Flickr's redesign makes it a photo service actually worth sharing | Hacker News Reader

Flickr's redesign makes it a photo service actually worth sharing

danwin.com

228 pointsdanso108 comments

As a former active Flickr user all I can say is that I have gone back to the product, big time.

I have ditched iPhoto as my archiving software and moved my +150GB of photos and videos to Flickr. I couldn't be happier. I'd also like to note that I share zero photos with the public, all my photos are 100% private or shared with family members/close friends.

Having said that there is plenty of improvement to go:

- iOS app (maybe it is also the case for the Android app) needs to improve (auto upload, better integration with iOS, etc). Recently I went on holiday and only used my iPhone to take pictures (over 5GB), it would be nice for an easier way to tag + create/add to set + upload photos and videos. By the way, where is the tablet app?

- Video is really really bad. Apparently Flickr doesn't support long video playback (and by long I mean 10 seconds or more - i think). Now a days (specially with smartphones) video is a big part of albums/experiences. Video needs to be permitted and nicely integrated within photo albums.

- Upload via web is nice, but a better Mac/Windows/Linux native app would go a long way for power users. Better upload resume, tagging, etc.

- Map view. Something is wrong with the new Flickr, it has a world map view, but it doesn't read/process any geo location from my pictures - unlike iPhoto which does this flawlessly. I need to drop one by one the photos into the map for these to be processed. I also have to say that the Nokia map could be better, I'd love to see Flickr using Google Maps. Has someone experienced this same thing?

- Better album sharing, a la Dropbox, would be great (e.g. allow friends and family to download an album as *.zip)

These are just a few things I would like to see in the coming updates.

Just to address the Video issue. I think Yahoo knows this is a general problem for them and it's probably the next on the list of things to address. I have a feeling it's going to come in the form of a Video service acquisition that will then tie into Flickr and other services rather than trying to improve on Flickr's inadequacy. Although I hear you when you say that videos need to be permitted in albums.

I thought the same thing as you did: Yahoo needs a video acquisition. Maybe that's where the failed DailyMotion acquisition came in. I think Vimeo is the perfect fit for the new Flickr, but good luck buying that from IAC.

Yes! I completely agree about Vimeo. It's a brilliantly simple and clean service for video and would be a fantastic addition for Yahoo. Although I think they want to go much bigger and try for something like Hulu.

I don't see how the two are related. Hulu is for consumption of produced video where as Vimeo is for oriented towards user generated video. They don't fulfill the same need.

Yes I realise this. User generated video may not be Yahoo's priority right now but on the subject of video, studio produced content is more than likely to be. Everyone's throwing their hat in the ring when it comes to streaming tv online. You can be Yahoo wants in on some of the action. What's going to be a better revenue generator?

> iOS app... it would be nice for an easier way to tag + create/add to set + upload photos and videos. By the way, where is the tablet app?

Use FlickStackr: http://ipont.jubilo.ca/ip/flickstackr/

Can't figure out why Yahoo hasn't acquired this yet.

Apparently, deep integration with Flickr is slated for iOS 7:

http://9to5mac.com/2013/05/21/flickr-vimeo-integration-likel...

I'm curious to see to which extent it will be.

I really wish Apple would let apps create their own type of account rather than arbitrarily picking services for users.

Makes me curious about how they did it with iOS6 with Twitter/Facebook if there will be a special kind of app that can be called "service" or if Apple will hold it close to the vest only being directly integrated in iOS so 3rd parties like Dropbox, Google+, etc... can't add similar deep integrated features in the os.

Can you explain what you mean about video? Flickr video until the redesign was limited to 90 seconds, and now 180 seconds. Still quite limited, but I don't know where you got 10 seconds from.

Sure. I've uploaded all the videos I had on iPhoto/iPhone. All of the videos are the same format, but when any given video is 10 seconds or longer (I haven't stopped to measure, but that's roughly the length), I get the following message on the video's Flickr url:

  Bonk!
  For some reason we were unable to process this video.
  
