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Dave Wild
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Dave Wild
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Dave Wild
Flickr stagnation and withdrawal
The screen shot above is what one of my photographs looks like on Flickr when viewed in a maximised browser on a 24” monitor. Five years ago, monitors were generally smaller and the Flickr pages looked quite nicely designed and the images seemed to be a reasonable size. As luck would have it, I found an old photo that contains Flickr running on a 17” monitor. This photo was taken in 2005 which was the year I started using the site. 5 years later, the photo pages are virtually unchanged.
If I compare the Flickr screen shot at the top with what the same image looks like on SmugMug – again on a 24” browser, maximised, much more is made of the available space.
Also, clicking on the main image, does a ‘lights-out’ enlargement to make it fill as much as the browser window as possible and fading out the background.
It’s not just the layout of the pages on Flickr that are well overdue for an overhaul – here’s a list of other irritations:
- The speed of the site. It can be painfully slow sometimes, it sucks the joy out of browsing photos because of how long it takes to flick between pages and images.
- The UK satellite maps are dreadful. When Flickr first introduced geotagging, the Yahoo maps they chose to use had really rough looking barely detailed maps in most of the areas I was interested in. Years later they are still like that – virtually unusable.
- The attitude of Flickr towards their customers. It’s hard to know if this is all Yahoo these days or what – but there are countless tales of people having their accounts marked unsafe, or even deleted without any kind of discussion or right of appeal.
- The popularity of the site has diluted the community aspect – This might be a bit of “this club was better before it was popular” type of thing – BUT – there is a lot to be said for smaller and well managed compared to catering for the millions. The help forums and a lot of the groups are depressing to read these days.
- Unable to retrieve your complete data – It’s possible using third party tools to re-download your photos should you wish, but, it’s much harder to download your photos and also the information that was added after it was uploaded to Flickr. For instance, extra tags, possible extra geo-data, people in the photo and the comments. It really ought to be possible to download an offline archive of your photos with this extra data.
So, for various reasons I have a few years left of paid Flickr account use. I’m gradually sorting through my photos that were uploaded to Flickr and putting them online at http://publicenergy.co.uk using SmugMug to make it work.
My plan is to wind down what gets posted to Flickr and use publicenergy.co.uk as my main online photo storage site. notsowildlife.com will continue to serve as my animal photo specific site.
I have no intention of actually deleting my Flickr account – although I’ll review that decision when my pro account expires in a few years time. For the time being I still need to keep tabs on friends uploading photos there, and it might be inconvenient for the small group of other Flickr users I really care about to keep tabs on my photos.
For me, my favourite part of this whole photography hobby is actually going out and taking the photos – it is nice when other people see them and like them of course. The not so wild animal thing has had lots of nice feedback from people. Comments left on photos are one thing, but it’s the odd comment from people who have really reacted that I’ve enjoyed the most. People telling me that they’ve had to put one of my cow photos up in their new born daughter’s nursery for example. Somebody telling me their student produced a painting based on one of my cow photos. Being asked how close I get to ducks! or how I clean chewed up grass spat by llamas from my camera! These are enjoyable reactions I won’t forget.
Flickr has been good socially too – I know quite a lot of good people as a result of Flickr meetups – I think that these events peaked a few years ago too – the love for Flickr is vanishing – so I’m glad I was around at the best time and still have a lot of friendships as a result.
We’ll see how it all goes!
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Dave Wild
White Post Farm Photos
I was recently asked to take some photos for White Post Farm. What they wanted was some extra photos in the style that I’ve kind of gotten myself in to over the last few years – i.e. fairly silly close-ups that hopefully show some of the animal’s personality.
I had two visits – the first one was very quick because it chucked it down about an hour after I arrived. The skies were quite dark and grey too so I wasn’t that happy with the resulting photos. I got the opportunity to have a second visit on Friday and the weather was lovely. A very low winter sun posed problems of it’s own, but it was preferable to dark grey skies with poor lighting overall.
There are a number of shots of that one llama who used every trick in the book to get food out of me – mostly successfully!
