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They also use meta robots=noimageindex,noarchive on every page without an opt-out which is so incredibly stupid and walled-gardeny for an image sharing site. I wanted to use Flickr instead but nobody else uses Flickr, then I tried making my own image gallery and I learned that browsers do not honor the JPEG rotation EXIF data and I don't want to write my own rotation/cropping code (that and Google completely ignores it), so now I'm trying Pinterest, but that one also wants you to log in to view full images.

Kind of silly I can't find a good image sharing site in 2019.

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Speaking of walled gardens. There is probably no service in this world that I hate more, as a non-user, than Pinterest.

Pinterest manages to do something horribly stupid and kind of abusive that I usually associates with adult sites ads: show you a preview of something that gets your interest, if you click to get access to it put you through a maze of forms and links all promising the result you asked for at the end, and then when you get to it they don't deliver and instead show other stuff you might like but really you don't because you did all that for this specific thing.

I don't get it. You have it. You know the user wants it. You know the user wants it very much, enough to go through all that crap. Yet you are going out of your way to not give him access, making him so frustrated that any hope of "but he will crawl around more and do more stuff" is quickly replaced by "he closes the tab in anger at having lost 5 minutes" ...

I'm sure there are metrics showing that it works, or maybe that it doesn't lose enough people to be worth changing, but it is so unnecessary.

They have actually had one positive influence on my life. After having dealt with exactly what you described a few times, I learned that I don't need anything that's on Pinterest. If a search results returns a pinterest link, I ignore it. If I can't find it anywhere except that link, it's as good as a dead link so I move on. This can be extended to much of the internet. So much peace now.

It is one of my main uses of Pi-Hole: “never, ever let anything from that domain into my network ever again.” If I accidentally click a link, it doesn’t go anywhere. I use it for quite a few domains that show up in a lot of places, but have proven to be an annoyance. I’m believe Pinterest was one of the first to be added for that reason.

The ad blocking Pi-Hole provides is a nice bonus, too.

It would be cool if this could be extended to automatically clearing those junk sites off Google's results, maybe by querying for a few extra pages, deleting the garbage, and then re-assembling them into fewer pages. Google spam filters would be great, I could also put in a rule to eliminate any page title that starts with a number ("Ten great ways to...").

Google used to have a way to block sites from search results. Do they still have that option?

They did offer the Personal Blocklist extension[1] for Chrome, long ago. But it's been sunsetted, there are some alternatives.

1: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension...

I wrote a userscript to do this if you're interested:

https://code.byuu.org/google

It blocks search and image results by pattern, and also removes the URL tracker wrapping wherever possible.

I’m the exact same. Over time I’ve been trained to ignore every link from google search results that points to Pinterest.

Why not use an addon? My addon removes all search results for facebook, pinterest

Sounds like my experience too. Any link on pinterest image, ie from google search is met with login/register form. Well pardon my english but screw that approach, pinterest doesn't exist for me.

Same here, I have their domains blocked in my hosts so if I accidentally click I don't see anything.

I constantly tack "-pinterest" on to the end of Google searches...

I've added Pinterest to my reverse image search extension [1] to avoid having to sign up when there is no alternative source for the image. It returns Pinterest search results [2], and you can access the image directly from the image icon.

I plan to release the image extraction module in a separate extension, so you can just click on the page area with the image, and it opens the image in a new tab. This way you will not need to do a reverse image search to get to the image, or manually look for it in the page source.

[1] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image

[2] https://i.imgur.com/L2wv2Wk.png

Thank you for creating this, it's an excellent extension!

Thanks! Make sure to explore the extension's options, it can be configured to fit most use cases.

Brilliant, I didn’t know extensions like this existed.

What about Twitter?

I just created an account with an email but after few minutes of clicking around it locked me out. I can only use it again if I give them my phone number, too -.-

As if this wasn't enough of their invasive procedures my profile officially says "Account is blocked because of suspicious behavior".

This is some advanced trickery to fool users into giving them more data than they intended to do when creating a profile and it sucks.

There are more examples: Have you tried browsing Facebook or Xing as a user? It's all a really crappy experience.

fwiw, this has happened to me a few times with fresh twitter accounts. In my experience, if you care enough and have the time, you will probably be able to get support to unblock your account without handing over your phone number.

I'm not saying this to defend twitter, this is definitely some aggressive, disingenuous behavior.

I just wrote a message to support and I will keep you posted about any updates.

Just to be sure I also ordered a free SIM card so I have a spam phone for these kinds of services.

Thank you for the advice.

As expected they did not give me the answer I was asking for:

"If you need to reset your Twitter password, please request a new one here: https://twitter.com/account/begin_password_reset.

If your Twitter account is suspended or locked and you are unable to access it, please log in to your account and use the following form to get in touch with us: https://support.twitter.com/forms/general?subtopic=suspended...

