Flickr stagnation and withdrawal

flickr

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.

smugmug

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.

smugmug2

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!