How Flickr needs to change
I use and enjoy Flickr. But with each passing month it worries me more that when I visit a photo page on the Yahoo photo-sharing site, it looks essentially identical to when I first started using it four years ago.
Flickr has typical online photo site abilities to upload, share, and print photos. What sets it apart, though, are features that make Flickr a community: discussions in comments below photos, groups for like-minded photographers to share their work, and social networking attributes that let people stay on top of their contacts' doings.
Flickr revamped members' home pages starting last September, drawing more attention to recent activity such as people who added you as a contact or who commented on your photos. The change was smart: Flickr was a socially wired site before social networking became all the rage, and photography is a great way for people to stay engaged with their friends and relations.
But now it's time for the rest of the upgrade. Here's what pains me most:
• The photo page. With Flickr, you can have large photos or you can have comments and navigation, but you can't have both. Photos are best viewed larger than Flickr's default 500-pixels width. Clicking "all sizes" to see lavishly large views sends you down browser dead end: you'll have to click the back button when it's time to add comments or navigate to the next photo.
• The photostream page. Flickr organizes your photos as one giant filmstrip called the photostream. But viewing somebody's most recent shots on the photostream page again forces you back into the small-monitor past. The default view for me shows 18 small photos, 10 sets, and an ocean of white space even on my laptop.
• The profile page. I rarely look at people's profile pages unless I'm trying to contact them or figure out who's behind a cryptic username. But there should be a way to make the profile page the anchor of a Flickr user's online identity, the public face presented to Flickr users. People judge others by their photostreams, which in my case these days is more about family photos than works of art or moving photojournalism, so I'd like to show them an automatically updated page of my top picks instead.
Fortunately, Flickr is working on several improvements detailed below by product strategy chief Matthew Rothenberg. But he kept mum about timing: "We're planning to be progressively rolling out enhancements over time," he said.
Show 'em how it's done
"Innovation happens elsewhere" is a worn-out Silicon Valley business cliche, but there's some truth to it. It's especially appropriate for Flickr, because the site lets others built atop it using Flickr's API, or application programming interface. Tasks such as flipping through a person's photos, adding comments, looking up interesting shots, and uploading photos all can be done without having to touch Flickr directly.
The Flickroom beta software presents a new face on Yahoo's photo-sharing site.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)The power of the Flickr API was shown most clearly to me a year and a half ago, when I tried Photophlow, a site that makes Flickr into a photo-centric chat room. Photophlow lets people collectively breeze through photos, marking photos as favorites and leaving comments as they go
Now there's a new kid in town with some other ideas, a beta application called Flickroom. It's built atop Adobe Systems' AIR foundation and presents a fashionably dark background for viewing pictures. There are plenty of icons and control panels to traverse photos, search photos, join a chat room, and see what your contacts are up to.
Flickroom has some bugs and idiosyncrasies, and fundamentally it's not shifting any Flickr paradigms beyond the user interface. But it does manage to illustrate what can be done with Flickr's raw material. I especially liked the flip through the large sizes of a user's photos.
Another good example of what can be done with Flickr's API is Darckr, which shows what Flickr (not entirely badly) believes to be your most interesting shots set off against a black background. I'm not going to be showing my photostream as my portfolio, but my interesting shots on Darckr aren't so mundane.
There are plenty more. Photoshop.com from Adobe, for example, not only gives a new interface to Flickr but lets you edit your photos, too.
Google's Picasa Web Albums is set up more for showing family pictures than for spawning a community of macro or Holga photography, but it can teach Flickr a thing or two. Google boasted in June of a revamp that makes photos load much faster, even at full-screen size, and it wasn't idle boasting. And even if Picasa photos are framed by more clutter than Flickr's photos, at least the photos can be viewed larger.
Photoshop.com offers online image editing and sharing.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
The good news
Flickr may not be moving fast enough for me, but happily, it's not standing still, either.
"The core photo-sharing experience on Flickr is the area we want to spend most of our time on now," Rothenberg said. He pointed toward "the photo page in particular, the photostream, photos from your contacts--all aspects of site core to the photo-sharing mission of Flickr but that haven't really been brought in line."
Also, probably not just to throw me a bone because I'm a fan of location tags in photos, he added, "Even geotagging, (we'd like) to bring it more into the core experience."