Because my account is "temporarily restricted" neither of the cases matches so I think this is their kind way telling me to f-ck off or give them what they want. I don't like these kind of games and I'm thinking about not using their service after all.

I think Twitter does that for some email services, definitely saw that behaviour with ProtonMail and Tutanota, Gmail was safe to use then (a couple of years ago, when I wanted to create a secondary account).

Ok as my domain is newly registered that could be a valid reason probably.

It's a TLD and no service like ProtonMail. Gmail would be the next party I don't want to share information with - I know those are complicated preferences from a "normal" point of view but I don't like to spread my data too much.

Don't worry it sucks as a user as well. Curiosity pushed me to use Google SSO to circumvent their crap one time, and they allowed themselves to subsequently spam my inbox with a flurry of emails. I proceeded to click the "unsubscribe" link in one of them, but to my surprise the spam kept coming. Turns out they have more than a dozen mailing settings and you have to painfully disable each one of them individually. Of course the simpler option is to mark all emails from pinterest.com as spam in the email client.

Especially as a site that specializes in hosting nearly exclusively non-original content, it's so ethically wrong for them to use such tactics.

Pinterest, Quora, Instagram, I never understood why people keep using these clearly unethical websites. Stop using them and other better alternatives will pop out, it's not like you depend on them like you depend on grocery shops or clothing stores. Voting with your attention is easy and cheap.

> I proceeded to click the "unsubscribe" link in one of them, but to my surprise the spam kept coming.

I despise it when this happens. The only solution is to create a gmail filter to catch the entire domain and archive it or mark it as spam. It's surprising how many companies willfully ignore the unsubscribe option.

I ignore any search result that point to Pinterest as, apparently, other commenters do. It looks like Instagram is now going to get ignored as well.

I have a browser extension which automatically removes any results from Pinterest in searches.

LinkedIn is comparably aggravating if you aren't a club member.

Now that Instagram has been totally Facebooked, I feel there’s a real gap in the market for what Instagram used to be.

Just want something simple where I can upload some photos, do a bit of light editing, apply a nice filter and share with friends. And also see a chronological timeline of stuff they’ve posted.

No likes, no engagement metrics, no personalisation, no skinner-boxing, no influencers.

Well aware this makes me sound old - and this hypothetical service will never make unicorn money. But I’d use it in a flash.

Pixelfed (https://pixelfed.org/) is pretty much what you're looking for.

>No likes, no engagement metrics, no personalisation, no skinner-boxing, no influencers.

IG is the defacto "photo sharing" tool because it does all of these. What you are describing is closer to Imgur but they have comments and likes as well, simply because without there's no reason for people to come back.

A browser interface for uploading would be nice too!

Micro.blog seems to want to head in that direction - they're certainly on board with the chronological feed & "no likes / metrics" idea, and they have a way to import your photos from Instagram. The service itself is meant to be a social network that works via RSS:

https://help.micro.blog/2017/instagram/

But they make it really hard to even see that they have photo / Instagram-esque features, and it seems mostly connected with their iOS app Sunlit:

https://sunlit.io/

I used to be a member but found the service very hipster & Apple / iOS centric. But it might be what some people here are looking for.

So VSCO?

I recently started using it, and it does somewhat fill that itch of "looking at pretty pictures" that instagram used to fill (almost a year fb/insta-clean now). But to me it seem like a niche platform attracting photographers and creative people that showcase very good photos. I'm somewhat in that niche so I like it but when I stumble on the small clicks of people using it more as a social "hey frinds (insert "vsco girls" meme), here's what I ate for lunch, sucks to be you" I immediately think "hey, this is not instagram goml!". But maybe it is/will be?

Tying it to smartphones and camera apps sucks.

It is not tied to camera apps - you can just upload any image you have in the gallery. Also, you can upload from the web

Ah ok, is this new? For some reason I've had the impression that it was only usable on mobile, now I wonder why.

VSCO costs $40 a month.

No it's free. They have a premium membership for $20 per year. Where are you getting your information?

Path could use a good comeback.

I still use Flickr. The only place out there which doesn't want to immediately steal photo rights.

I still maintain that if only Yahoo had any intent to do anything rather than sit around back then, Flickr would have won in the field of photo sharing and photo social media, and it would have been a much better end result for the users.

Now that it's not owned by Yahoo any more but smugmug there's still a shimmer of hope for a revival.

Search engine and instant messenger - Yahoo could have been Google & Facebook if they had been managed competently.

I was surprised that I can't share a HD image on flickr with someone on mobile and have them be able to see the full image. If I remember correctly, it shows them a bulky UI with a scaled down version of the image.

Ah but they have previously. They (at the time Yahoo) used non Creative Commons Flickr images in ads. This made me delete my old school pre Yahoo account and remove everything I uploaded.

>Kind of silly I can't find a good image sharing site in 2019.

Have you investigated paid options? Otherwise, it's kind of silly that people expect free image hosting years after everyone has started monetizing.