  There may have been a temporary problem with our servers,
  or we may not be able to work with this video file

i.e. video playback for +10 second videos isn't working for me, and video format between playable and non-playable videos is the same. Any ideas what this might be?

Huh. I've never seen that message, and I upload 5 or 6 videos a day, all generally around 70-80 seconds long, and in the last few days close to 3 minutes long. Almost all of them made with my iPhone 5.

How are you uploading your pictures? One thing that has always kept me away from Flickr is that it always seemed very clunky to upload things (I wish it monitored folders like Dropbox)

Most people I know do it via some form of API integration with desktop photo managers. Lightroom/Aperture plugins come to mind (I think it's built-in to Lightroom now?)

The trick is also that most photo sharing sites don't actually have a good way to manually upload photos. Most (see: Instagram, Facebook, etc) excel only when you go through their apps.

I've used the site (drag and drop) and the Mac app. The site works as it should, it even starts uploading files before hitting submit, which speeds up the process. On the other hand the Mac app needs a big update, and by big I mean start from scratch. The app feels slow, packed with restrictions and errors, but I guess it was designed for the previous Flickr version.

RE: Map processing.

I had a similar issue uploading from Aperture and it turns out there are 2 privacy settings in Aperture that have to be changed in order to upload geolocation data. I'm not sure if that's your same problem, but privacy settings may be something to check.

I have ditched iPhoto as my archiving software and moved my +150GB of photos and videos to Flickr

Nice! Glad it works for you. I suspect that a lot of people won't be using Flickr for everything because of NSFW photos that shouldn't live off the hard drive. That's certainly a concern for me.

I'd definitely emphasize this: "a better Mac/Windows/Linux native app would go a long way for power users" is a huge one. Right now the OS X version doesn't simply default to intelligent settings, which is bothersome: it should start uploading as soon as a photo is selected (along the lines of Instagram).

>Nice! Glad it works for you. I suspect that a lot of people won't be using Flickr for everything because of NSFW photos that shouldn't live off the hard drive. That's certainly a concern for me.

This is the most tangential and unnecessary thing I've read on HN all the years that I've been here.

I mean, DOH! Your XXX candid shots will stay in your hard drive, how is that a surprise or relevant to the discussion?

> how is that a surprise or relevant to the discussion

Lots of people will have _some_ photos that would be a bad idea to post on Flickr. Anyone with children, for example, will certainly have photos that obviously shouldn't appear on a public website.

Which means there's a very large set of people who can't save _everything_ on Flickr, and since the original post said 'I have ditched iPhoto as my archiving software', it seems completely relevant.

It's a new class of humblebrag.

Maybe go back and re-read the comment, it's pretty obvious, but I can spell it out for the language challenged. He has photos that since some shouldn't be put on a public photo site, and since sorting them out isn't easy, a local hard drive based solution is still preferable for him. I should think a lot of people are in this place. They don't want their children on the web, or their girlfriend. I realize this country was founded by religious zealots he'll bent on eliminating any fun, but it's a fact of life that a lot of people have naked photos!

>Maybe go back and re-read the comment, it's pretty obvious, but I can spell it out for the language challenged.

We, "language challenged" don't need it spelt out thank you, we got it the first time.

It's not what the comments says we find problematic, is why he deemed it relevant to say it. I mean since it goes without saying that this situation applies to some people, and that not everybody can share everything in Flickr.

It's like posting on an article about a cool new email client, and somebody commenting "Alas, I can't use this for everything I mail, because a lot of that are physical packages, not just emails". Well, duh!

>I realize this country was founded by religious zealots he'll bent on eliminating any fun, but it's a fact of life that a lot of people have naked photos!

Well, that was not my issue with his comment. For one, I could not care less -- I'm from another country, and I won't even raise an eyebrow for people having naked photos (or any kind of fun for that matter).

