Comment by onethumb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onethumb | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Feeling frustrated is totally justified. I'd feel frustrated, too. And no-one is more sorry that you're feeling frustrated than I am.

However, "total radio silence" is not fair. We're very active, and very vocal, about our status updates and progress we're making on the Flickr Help Forum, on our blog, on Twitter, etc. In particular, Flickr now has a CEO (me) who frequently engages with the community and customers to keep them informed, something Flickr hasn't enjoyed since ~2005.

We even have a status page, with frequent realtime updates, which I believe is a first for Flickr: https://status.flickr.net

There is a single feature, Camera Roll, which is still offline undergoing maintenance. No-one is happy it's offline, but it is what it is. It relied on technology internal to Yahoo, which we had to leave behind when we recently exited their datacenters. Given the hard deadline and the vast size, scale, and scope of the Flickr service, we managed to move everything (while keeping it online) except this. It will be returning shortly, but it's not quite ready yet.

I hope you'll stick it out with us, because we're nearly done migrating one of the largest web services on the planet, which means we get to focus on building again instead of just copying. The future is bright.

Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder, CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug, the company that acquired Flickr from Yahoo last year.

I'm an early adopter to flickr, more than a decade ago. I can say that I did rely on Camera Roll and felt it was a much needed, but somewhat incomplete in scope, tool to flickr. I would be one of the users who relied on it, after years using Organizr. So, there are some of us old timers who used it regularly. Luckily, a strong experience with Organizr allowed me to cope with its downtime. I look forward to its 100% bill of health return. Might I suggest as a request, that Camera Roll be incorporated in some way to view and manage our Favorites Album. There is no longer any way to quickly access a list of Favorite images from a decade ago without trying to scroll through countless webpages...only to find the browser and flickr server crashes. That's been a very old bug on this interface, btw.

Thanks, WNG Image and Design

Thanks for the update. As a long-time Flickr user, I too miss camera roll. The AutoUploadr and Camera Roll really got me connected to Flickr and I use it hourly on my iPhone, I have limited time on my iMac, Organizr is confusing and difficult on the iMac, impossible on the iPhone.

I am also an old-time programmer, starting on 6502 machine language, so I understand programming challenges even though I have never dealt with them on this massive level.

Please continue posting updates wherever is convenient for you, I know the users on the Flickr help forums are quite opinionated and fond of their own words so I understand a bit about not posting programming issues there.

I appreciate your response. That said, in the Flickr Help Forum that everyone is directed to when asking about Camera Roll, there has been absolutely zero update for months (plural!) about its status. I have tried to find other updates elsewhere on the web and failed, do they exist?

Furthermore, calling Camera Roll just a feature undermines its significance. This isn't just removing some insignificant feature like "search by focal length" or whatever. Camera Roll _was_ Flickr for many people. Not most of the total users, sure, but for everyone I know it was. For half a decade Flickr pushed it as _the_ way to use Flickr. It was what you saw first upon opening Flickr, and for any users to Flickr that joined in the last five years it was basically the entire interface.

Then it disappeared, supposedly for a very short time which then became very long... And then the updates stopped. During that entire time, myself and everyone I know that uses Flickr basically stopped using it. This includes people like me who pay for Pro. It became worthless.

The frustrating thing is that I really loved Flickr. I loved it so much I considered applying for a job there as the first job I've applied for in my life (I never apply for jobs, I just get referred to the company usually.) I loved it so much I evangalized it to my friends, family, random strangers.

But then the core Flickr interface, the way everyone I know managed and viewed their photos for half a decade, disappeared. And it's still not back. With the time, and the silence, I grew frustrated, and so did many people. I can't use it without Camera Roll, and everyone else I know can't either.

I really, really want Flickr to succeed. But this whole thing really stings hard.

Again, I'm sorry about Camera Roll. I understand your frustration. But perhaps I can share some insight into what's going on and why:

- The choice to finish moving Flickr or not was literally the decision to keep Flickr on the planet or not. There was no wiggle room in terms of timeline or resources to get the job done. So we had to make some hard decisions, because I, for one, didn't want to see Flickr disappear entirely. For good. This was more likely than most people understand. (See: https://www.vox.com/2019/1/23/18194865/verizon-layoffs-aol-y... )

- Camera Roll wasn't used by most users. When we were faced with the question of "ok, we're going to have to temporarily shut off a major feature to meet this deadline", Camera Roll was the obvious one due to its relatively low usage. I'm sorry you rely on it so much, but it's very clear that's not common relative to other major features.

- Camera Roll being offline hasn't affected usage materially. There appears to be near-zero evidence that many people "basically stopped using" Flickr due to this feature being offline.

- Based on your comment, I checked with long-time Flickr employees who are still employed here, and none can recall Camera Roll being central or core to the Flickr experience, nor it being the landing page. Our usage data, both before and after shut-off, supports this perspective.

- One reason for a smaller # of updates about Camera Roll is simply that it's not done being rebuilt yet. We prioritize time spent building things rather than time spent updating people with "Still no update". I think most customers would rather have us ship it sooner rather than talk about it more and ship it later. The last updates are still true. It's not done, but we're working hard and it is coming soon, which we've said recently, more than once.

If you truly love Flickr, as I do, I hope this perspective is helpful. We (the royal "everyone on Earth" version of "we") nearly lost Flickr forever. SmugMug saved it, but we had to make some hard choices. So we did, and I'd still make them again. Flickr is in good hands, we're excited about the future, and we're excited to get back to building again.

I hope you stick with us.

Well, that's certainly a different perspective. I appreciate it. I think many of the users who are so frustrated by Camera Roll's prolonged disappearance would have gotten less frustrated had we received an explanation like this in the beginning.

Asking old time Flickr employees is good, but that kind of misses the point. Old time Flickr users generally stuck with the interface they knew, from what I can tell, and did not use Camera Roll as much. "New" Flickr users, aka those using it for less than a half decade (at least those that I knew) used Camera Roll nearly exclusively and never used Organizr. There was never any other way to view large numbers of photos or organize them on any non desktop device other than Camera Roll, for example, and for anyone who used Flickr on mobile it was not merely central to the user experience - it _was_ the user interface.

I'm extremely shocked that Camera Roll isn't commonly used relative to other features. I wouldn't believe it from anyone else :) Can you say roughly how often it was used compared to Organizr before the switch? (as those are the two only ways to organize your photos on Flickr.)

Regardless, I know first hand that a not insignificant number of people used Camera Roll for everything. Personally, Camera Roll's absence has prevented me from providing photos of important things to several people. I simply don't have the time to dig through Organizr to find and organize a selection of photos that was easy to locate before but is now nearly impossible.

I appreciate the work you all did to save Flickr, and I look forward to using Flickr again once it's usable for me.

Camera Roll was useful from the phone! Organizr isn't. It was the only way I could easily find a photo that I posted a while ago without metadata.

Don, this very thread is one of the reasons why some of us Flickr members feel there is a very real communication problem between Flickr and its membership. This discussion should be happening ON Flickr, where members are asking about what is going on with Camera Roll. If there's time to respond here, there's time to respond there. Please.

Don - responding here and not on flickr makes the rest of us members feel unimportant. There are 34 pages (hundreds) of responses waiting for an update to the "You can stay updated on the progress here" landing page. Could you give us an update there with some transparency and timeframes? Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com