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Comment by pwenzel | Hacker News Reader

It's 2017 and I still use my Flickr account because I can't find an equivalent service that maintains the level of photo metadata, privacy settings, and archive capability that Flickr does.

I have close to 11,000 items personal photos and videos in there (60GB), and it is constantly growing, yet searchable. I also have a myriad of tools to back up my Flickr photos and metadata to Dropbox, which I do periodically.

People love to nitpick about it, but I still find Flickr enormously useful, and have been paying for Pro for nearly a decade. I try to be proactive and open to alternative photo services, but migrating to something else at this point seems like be a huge hassle.

I wish they didn't have old and new UI mixing though. Yahoo could definitely polish that.

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If you want to know how it would feel if it was more consistent, the Flickr (partial) redesign was done by the same guy who did the Chow(hound) most recent redesign.

I don't think much of him.

I hesitate to question anyone's abilities before you know what constraints they had to work under. Designers often get the blame for internal management chaos, and a lot of executives feel qualified to make major design decisions.

A dev and a designer require the same primary quality: being able to manage the scope and the conflicting requests from the environment.

Well, yes, but they also have a job to do. If whoever is in charge mandates something your options may be to do it or find another job, and not everyone is financially comfortable walking away.

I'm not saying everything is great, only that it's far more common for something wrong to be explained by factors you aren't aware of than someone to be utterly unqualified to hold their job.

First of all, I shouldn't have said I'm not a fan of him. It's his work.

Second, if you're doing redesigns for major, major sites, there has to be some accountability.

Relax. Noone is getting fired for asking what's the purpose of a feature.

You gotta understand why you are creating what you are creating to make it well. And that is perfectly reasonable to suggest an alternative route if you think it's better for the business and the users.

Is the search as good as Google Photos? I don't need to do it often, but when I want to find photos I've taken of dogs (for example), it's pretty nice.

The search is terrible. If a recent photographer has taken 1,000 photos and tagged them with your search keyword, you have to wade through all 1,000 of that photographer's photos first, even if they are all of a style you aren't looking for. And this happens to a large degree on practically every search keyword you try. They have no collapsing of photos from one source, nor any ability to filter out such spurious results.

What's the backup tool you use? I've had trouble finding something that works.

I used https://github.com/drtoast/flickr-backup but it has some limitations (only backs up photos that are in photosets, max 500 photos per photoset - neither of which were a problem with my account)

> I can't find an equivalent service that maintains the level of photo metadata

Smugmug?

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