Hahaha! To be honest I haven't got any personal NSFW pics, maybe I'm not living life to the fullest! Maybe it'll go on my bucket list.

To each their own! There may also be demographic factors at work: I'm 29 and was among the first of my friends in college to use a digital camera. Certainly among my peer cohort sending / receiving NSFW pics is a common practice, but I obviously can't speak for everyone.

I suspect there are a lot of people like me out there, who would be leery of wholesale uploading to Flickr, for fear of missing a couple shots that shouldn't be public. I do use Flickr, but only for selected shots: https://www.flickr.com/photos/91262622@N02/ , some of which are just website storage. Others are experiments; for example, I bought an Olympus OM-D recently and have spent a lot of time getting accustomed to the camera.

Same age. I'm clearly hanging out with the "wrong friends"

You should put your e-mail address (obfuscated) in your profile; I was about to send you a message about this that's too specific to be of interest to most HN readers.

Well now I want to know.

Can't you set the default for uploaded photos to private? That would seem to solve the issue of using it to archive everything, and then let you selectively choose what to share.

Flickr has reasonably fine-grained privacy controls. There are a lot of people who do post the occasional NSFW picture right in with their regular photostream.

You can mark it private to yourself only, or family, or contacts, and anyone not in those groups will never see it. You can and should also mark it as having a different "safety" level - by default people browse Flickr in a "safe" mode, unless they change their account settings. Such people, even if you've authorized them, will be prompted to click through. This is my favorite setting, as a clicked-through image has an emergency kitten escape button.

Finally there are "passes" for certain photos that can override any other security setting. So it could be private to you, but you can give someone a pass (a special URL) to see it. You can revoke the passes later if you want.

How did you manage to sync 150GB+ of photos into Flickr?

https://secure.flickr.com/tools/

In case you don't know about them, there are native Windows and Mac applications for uploading:

http://www.flickr.com/tools/

I've had lots of problems with the Mac uploader, fwiw. Huge CPU use, using less than 1/4 of my bandwidth, not adding to sets, uploading for a few minutes then simply stopping, uploading and then showing me dozens of errors that said a photo failed to upload (maybe one for each photo? I killed it before it had that chance) when in fact they did and were sitting in my photo stream...

The web uploader is way, way better in every way, and far faster, even with the problems I've had with it (if all photos aren't completely uploaded and processed, the 'upload' button tends to fail, but at least it fails atomically so I can just redo everything and not wonder what worked and what didn't).

I guess it's more of a problem than the Windows client. I've been using it the past few days and haven't had an issue with it.

This is the second coming of Flickr, a rebirth, and I couldn't be more excited. I'm not a power user of Flickr but a fan of what it once was back in the day. It was a real shame to see it be neglected after the acquisition but Marissa Mayer has arisen as it's saviour and beyond that the saviour of Yahoo. For anyone of us it was blatantly obvious how powerful Flickr was and how it could have continued to dominate the photo sharing social scene. For some reason Marissa's many predecessors failed to see this. Honestly, if utilised in the right way, Flickr is a Facebook killer. At the core of Facebook is it's photo sharing service, take that away from them and it's nothing but useless news items from people you wish you could block.

I'm as quick to dismiss re-skinning as any self-righteous dev, but this really hit the spot for Flickr. Flickr has always had a trove of useful photo archiving and categorizing features...sometimes I upload photos just because their geocoding editor is so convenient to use. Many of the other major photo services lack even simple group creation of photos (I.e. having a single photo endpoint both be in your "Family memories" and "Summer Vcation" albums)...and Flickr is by far the best in terms of making it easy to discover old, but significant photos.

This is not to say that this means Flickr will survive against Facebook, anymore than quality point and shoot pocket cameras have a chance of revival in our camera phone era. But Flickr, for now, definitely has the edge in quality and variety of photos. Even if you think Instagram filters are the best thing ever, the laws of physics (I.e. optics) limits the vast majority of their photos to a narrow range limit.