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Dave Wild
I don’t like having a go at script reading call centre people but…
When I changed mobile contracts recently, I phoned my old network (Three) and told them to cancel the contract and was forced to listen as the person on the phone went through their list of special offers to keep me as a customer. Despite me saying that I just wanted to cancel and wasn’t interested, they insisted on carrying on. After a very long time it transpired that I had phoned a few days early so to avoid a charge I had to phone back.
When I phoned back, I had to listen to all of the same stuff, despite telling the person that I’d already listened to it before – this was extremely tedious but I was glad to be eventually shut of them.
Unfortunately cancelling the contract puts me on the list to be called back to go through this again. I explained to the first caller yesterday that everything was already sorted, I had no need of the contract or any other offers – but she continued to try the things on her script. I had to stop her again and tell her that she was wasting her time because I definitely didn’t want the number or the contract at all – so it didn’t matter how cheap it was or what offers they had.
The next day I get another call with the same kind of questions being asked. This time I explained to the man that this was the fourth time I’ve been through this script with somebody and each time I’ve explained that I have no interest in any of the products.
He said “I understand that” – and then carried on with the script!
I said excuse me, did you understand what I just said to you? Because you’ve completely ignored me and carried on trying to sell me stuff. He said yes and carried on again!
By the end of this I was raising my voice.
I don’t think good customer service is ignoring everything the customer says in order to try and sell them stuff – but throughout my life, all of the dealings I’ve had with any mobile phone company has led me to the conclusion that they’re all bastards!
If they phone back again, I might say something rude ;)
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Dave Wild
SKY TV on the XBOX 360
The Sky Player on the Xbox 360
Positive Point
- The Interface is very nicely done.
Negative Points:
- The quality of the streaming is really bad (it’s also bad on the PC player)
- The selection of channels in the online subscription can only be described as shite – If you think of Sky TV, most people would probably want the big programmes that get stuck on Sky One – they are nowhere near this bizarre selection of bottom rung channels.
- Even if you do find something on there worth watching – you might get a notice saying that the programme isn’t being broadcast online – you’re told this in a VHS rental video ‘upcoming features’ style – it looks so nasty and amateurish.
- The initial offer when it became available via the Xbox was for 3 months for the price of two – this seemed like a cheap way to lock people in to 3 months of the service before they could escape.
- The Zune Marketplace can quite happily stream films at 1080p with Dolby Digital sound – this makes the Sky service even more of a joke as it shows it up, raises it’s leg and pisses all over it.
So, reading between the lines there, it’s safe to say I didn’t like it. It’d need a big channel like Sky One, streamed in HD to the quality of the Zune Marketplace to make it worth considering. At the moment it’s just awful.
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Dave Wild
notsowildlife.com updated
I’ve done some tidying up on notsowildlife.com recently. Since I decided to rip out all of the text only posts and move them here, I had to make sure that notsowildlife.com looked ok with just the image posts. So I started with the latest release of the theme and re-applied the relevant changes from before. I also ended up moving things around because it was just the images, so I think it’s better now and seems tighter.
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Dave Wild
Flu
I love the first question/answer choices on the NHS swine flu questionnaire – is the patient unconscious or impossible to wake up? – if that’s the case, why are you filling in questionnaires on the web?
My skin hasn’t gone icy, I’ve not turned blue or any of the other things in their list – I do seem to have some kind of flu though that has started to wane, so I reckon I’ll be back to normal in a day or two :)
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Dave Wild
Experiences of rolling out Windows
A lot of people all over the Internet are saying Windows 7 is wonderful. Because of my work, I’ve been testing it for some time and we’re gradually moving people to it at work. Every person who has used it thinks it’s great – we’ve had no negative feedback at all. Even a few people who I would have thought might be the most resistant to changes.
This is quite remarkable really. When we started moving people to Vista in early 2007, the experience was different. Some people moaned about it, didn’t like it, wanted to go back to XP. The strange thing about that though, was when I asked somebody what their actual problems were, they tended not to be problems at all. I remember one used saying to me – “Vista makes things much harder – I have to go hunting for my documents all the time” – I asked what they meant, clicked on the start menu, then clicked ‘Documents’ and up they popped. What other problems have you got with it? Erm, I can’t think of any at the moment.