He couldn't comment on my specific gripes about wasted screen real estate, though he did mount a bit defense of white space. However, it's clear Flickr understands the issue, because he did take pains to mention Flickr's new search tool launched Tuesday. It can take advantage of available screen size.
Photophlow, though its development is dormant for now, can make it fun for groups to browse and comment on Flickr pictures.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Flickr's absolute priority is a page on which the photo looks good, but the site must also balance that with social and navigational features. "There's a large amount of information we store and display and allow people to interact with--sizes, licensing, location information, comments, favoriting," he said. "We want to make all those options as easy and efficient as possible."
Flickr also wants to improve navigation and organization, two areas that I believe the computer industry always will face. Rothenberg
Lowered expectations
Rothenberg lowered my hopes regarding a handful of other areas I could see improved.
• Threaded comments: I find it hard to traverse longer discussions, in which people sometimes try to address each other with the @username convention, but Rothenberg pointed out fairly that most photos don't have such complicated discussions. "For most people it's question of whether getting any comments on the photo," he said. "We want to make that social aspect of photos matter to members more than it does today."
• Beefed-up Flickrmail: Flickr isn't designed to replace Yahoo Mail or Gmail, he said, but that doesn't mean e-mail and photos don't go together (as Yahoo's acquisition of Xoopit indicates). Rothenberg hinted at future integration: "For a large percentage of people on the Internet, the way they share photos is through e-mail. For Flickr to be the most useful site for our members, it needs to work well with all the ways they share photos."
• Face recognition: A Google-like approach to face recognition doesn't look likely, either. Facebook's social approach to getting people identified in photos is more in keeping with Flickr's style than Google's computer-based method. "We try to optimize toward social interactions rather than algorithms," he said.
• Longer video: Flickr is happy with its 90-second video limit, which was set not because of any hardware limits at Yahoo but because of an aesthetic liking for what Rothenberg terms "moving photos."
• Tags drawn from metadata: I'd love to sift images by camera, lens, shutter speed, and the like, which is information Flickr extracts from data cameras automatically embed in most photos. That's a technical matter Flickr has pondered, but "we don't have any immediate plans," Rothenberg said. "In general we want to make it easier to find the photos most important to you on Flickr. There are other areas we can improve on more immediately."
None of these are really grating issues for me, though, and I can see Rothenberg's point of view. So I'll willingly cut Flickr slack here.
As for the other fixes, I'll console myself that Rothenberg and I see eye to eye when it comes to the site's vision and priority: "Flickr needs to be the best place to be a photo if you're a photo."
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
Flickr's default image size could be a bit larger now that most of us are using high-res monitors, though.
As for all the social networking stuff, it sounds like you want Flickr to be Facebook and I just don't think that's a good strategy. Whatever Flickr does should be completely photo-centric - it should be for the good of the photos. They're never going to compete with Facebook on the social aspects of photos, so what they should really be doing is trying to make their site the best photo hosting service possible. I agree their editing functionality is clumsy right now and could use a revamp. And the Photostreams could definitely use a bit more AJAX to streamline the presentation.
Everything else is not really their core business, and I hope they don't waste their time on it.
Flickr Rocks!
HMK
Where is the "Other people who "favourited this photo" section?
Where is the "People that like this picture also liked these pictures" section?
Where is the "More photos like this" section?
Why is there no Diggs for tags or Rate this Photo for tags? If you subscribe to a BBQ or Steak group to see what others are cooking you will soon learn that there are numerous of these groups and none of them are perfect. You need to subscribe to all of them and sit and browse through the numerous duplicates. I would love a stream that is voted on by all the users so I can have an easier time discovering good photos. Groups will still be used for more obscure topics.
I also have tons of small issues, like why when I login do I get redirected to my home page and not to the photo I had to login to view, and why do I have to go to the photostream to get to the user profile why can't I get to the user profile from the photo I am viewing? And also, speed. Speed. Speed.
But yes, it looks exactly like it did when I first found Flickr, still like it but it could be so much better.
- let us select what size to display for each photo when clicking through to the photo page. I disable 'all sizes' since I don't want people downloading full-res images, but there are times I want to show a larger image.