It's worth pointing out that Google Plus has had a better photo album design than Flickr for awhile now...I just tried them out (again) and saw that they, for the most part, have most of what makes Flickr useful. However, Gplus is decidedly focused on social sharing...it's hard to describe how this drastically impacts its use as a photo service...but using GPlus's photo feature was, for the first time in a long while, that I've just given up in frustration in the first five minutes. But this may be just a sign that I've finally hit old age.

You make some valid points. I was not aware of the Google+ photo album design but then again I was only a user when it was mandatory within Google. I don't personally know anyone outside of Google who uses it. Quite a few public figures have accounts but none of my friends are on there. Google+ feels like a very closed community. I've never seen anyone share links to albums on there whereas someone is always passing around a Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Imgur or Dropbox url.

Flickr is almost 10 years old. They've been around longer than anyone right? It only makes sense that they would have one of the most mature products relevant to people who want to maintain thousands of photos and share them.

I think we'll see a lot more interesting features for Flickr over the next year as social and mobile becomes a bigger priority for Yahoo.

You seem desperate to find reasons to dislike G+, so I'll help you out:

https://plus.google.com/communities/101451257802046158545

Oh I have nothing against G+ personally. I just don't use it and none of my friends do either. If there was a significant level of activity on there or better content discovery then perhaps I would use it.

Did you actually click on the link and look at the timestamps, or are you just blowing smoke?

> Flickr is almost 10 years old. They've been around longer than anyone right?

I think Smugmug might be as old as Flickr. They serve a different audience (some overlapping) but I imagine they'll be around longer than Flickr.

Another awesome thing about Flickr is how good its API is. If you look around for web apps and mobile apps that do something interesting with photos, they're almost always built using Flickr's API, for good reason: it's likely the most open, easy-to-use, well-designed API for photos out there.

To be fair, I think of Facebook more as a good microblogging platform than photo sharing. Unless more has changed than I expected, Flickr will still suck for that.

Is it really though? I wouldn't necessarily classify it as a microblogging or photo sharing platform. It's a good old fashioned social networking service which revolve around the world of profile pages. Early on they introduced photo albums and it became huge for photo sharing with your friends.

At the end of the day Flickr is about one thing, photos, and it needs to stay that way. Yahoo bought Tumblr, an actual microblogging platform, that's their way into the big social game.

I must be the only one who doesn't like Flickr's redesign. Sure, there's some good benefits from it, but...

- The lines and colors are harsh

- The grids on the single image view separate the page in non-equal thirds which feels awkward

- A lot of the data elements just run together without labels or any indication that they're links: http://i.imgur.com/Szy3Y7Z.png

- In 2013, I'm a bit shocked that the site isn't responsive, even if they do have a good mobile app: http://i.imgur.com/OMiqoZs.png

Everything else is okay, but only because they didn't actually redesign the majority of the site. Go to your groups, stats, etc. and you still see the nicely organized old Flickr. I'm a fairly active user and usually a big fan of redesigns and changes, but I don't see myself using it much now.

The reactions on the Flickr forums are heavily weighted against the redesign as well. There are lots of little problems I noticed (the links to fullscreen images on my feed would fullscreen a different image - fixed now), and hopefully they can run the problems down over the next few weeks. I'm equally aghast that their mobile website hasn't changed - come on guys. Overall, though, I really like it. I think it's a much more attractive public face.

OK, coming from a regular user:

- Your updates and activity entries are now mixed with other people's photos. That the photos are humongous and your updates are tiny one-liners doesn't help. You have to eye-grep and scroll the infinite image feed all the way to the bottom.

- At the same time, the right bar is occupied with such immensely useful things as "Flickr Blog", "People you may know" and a patch of empty space.