This not liking Vista despite not really having problems with it was really puzzling. Even the error reporting that I could see across all of our desktop computers showed that the Vista machines were more reliable and produced less problems – the 64bit version especially seemed to be miles in front of anything else we’d used in the past.
I think that a lot of the attitude towards it was based on the negative things that were being said online and in magazines. It’s still quite hard to find hard evidence of actual problems rather than just a general tone of dislike. A few things I’ve read recently have remarked on the fact that Windows Vista started off getting lots of good reviews before people turned on it. I suspect a lot of it is just a general dislike of change. If you ever want to see ridiculous over-reactions to software changes, look in the Flickr help forums after they add a feature or change the layout of a page – you’d think they’d started murdering babies or something!
If our positive users of Windows 7 are going through a honeymoon period, then some of them are still in it after nearly 3 months – and there isn’t the slightest hint of it ending.
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Dave Wild
A Pox On The Pioneers
Since it was released on the Rotters Golf Club web site about a month ago, I’ve been listening to Andrew Weatherall’s album, A Pox On The Pioneers quite a lot. There’s something there that just does it for me!
You can hear it on Spotify, preview the tracks here (a minute or two per track), or buy it for a fiver from Rotters Golf Club – which is a massive bargain – and 3 quid cheaper than 7digital ;).
I’ve liked Andrew Weatherall’s stuff for a very long time – I loved The Sabres of Paradise and Two Lone Swordsmen – but I remember buying a Two Lone Swordsmen album from HMV (this was a long time ago) and expecting more of the electronic stuff that I was used to from the earlier albums and instead finding something very different – with singing on it and everything! I think I was quite horrified at the time and thought they’d chucked everything away.
In retrospect, I like the stuff after that change more than the earlier stuff. In particular their Wrong Meeting II album.
I think The Pox On The Pioneers is my favourite piece of Andrew Weatherall’s work though (and I had plenty of favourites before!). Not a low moment or filler to be found – it’s just lovely – and such a breath of fresh air.
premiump, 
Primed Minister, 
John and 5 others are discussing. 
Nick 12:28 pm on January 28, 2010 Permalink |
I feel your pain and recently wrote about issues I had with Flickr; finishing with a plea for them to either sell the service or shove some money at it and actually do something.
Its a really hard call as the community aspects (when they work) are good, but the actual photo sharing is abismal at best. The service has barely changed since 2004 when it launched apart from adding features that help them make money. Such a basic site with little to no investment (and a small and unresponsive support team) must be a huge money cow for Yahoo. Which is sadly, probably why they can’t be bothered changing anything.
Off to have a look at Smugmug now!
Dave Wild 12:38 pm on January 28, 2010 Permalink |
SmugMug definitely doesn’t have a community to match Flickr by a very long way. It does however provide a fairly modern photo browsing web site that you can get working on your own domain name. It seemed the best option for me – less hassle than actually hosting and looking after something.
Nick 1:24 pm on January 28, 2010 Permalink
Perhaps a business opportunity to set up some competition for some photography minded IT geeks (or IT minded photography geeks)!?
Michael Randall 8:29 pm on January 31, 2010 Permalink |
Very nicely put, Dave. I’ve been somewhat unhappy with Flickr’s display for a while now, and stories of people’s accounts being deleted without warning or recourse make me nervous. The one thing that had always put me off SmugMug was that there didn’t seem to be a way to show your most recent photos – but your site has that.
Knowing that was possible was enough to get me to try it out – I’m now trialling it, and may switch to it for most of my photos too.
For the moment, at least, it’s at http://www.pigpog.co.uk – I may try linking it neatly in to PigPog next week.
