bodged. Even uploading seems a bit dodgier right now. I don’t know if it’s because thousands of people are trying to get their full terabyte of space, but it does remind me a little of the bad old days of needing to use the standalone Flickr Uploadr which was notoriously flaky. We’ll see if they fix that problem.
I also think that hiding the stats and comments too much was a mistake. I’ll be honest and say that I’m not the most “social” person on Flickr. I follow my friends feeds and see their photos – to an extent. But I don’t comment a lot. And as a result, I don’t get too many comments. Those that I do, I tend to see in email rather than on the site. Indeed I found heavily commented accounts positively ghastly. Anyone “famous on Flickr” tends to get dozens of gushing comments about anything they upload. As a result, I’d never go near that person’s comments.
That said, I know that I’m perhaps not the norm, and others enjoy and use the comment features more. Either way, I do think it’s a mistake to completely hide them. More than just a number should be visible. And having to scroll down every picture to see how many views it’s had is awful. This is probably the extent to which I use the stats – I just want to know if anything I’ve published has hit a nerve.
While I agree that giving some space to photos is preferable, I’m aware that I’d never use anybody else’s site to truly display photos the way I want them to be seen. That goes for 500px and Google+ as well as Flickr. Fortunately they have a decent API that lets you offset the brunt work of serving them, while embedding them to your satisfaction elsewhere. That’s what I’ve done for years on this site.
As I’ve said, there are changes I’d like to see. I note that they’ve fixed the grandfathering of Pros to a certain extent, but the forced display on black is not great at all. It should be a black or white option. Indeed if they were really clever, they’d let you set a default for a profile, but allow users to switch to the inverse for individual photos on an ad hoc basis.
David, I don’t think I’d equate this with Google closing Reader. That’s a service that’s being removed altogether. This is one that’s evolving. For better or worse is perhaps up for debate. But I’d still argue that on the whole it’s for the better.
There are things wrong with the new Flickr, and I’d very much like to think and hope that Yahoo will listen to some of those comments. Although I certainly don’t want a complete rollback.
In any event, I don’t think that there’s a useable alternative out there. Google+ is messy, has very limited capacity before it gets reasonably pricey (in the scheme of things), and is far too closed. 500px looks gorgeous, but as per the site’s name, you can’t even view photos fullscreen – my photos tend to be Creative Commons licenced (for non commercial use). So I’m pretty relaxed about leaving high resolution photos on the site.
I’m a bit of a vain fellow, and check Flickr most days for photos relating to my day job. The old Flickr remembered that I preferred to have my search results sorted by most recent. The new Flickr defaults to most relevant each time, and now has to be changed each search to most recent.