- Portrait orientation photos are disadvantaged in the feed layout.

- The documentation is not updated! It took me some time to find how to share BBCode in the new layout.

- Flickr is no longer Safe for Work! If any of your contacts posts a nude image, instead of tiny thumbnail it gets blown into all its high res goodness.

I think all of this is to compete with G+.

I think they are anticipating to merge it with Tumblr, forming one giant Thumblickr.

I dunno. One of the distinctive tacit features of Flickr is that the users have class.

I don't like the intermixing of photos and activity either, but you can get to a feed of activity only by mousing over the You menu in the top left and choosing Recent Activity, or go directly to http://www.flickr.com/activity

Regarding the SFW issue, I know Flickr has safety levels on photos...if you go to http://www.flickr.com/account/privacy/ there's a Content Filters section, but it's not clear if it would apply to your Contacts photostream or only searches/viewing another member directly. The setting says:

  Choose a "safety level" that will apply to any site-wide
  searches you perform or member pages you visit on Flickr.
  You can also set the sort of content you'd like to see.

Yes, you still can find the activity feed, but for practical purposes it's not on the front page anymore.

And I'm aware of content filters (since I disabled them). I don't feel like disabling/reenabling them every evening though.

The SFW issue has been a problem for me too. I've actually gone through and removed some family and friends as contacts because I don't want to have to worry about a half-screen NSFW photo pop up whenever I visit the site. Unfortunately this means that some of my family members can no longer see photos of my kids because they are marked as "family only."

The design might be modern but it is very distracting. The photos are surrounded closely by so many other photos that it is difficult to enjoy the beauty of a particular photo - it like a painting framed by a gold gilded frame which is more beautiful than the painting itself. Photography is an art form but in this new layout the art is overwhelmed by its 'evil' cousin, design.

The photos are surrounded closely by so many other photos that it is difficult to enjoy the beauty of a particular photo

On the "feed" screen, sure, because that's the point of a feed screen -- information density is key. You navigate to a specific photo for immersion.

Yes, but is it really necessary to have a feed screen in everything? There's already Facebook and Google+ for that. Flickr was nice because it was geard towards the less ephemeral. I guess "less ephemeral" goes against the zeitgeist.

But it is a feed of contact photos. The presentation makes sense.

With the flickr redesign (and, more importantly, the massive speed up of their backend servers), I've looked at dramatically more of my contact and group photos in the past two days than I did in years prior combined. It makes it so pleasant and effortless.

Agreed. I also miss being able to see photo titles for all of the displayed pictures. Now, in order to view the title, you must mouse over the photo which is a tedious task when there are hundreds of images.

Flickr has long had good features for sharing photos with Creative Commons licenses, and for searching based on license. Example: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=duck&l=commderiv&ct=...

I am happy this still works. If Flickr gets more popular with photographers, there will be even more photos available to Wikipedia and other free content projects.

With this new move, it seems that Flickr has made a turn towards the domain of 500px.com, also known as providing a stylish way of showcasing your photos. 500px actually used to have a design that was almost an exact match to what Flickr has now, and still looks remarkably similar.

I launched the beta of my own photo sharing site a few weeks back and the new Flickr design is somewhat similar in parts (flexible width/tiling photos). It seemed logical to me to adopt a Pinterest style grid for varying size images, rather than cropping them all to squares, though I notice that Flickr's design works more in terms of rows (https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=nature) than columns (https://photographer.io/categories/nature/photographs).

I'm very curious as to which style people find the easiest to browse.

I prefer your index view to theirs.

Just check your page on iPad - the header bar doesn't quite fit.

Sorry for the slow reply!

Aye, the layout is pretty broken on various smaller devices; a fix is in the works :)

I was a huge Flickr user from 2006-2009, but the service stayed in 2006, and so I moved on. The new changes are very exciting, but I still have one huge gripe. For a service about to turn 10 years old, being unable to change my URL is a deal breaker:

I registered my URL in high school, and now I'm starting my masters. My photos have improved, and so has my online identity.

