Flickr Is Getting a Major Makeover

Everyone here is completely missing the most important point of this makeover: it's not the design, but the fact that this means Flickr isn't being killed off.

With the sorry state that Yahoo!'s been in recently, the killing off of several interesting projects and websites, etc. Flickr dying was the number one concern for its users.

Stagnation is the death of any website. Any attention it receives from corporate, any money sent its way, any sign of time and effort being put into keeping it alive means they're not ready to chalk it off just yet - which means you don't have to worry just yet about migrating your thousands of photos (and far more importantly, the associated metadata) from Flickr to one of the alternatives.

This makeover is an infusion of life, and is first and foremost an attempt at extending the life of what could have been a dying website (from a corporate point of view). For this reason, and this reason alone, I both welcome this news and hope it accomplishes at least something.

Yes Finally!

I can't wait for this. I'm a heavy heavy flickr user. 100+ hours just these last 2 weeks, every day hours and hours. (I use flickr to look for creative commons photos for my websites).

1) Flickr currently wins the award for the worst search results. I've spend dozens of hours looking for specific photos with flickr returning the most irrelevant results you could ever imagine. Sometimes the results have absolutely nothing to do with what you searched for. It was funny for a while when page after page of Asian Children turned up when I was searching for nature photos. But after

2) Flickr's flow is broken. There's something very unnatural about the way search results, pages, streams, and download pages are set up. Common, it's a photo gallery with comments, I'm not sure why they had to complicate it.

3) I should not have to right click on an image to go to it's download page.

4) Flickr has a serious quality problem and is a terrible place for Photographers. Why? Becuase Flickr is a place for shitty family photos. People upload them by the room full. And I do NOT want random people's portraits in my search results. Any good photography that has potential to be licensed or commented on is lost in the jungle of family vacation photos. Yes I know flickr is a photo hosting site, but what people are really trying to use it for are to showcase and host their photography, which is actually useful. So these 2 groups, average consumers and pro photographers are both using Flickr in two different ways and that really hurts the site.

So I'm very excited at what the redesign is going to look like. I just hope they don't turn it into some laggy ajax nonsence where effects pop up every time you hover over a photo or all the photos are dynamically grouped using javascript after they're loaded (which again, makes scrolling laggy).

I am certain Markus Spiering is a talented designer, and having not seen the final product or the research involved, I have no idea whether the new interface will better serve their customers. So I have no desire to attack this makeover as a poor design decision.

But it is sad to see the famous Flickr aesthetic so substantially changed. Flickr was one of the first web apps, but it made itself easy to use and approachable by looking deceptively flat like a webpage. It communicated not with gradients and flashy buttons, but with tightly-written copy and a very precise visual hierarchy emphasizing white space.

It was also, recently, pretty fast. The previous rewrite in YUI3 emphasized speed and I strongly hope they didn't revert back to the previous performance problems.

As someone who designs and builds webapps, I find this a sad day. I aspire to build something as simple, flat, and creatively-written as the Flickr interface.

Flickr is one of the very very few services on the Internet I've ever taken my wallet out to pay for when asked (there are simply too many free alternatives)...and I've heard the same from other people.

All the recent rumblings at Yahoo have made me very nervous and it was obvious that the Flickr site was starting to get a little old looking. Some of the backend photo management stuff, while brilliant for 3 or 4 years ago, has been superseded by better, newer approaches -- and certain things were never good enough (geotagging photos in some areas was really hurt by the aging map interface and low quality imagery). And the photo views were getting far too small on today's modern displays.

So I welcome this change, even if I feel nitpicky about some of the particulars. It means that Yahoo is stating their intentions to keep Flickr going -- I suspect this is in no small part to the paying customers.

Now I only hope two things:

1) This isn't a one off, that they continue to work the design so that it doesn't die right out the gate, and long standing problems don't get left around.

2) They update the flickr uploading app. The ancient app is positively ancient, and a buggy mess, but it's still better than the web interface. There's not a whole lot that needs fixing, but it does need to get fixed.

A facelift, basically. As an ex-Yahoo! the problems which plagued Flickr run deep. They need to perform open heart surgery on that sucker, not put some make up on it.

Disclaimer: I work on The OpenPhoto Project :)

I don't envy the person who has to do a make-over for flickr. It works pretty well as it is (from a design perspective), and it feels as if it's hardened into concrete over the years of passivity, which makes it harder to argue that flickr needs to evolve its design like regular websites.

But Yahoo! can blame it all on themselves. How about they make sign-in and registration less of a pain in the ass for people with no interest in Yahoo! accounts.

I want this to be a great new start for Flickr, but I'm worried it won't be. What Flickr is really missing in 2012 are more advanced community features: Its user base is brimming with talented photographers, but the dusty old pool system doesn't encourage the kind of individual curatorial approach that has propelled the likes of Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram to their present heights.

Pools are big buckets that anyone can throw a photo into. They can be moderated, but rarely are, and so tend to be a broad cross-section of a theme rather than a gallery of excellence. I rarely use them; most of my viewing on Flickr is browsing the photostreams of contacts I've added because I like their tastes.

Flickr could actually go a long way toward fixing this with a fairly simple addition: Give me a feed of favorites by my contacts. Flickr has individual curation; it's just hidden in dark corners of the UI.

This makes me kind of nervous.

Honestly, I couldn't care less about the social aspects of Flickr or the quality of the search, or most of the other things people here are complaining about.

I don't use Flickr for random people to see/find my pics. I use it so that I can organize and find my pics, so I can share them with my friends and people I know, and every once in a while post links to them in some of the forums I frequent. It's easier to use Flickr than it is to host it myself. All of my pictures are creative commons licensed and open to the public, but my primary concern is my ability to organize them and view them.

The current interface isn't the best, but it's "good enough," and I've been satisfied with it. It's nice to know it's not being killed off, but I'm worried they'll screw it up.

Please, please, please make the mobile version use the full screen width for photos. I can't believe that it's been like this for so long.

Goes from looking very "Flickr" to indistinguishable from so many small-time competitors or even Google Images.

A major makeover? Great!

Not addressing the terrible Cut/Paste "From Yahoo!" logo?

Big mistake.

Too little, too late. People have moved on, it seems, judging from my unscientific poll.

Wow, that guy is completely self-absorbed.

Yahoo has been paying attention to Flickr all along, Mr. Spiering insisted, and has made a lot of improvements since it bought the site in 2005.

As a paying Flickr customer for several years, I can say that no, Yahoo has not been "paying attention" to Flickr. At least, not in a way that is meaningful to any one other than the product manager.

He pointed out that the photo page was redesigned as recently as the summer of 2010 ... started integrating Flickr across its products ... Yahoo weather app ... integrated into Yahoo Mail soon...

Wow. None of that means anything to me at all. Flickr hasn't improved in any meaningful way, in terms of my end-user needs, in as long as I've been using it. A few painfully obvious examples are: 1) give me multiple photostreams. Seriously, my eBay photos go into the same stream as my carefully selected landscape photos? 2) Give me an uploader that doesn't consume massive resources and error-out regularly.

This might just be too little, too late. Flickr has been in bad need of a makeover for 5-6 years now. Sites like f.e. 500px.com - with its unfailing focus on photographers and their photography - ran past Flickr long ago.