I had a really good paid experience with SmugMug, which is now Flickr's parent company.

But pinterest really really wants you to log-in, does it not?

Another entry for the hall of fame is Quora.

Someone should make a bugmenot browser extension...

And what's up with their hate of zooming images in desktop?

They HAVE the full res image. There's even bookmarkets to snag the image. What twisted product goal led to the current state?

I seem to recall vaguely that this redesign was part of a response to a legal challenge for copyright infringement from one of the large photo libraries.

Interesting. I have wondered how IG and Pinterest get away with hosting so many photos that weren't uploaded by the copyright holder. Was that the solution? Upload the pics at a degraded resolution and claim that it's not infringement?

The Write.as guys have been working on a good alternative with their Snap.as service [0]. It's tied to the blogging side, but looks like it'll be another simple tool that doesn't pull the same signup-wall crap as Instagram.

[0] https://snap.as

As a viewer (not sharer), I find unsplash to be very enjoyable and not getting in my way

https://unsplash.com/

And then there is also 500px, a bit more controlled but still very nice in my opinion.

I was very upset with 500px when they abruptly stopped allowing Creative Commons licenses and forced me to re-license my existing photos on the service.

Frankly I'm also slightly annoyed with Unsplash for reinventing the wheel with their own license instead of using standard CC licenses, reducing compatibility with other free culture projects.

> then I tried making my own image gallery and I learned that browsers do not honor the JPEG rotation EXIF data and I don't want to write my own rotation/cropping code

This just sounds like an excuse to yourself. It’s not hard to deal with this just strip out the EXIF data and bake the rotation into your images on upload. Problem solved, though I don’t know your experience level.

Or even just detect the rotation tag, leave the image untouched, and rotate it in CSS.

Too many edge cases I’d say.

Images really shouldn’t be stored anyway with rotation data in the EXIF. By pre rotating it you normalize and make it ready to use in any context.

The EXIF should be stripped out and used for other sorts of analytics.

Have you tried https://youpic.com/?

There's also https://pixelfed.org

It is decentralized and open source.

Yes, PixelFed is great. Based on ActivityPub open standard you can self-host your own instance and federate it to the Fediverse.

Never heard of this and love the idea. Thanks for sharing, will check it out.

Came across it because someone boosted his messages on Mastodon.

I loved the idea too, Mastodon is somewhat limited and if we can get more alternatives all the better.

Lychee is a very good minimalistic self-hosted photo gallery: https://github.com/electerious/Lychee

Stack is PHP/MySQL so it'll run anywhere. I've been using for years now with no complaints.

> Kind of silly I can't find a good image sharing site in 2019.

Flickr is very good. Amount of users doesn't really affect my use-case, which is offsite storage and being able to send links to my friends/family.

In fact it is maybe the only service that I pay for.

It takes a couple of hours to write code to handle exif rotations.

in python I use pywand:

    def generate_with_wand(self, wand_img: WandImage):
        # create stripped down version of our image:
        wand_img.strip()
        wand_img.auto_orient()
        wand_img.compression_quality = 90

        thumb = wand_img.clone()
        thumb.transform(resize=self.size)
        thumb.save(filename=str(self.get_output_path()))

Exactly! I was including making test case images and writing tests.

So why can't browsers handle it? Now that I think about it, browser image viewers are pretty basic...

I was curious too and looked into it.

Someone originally thought it would be a good idea to ignore EXIF data, and by the time someone else cared enough to address it, they were worried about breaking sites that had bad rotation EXIF data if browsers suddenly started honoring it.

Mozilla tried to add image-orientation: from-image CSS for this purpose, so sites could say "no actually the EXIF data really is good", but then no other browser vendor followed along.

So as usual, everything in computer science is just terrible for the sake of legacy compatibility with the first implementations ever made.

Relevant Chromium bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=56845

It works fine when you open the image directly, but it will not apply EXIF corrects for inline images (<img> tag). There are JS libraries that load the image as file data to read the EXIF data and apply the correct rotation, but those fail in some cases (HTTPS trying to load data for an HTTP-linked image, for example).

How about imgur.com?

Imgur's compression is awful, and especially on mobile, has a ton of dark patterns for logged-off users or anyone not using their app.

Personally I'm using Instagram for casual "here's my life" photos where I don't care about compression or any of that, Flickr for more curated public photos, and Google Drive as a secondary private backup.

Imgur requires you to provide a valid mobile number in order to create an account.

Christ. It's strange to recall Imgur's genesis on Reddit as a simple, lightweight replacement for all the obstacles and mess that came with Imageshack/Photobucket/other popular image galleries at the time. Shame it eventually bloated into the thing it was meant to remedy.

Well it happened in two easy steps: 1. They took VC money, 2. Reddit cut the middleman and offered direct photo sharing.

At that point imgur became less about easy photo sharing on reddit and others, and more about creating its own community.

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