I'm considering just switching to a new account, but the situation gave me no faith that Flickr was worth the effort. I look forward to a similar post when Flickr overhauls the backend.

I have this same gripe (about HN too, I suppose). Flickr claims that it's a philosophical thing - that URLs shouldn't change, so the username I chose when I first registered years ago should invariably be what I'm associated with for the rest of my life.

They likely do have the technical ability - when you initially register, your URL is represented by internal IDs (like 1234567@Z01), and you then choose your 'friendly' url. So it doesn't seem like a stretch that they could extend this to allow changes.

I understand the philosophy of keeping URLs active, but this is taking it to a new extreme. How about changing URLs every... 5 years or something ridiculous. I mean, they allow me to delete my account and that would kill URLs, so if it's between deletion or changing, what is the difference?

I find the website really slow when scrolling, as if the Javascript engine were choking.

And I'm using a 8GB RAM, i7 laptop.

What is the best tool to move all my photos from my local harddrives (unorganized currently) to Flickr in an easy way?

Probably a photo editing app. Adobe Lightroom has a Flickr plugin and I think a 30 day free trial. Import everything into Lightroom, and then set up the Flickr plugin, and then push everything to your account.

Flickr Uploadr works for me: http://www.flickr.com/tools/

last update in 2009...

And I have tried uploading, its not convenient at all. I have switched to google+ auto backup cause, I don't care about super high resolution since I am not a photographer and my upload speed sucks, I don't have to worry about manually uploading (though its also possible and very convenient). I just set it and forget it, it works in the background. The UI is very very nice, probably the best out there at the moment.

If flickr continues to make minor tweaks and comes in par with google+ photo looks and if my upload speed ever improves then I might consider moving to flickr. I am still a paid flickr member since 2007.

As I mentioned elsewhere[0], I've had lots of problems with their Mac uploader. I'd heartily recommend sticking with the web upload until it's updated, or using some third party tool (if you have tons, this might be the best option - web is limited to 200 at a time, not resumable if something goes wrong).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5758033

What I don't like about the new Flickr is that if you look at single photo, it's presented on a black background. While this is stylish, it's also feels distracting.

I miss the white background.

They're late to the game. I use Facebook, Google+, and Dropbox to share and view photos. Right now, Flickr doesn't give me any reason why I should switch.

Facebook is already good because everyone uses Facebook. It's a convenient way to tag, share, and comment on your photos of your friends.

Google+ has a great Communities section where people share and post photos to other people. Also, a lot of photographers hang out there.

Dropbox is great if you want people to download your photos. They automatically zip the photos up. Or if they have a dropbox account, you can share your folder with them.

I do like they give us a TB of space. I think if they make a way for Flickr to sync my Lightroom catalogue and all my RAWs, I think that would be a good use of that TB of space.

> They're late to the game. I use Facebook, Google+, and Dropbox to share and view photos. Right now, Flickr doesn't give me any reason why I should switch.

Let me give you one: full quality image.

Aside from Dropbox, the other services will compress your images. If you're an enthusiast and expect people to see your photos in all it's glory, that's important. And while Dropbox does that, it doesn't really supports the concept of galleries and such.

I think one of the interesting bits of info to bubble up since the redesign was launched was they said mid-March was when they geared up and went for it. Even if they had bits of it done they did a great deal in a small time frame and made massive improvements, and it's a great sign for Flickr because they've got room to get better.

I was a paid up Flickr Pro user for a while, and I actually let it expire this year as I'd decided it wasn't going anywhere but this has really got me interested again. Seems like Yahoo understands the potential value of Flickr, it might not compete against Facebook in terms of raw numbers and standard phone camera photos but there's potential to get the serious enthusiasts back.

Anyone know of a decent way to sync a set of photos in folders with Flickr? Mac or Linux...