Dave Wild 8:52 pm on January 31, 2010 Permalink |
Looking at the SmugMug blog, they seem to have a steady rate of improvements – especially recently. I think any extra features now will be a bonus – I’m enjoying the site’s speed and being able to see the photos larger by default. Good photos look much better larger – looking at a lot of my old ones though, making them larger means you can see how rough they are – the 500 pixel size on Flickr brushed a lot of problems under the carpet out of view! :)
Have fun with it during your trial. I’m still finding things out and there seems to be lots of info about customizing the pages in their forums that I’ve not really looked at yet – I’m going to be concerned with sorting out all of the old images I want to move there that are currently very disorganised – I’m trying to avoid a “2000 random photos taken during the last 10 years” gallery!
Austen 4:27 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink |
Hey there Dave.
Like yourself i have started trialling other sites, but as of yet havent settled on one. For me the reasons for looking around are different to some of yours, but i too realise that Flickr is past its sell by date, and soon to be passed its use by date. :-)
I was never a big browser of others photos but yours were ones that always put a smile on my face and im sure they will continue to do just that.
And it has been great meeting you a few times (because of Flickr) and of course lots of other people. Best of luck with your plans to sort your photos out properley. It sounds too much like real hard work for me. :-)
Dave Wild 4:43 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink |
Well, I’m going to continue to keep tabs on Flickr and the contacts and friends there so I still see their photos, meet up and all of that kind of stuff.
As for difficulty in moving, it was fairly easy – I found a Firefox add-on called Smugglr which copied all of my sets in to galleries on the new site – I do have a big pile of photos I never organised that I need to go through, but I can do that gradually – there’s no real rush! Deciding to do it was probably more difficult than actually doing it.
Milo42 5:58 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink
Interesting post I had not given much consideration to flickr in that respect guess I’m always to busy to look in depth at it. You raise some good points. I have never seen smug mug so I will check it out in more depth when I can find time.
The great news is that it has an RSS feed so I have hooked up the RSS feed of your pictures to my google reader and I’m sorted I will see the images you post.
Dave Wild 6:26 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink
I think there are plenty of alternatives, but looking at the SmugMug blog, they seemed to have a bit of drive to make their product better and my limited experience of their forums and support looks good too.
I already track the ‘friends’ Flickr RSS feed – which is basically Flickr contacts that I really care about rather than the hundreds I added years ago out of politeness! – I think I’m going to go through it and subscribe to the individuals though because I think things fall through the cracks and it’ll be good for me to get in to the habit of keeping track of photos where ever they are.
Milo42 9:27 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink |
Yes I had come to realise I was missing new pics relying on the flickr email and have slowly been adding RSS feeds. RSS seems to be a better way to go. It will be interesting to see how you get on with SmugMug
Primed Minister 12:37 am on February 5, 2010 Permalink |
Hi Dave,
Sorry to hear you’re withdrawing from Flickr as I enjoy looking at your photostream, however I can relate. I agree that an overhaul is overdue. As websites go Flickr is quite a basic site now and at times it is slow, it could be a lot slicker all round really. A ‘light box’ feature for instance where the image ‘expands’ large above the web page would be a good one. How hard would that be to implement? Surely Yahoo have the time and resources? The geotagging, I agree with you, I gave up geotagging my images a while back as the maps simply aren’t detailed enough to pinpoint an exact location. Also grey seems to complement images better, it looks more neutral, yet we still view our images on Flickr against stark white by default.
One of the things I enjoy about Flickr though, like everyone else, is reading people’s comments but what I regard as spamming, i.e . the addition of graphics and icons or replacement of words for meaningless icons is quite irritating. On some photostreams I don’t bother to leave a comment at all because of all the graphics and award icons you have to sift through to get to the actual ‘dialogue’. It’s a shame there hasn’t been some kind of filtering setup to automatically ban the graphics from appearing or a toggle on/off feature to make it optional.
For all its flaws I’ll carry on using Flickr until I’m convinced of switching to a suitable alternative. SmugMug sounds interesting although I haven’t got the time to work on my own website. Credit to you for looking into other alternatives.
Cheers, Paul.
premiump 12:34 pm on February 5, 2010 Permalink |
Yep, all good reasons Dave, and control of your own content is always something you have been really good at. As it goes, I let my Pro account lapse before Christmas, intentionally removing over 500 photo’s to keep it within the free “viewable” limit.
I can’t say I have missed it.