- give us more flexibility on how our pages look. I'd not like to see it end up with the horrific aesthetics of myspace, but there are a lot of creative folks out there who would like to showcase their talents, I'm sure.
- provide a portfolio display tool of some kind that could stand on its own within flickr or be embedded in a website. There are website tools available, but there's room for a flickr-developed entity. It'd make my organizational life easier.
- related to the above, flickr is a great sharing tool for 'this is my latest mountain climb or family vacation' but they ought to think about catering to the pro or pro-am in sharing or selling their work. It'd be interesting to see what the market share is for 'casual' sharing--where do people do this? facebook, a vendor site like snapfish or kodak, or one of the sites like flickr, picasa, smugmug, photobucket, et al. I think there's room to increase the sophistication level of capabilities. Not that I'm keen on tracking yet another thing, but it'll be interesting to see how Adobe's online editing tools fit into the social sphere.
or how to bloat flickr.
Thanks but no, Flickr is not a social site in the concept of facebook or myspace.
It would be nice to be able to surf contacts by group or genre. Specifically, I'd like to be able to bucket people by "personal friends" and "pro photographers" and "nature photographers" so I can surf what I want by what I want to see. It's hard to do this once you have a LOT of contacts.
Also, for a property owned by a search engine, it is amazing that Flickr photos don't rank higher in search engine results. You can do a search for a photo in Google or even Yahoo, but Flickr isn't really well represented in the search engine results page. Even if you tag your photos, you don't get high in the results, which is amazing, since you can include a lot of tags and a description about each photo. They need to somehow make it easier for search engines (or at least Yahoo) to spider and index photos from Flickr.
I am in the first year of my pro account. If they don't improve, I dont know if I will keep paying for the service.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/buddyscalera/
When i found out photobucket allows unlimited uploads, i new where my photo sharing website home was. Yes photobucket has ads, and yes FireFox has ad-block Plus.
:)
You can get around the 200 picture limit by starting your own group and putting all of your pictures in it. Also, just because you have turned off downloads don't think that people can't download your pictures. There are Firefox extensions that make downloading as simple as clicking a link.
Not to mention IE extensions well :)
Yahoo will stick its head in the sand and is so busy focusing on keeping the company running that they have no time to innovate.
The biggest improvement yahoo could make is to sell it to Google, or another large organization that has the commitment to innovate, and to sink the cash in where it counts.
This lack of innovation all goes back to Yahoo being a crap company run by bean counters instead of innovators.
People like to knock flickr as having an unfriendly user interface, but I've never seen that to be a problem. Create sets and collections. With their organizer tool, it does not take very long at all to group your photos and tag them in easy to navigate folders. It works much like a folder organizing system on a PC or Mac.
Things I like from the comments here:
Better organizing of contacts and groups, controllable by each user.
Letting pro/am people sell prints.
Picture rating by stars.
My suggestion:
Allowing batch downloading of personal photos so that flickr can act as an off-site backup of my edited .jpg files.
More native tracking tools so that we can see better data on who looks at our photos, something more than just raw numbers.
Letting users sell photos.
A bit more thought plus positive reactions to members' well thought out concerns would not go amiss. Just look through Flickr Ideas to see the number of totally ignored complaints on this issue.
Did you see that you can now upload videos to Potoshop.com ? I did a review here, the only thing I don't like is that you can't embed the videos like you can with the photos.
http://dest.in/destin/upload-share-videos-photoshop-com/
- by eccles1214 August 27, 2009 8:15 AM PDT
- I've been using Flickr for the past year or so, and I am a bit unhappy with it.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (27 Comments)I can't do all the things I want, and flickr limits how much I can upload, without going Pro account.
I wish the presentation of photos had more choices.
I wish Flickr would allow black or grey backgrounds; people in the Flickr community have been clamoring for the latter for years, but Flickr won't allow this. They also want a more elegant interface to go with a more elegant presentation. Again, Flickr lags on making any meaningful changes. Probably because it is owned by yahoo, and those yahoos don't know what they are doing.
No wonder competing sites such as SmugMug.com have taken the lead. SmugMug costs $, but look at how nice they show off photos. I wish Flickr were like a combo of Picasa and SmugMug.