On Linux, there is a photo app named shotwell. shotwell has a flickr plugin that works like a charm

/almost off topic/ I love the history Flick'r! Back in 04, made for gamers... A brillant turn over induced by users misusing the website uploading their holidays photos... A lesson to keep in mind, always listen to your customers!

Narcissism aside, why did they drop the view counts ? I used to find them useful to see what people actually look at and therefore which of my pictures work and which don't. Comments and 'likes' are good, but only view counts are honest.

I still see view count, under user avatar > "Taken" > Location > Device/Camera

For reference: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourusernamehere/stats/ should provide you with what you're looking for (although it may be a paid feature, I am not sure as I have been paying for flickr for years now...)

Stats are only available for (new and old) paying members

That's a Pro feature. You couldn't get stats on the free plan. And it seems, you can't get stats on their new replacement plans either. So far it looks like if you want stats, hope you're grandfathered in as a Pro user and keep on renewing.

Even with its new design, I find it surprisingly primitive. I don't have an account, but if i try to watch a set from some user as a slideshow, I have no option to scale the picture to my screen size (or at least no obvious way of doing it). Furthermore, when I rightclick, I get a list of sizes, but those links only embed a full-size picture into a new page. How useful is that.

Anyway, needs lots of improvements.

On an unrelated note, I am planning to make a backup of all my ebooks there, by storing them as pictures (something like https://github.com/meltingice/flickr-store, but better).

I wonder if Flickr API ToS is going to be updated. Last time I tried to integrate Flickr API, the rules were that you need special permission to use Flickr API for commercial use. I sent multiple emails and nothing happend.

Is this going to change?

I'm really picky about the way my photos are presented and right now flickr looks cleaner to me than G+ photos. Flickr puts the photos at the forefront and I also like the photostream idea in general.

For me though it feels really hard to switch everything over to Flickr bc there are other issues. For example, with Google I get auto backup of photos taken on my phone which, as we all know, is accounting for a greater and greater percentage of total pics taken.

So that's kind of a big deal to me.

Anyhow, assuming I wanted to transfer ALL of my photos from G+ to Flickr, how the hell would I go about doing that?!

Overall I really like the new Flickr layout, especially the main photo stream. It's more of a Portfolio that one can use rather than a collection of your photos one after the other.

What I don't like is the single photo page. The photo itself is nice and big, which I like. But once you scroll past it it's pretty much a cluster fuck of information that looks very much out of place. It looks like they didn't even bother to make it blend well with the page.

What are the privacy/access controls/sharing facilities like? Are the terms of service and privacy policy OK?

A convenient way to store online and share selected photos and videos would be good. I don't trust FB/Google with images of myself and my family or my geo-tags. I would automatically be similarly sceptical of Yahoo bet a quick glance at the main TOS didn't show anything obviously objectionable.

Flickr even offers geofencing that will prevent people from seeing any geotags within zones you mark out.

What drove me to flickr as opposed to other places years ago was the detailed access control it offers.

I can have public photos, photos of family events and pictures from drunken escapades on the same account and I can reliably and easily have just certain people have access to them via guest passes.

I wrote a thing about how your favourites are public and searchable with not opt-out on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5756487.

Other than that, Flickr is one of the most privacy-conscientious services I know—which is why it took me by surprise that there weren’t controls for my favourites.

Flickr’s (general) emphasis on privacy and ownership rights are their main features to me. Maybe those are just hold-overs from the early days when monetizing your users’ data weren’t in vogue, though.

Thanks, your link is to this topic though. I think you meant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5751591

I've also asked a question on that topic.

Thanks. Got a bit recursive there.

ARgh, and they still haven't released the Android app (and apparently the iOS app) in Japan.

It's available in Peru, it's available in Ukraine—but not Japan (which is much larger, richer, and almost certainly has more photographers than those two countries), and this has been the situation for ages.

