Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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