This was going to be another random Flickr trawl post, right up until last night when I got home from class. that's when I discovered the new user "interface" on Flickr. I'll admit it, I'm a late adopter. I always have been. I started using Flickr after Yahoo bought them. I have no idea what the "good old days" were like. But I do know that once I figured out how to reverse the previous round of upgrades, I did. I like looking at thumbnails. It allows me to surf through images faster. I don't really need to see images that are all strung together. This current round of upgrades marginalizes everything I liked about Flickr. Besides, if you just bought Tumblr for $1.1 BILLION why do you need to make Flickr look just the same? And there seems no way to convert back. While the terabyte of free space is nice I just upgraded to a pro account recently. So that makes that $25 semi-wasted. The Lego community seems to feel the same. I guess only time will tell if things stay the same or we go back to the way things were before. Just in case, does anyone know of a hosting site that looks like Flickr used to?
Here's a few articles for your reading enjoyment. Here's an article on how Yahoo screwed up Flickr. Here's an article on the upgrades to Flickr and the differences between them and the other main photo sites. Another article on the Flickr Pro accounts. Even The Brothers Brick don't know what to think.
I think there are things to debate about the interface. I personally like it for the type of interaction I usually have with Flickr. Any UI change is usually accompanied by a certain amount of "Why Wasn't I Consulted?" but we'll see how it shakes out.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand I don't think complaints about price are reasonable. Flickr has always been an absurdly good deal. I have mostly worried that they were not charging enough at $50 a year to survive. We have become accustomed to the Google model and it has distorted our sense of fair play. It costs money to build and maintain services like this. Anyone giving it to you for free is selling you (or failing to and about to disappear).
As to your concern about your Pro membership, there is a pretty good FAQ about it here: http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/#150487675
All that aside, yay for lego robots!
Cheers, Alex