WTF, Flickr...

[And unfortunately Flickr has always had a very annoying habit of completely stonewalling on such issues.]

I like the new Flickr. Its made me want to use it again. Both for the large amount of storage, the new Android app and the website. I've not had time to fully try everything out yet.

Facebook's dominance may mean its too little too late except for the crowd who detest using Facebook (myself included).

It's great to see Yahoo! in the news so often. Growing up in the first Internet boom, Yahoo! still holds a place in my heart as my first search engine and homepage.

Flickr has been a great asset for Yahoo! but has lost much of its momentum, especially with the rising popularity of Pinterest.

This is a really good model of product resurrection. Now lets what yahoo do more of the same thing.

What I'm wondering is: are the android and iOS apps being developed separately now?

Can someone comment on the new flickr vs PIcasa?

So far I'm liking Flickr better, though I've only dipped my toe in. Uploads (on the site, see [0]) are fast, organizing is fast (though the batch organize is weird IMO), everything can be made private by default easily, and ONE TERABYTE OF STORAGE. It's also much better for browsing than Picasa Web Albums, which are functional but don't really do it well. Flickr makes browsing quite pretty (in a good way, mostly) and generally better for showing your photos to someone.

Picasa the website is fine, and does just about everything right, though generally not in the most ideal way. Privacy controls are rich and you can still link directly to a photo to bypass (and revoke existing links). Albums are functional, face tags are functional (though now they use G+ accounts if you link to contacts... not happy, but I guess it works), comments are a bit hidden but work. I have several gigabytes in it (and bought more), no problems, no complaints. Main downside is it has definitely not been updated along with the rest of Google's properties, and it integrates very poorly for the most part (notifications, accounts, weird partial G+ linkage...).

Picasa the application is... different, but decent. It's surprisingly good in a number of ways, and I'd recommend it over iPhoto if only because iPhoto has routinely lost my data during updates, and slows to a crawl after several thousand photos. Picasa stays fast, searches quickly, organizes oddly but effectively. It leaves your photos in folders that (basically) match the UI, which may or may not be a good thing for you.

Picasa the application when synced to your Google account is slick 95% of the time (it all works as you'd expect), and a total hell-hole of duplication, sync failing, and filename mangling the remaining 5% (though most of that only rears its head when you hook it up for the first time). The 'Sync to web' on/off switch for each album is handy when it works, but hasn't generally handled turning on dozens at once.

I would honestly recommend against the syncing aspect of it, though sadly it's a major selling point. If you can hook it up once and leave it that way you probably won't have much trouble, but I did a lot of reconnecting, and it definitely got confused sometimes.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5758033

Flickr seems to be down at the moment.

But i still prefer the old design

All said and done, somehow I feel it looks a little Instagrammy.

- More clutter

- Less clean

- Congested, as in a little border would have done no harm.

- Looks loud but maybe that's just Instagrammatical.

- For me, at least, the home page takes longer to load.

- Maybe earlier they had the site built for photographers and now they have made it for everyone

- just like lady Mayer said.

Where are you getting that? It looks more like Pinterest than Instagram. There's less whitespace, but the old design was more complicated. It's more colorful now and there is more focus on the photos.

It is pretty nice but navigation between photos still feels a little clunky. I'd have expected the 'next' and 'previous' arrows to slide/load in the pre-loaded image rather than generating a full page refresh.

Still very nice all in all though and a terabyte of free space makes it an easy choice for the default place to store all your photos. Goodbye iCloud for me.

FWIW, yesterday I saw a "fail whale" page on Flickr for the first time ever (though it was of a baby panda). I don't know if that's a consequence of infrastructure changes or increased traffic...I don't think it's the latter but perhaps the increase number of fetches on each normal page load is causing a burden.

Also, the simple prev/nav between single photos has always been unacceptably slow...hopefully that gets fixed, as that's also kind of key to the viewing experience

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