Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Is Flickr "awesome again,"?

Marissa Mayer has stated one of her first task at Yahoo, is to make flickr awesome again. On Monday Yahoo! announced a take over of tumblr and also a significant makeover of the flickr service. She seems to be on her way, but I reserve judgement on whether the awesomeness has returned.The changes are in fact Biggr than I expected and the format so overwhelmingly different you might just think you are in the wrong place when you first arrive.
  • Biggr. Your terabyte of free space is massive, and includes extending the limit on video to 3 minutes of HD video. My old photos dating back to 2005 are back on-line again. This is Big.there is no doubt about that, it dwarfs my post last week about all the free cloud photo storage. Essentially you are getting a free external “cloud” harddrive (albeit with some very real bandwidth limitations) and for a lot of mobile photo snappers that probably more than they will ever want.
  • Spectaculr. This presumably refers to bigger photo displays (on a desktops, with access to good internet bandwidth!) and a cleaner "seamless" collage-like view that replaces the thumbnails for your photostream, looks good but makes for a very tedious scroll “endlessly” for anything older. It could easily be google+ photo's album page with fewer photos on the screen, so its not new to me. The new slideshow actually would not start for me, I just watched the spinning balls for a few minutes and gave up. I wonder if calling these changes spectacular in the light of other photo sharing sites is a bit of over hyping the new appearance but I have to admit my photos do look better now. (ie all that white space and text were a distraction).
  • Wherevr. Is about mobile and the iphone & andoid apps. Unfortunately the new android app is flagged incompatible with my older Telstra/HTC Wildfire, sad but such is life. I suspect flickr are aiming to become "the photo sharing site" of choice from mobile, by being easy to use, massive storage capacity and full resolution display but instagram and others are a long way ahead already in terms of an established userbase.
The flickr blog has a few more details
alvin & lila on flickrThe one item I haven't been able to figure out just yet is what has happened to the PRO accounts? I assume it is now called an adfree account, and the only difference to the free account is no ads?

If you loved flickr the way it was, don't stress too much all the old features and functions are still there, you may just have to look around for them. However there doesn't seem to be anyway to go back to the oldclip_image001 user interface. So far I have found the edit button on your photostream will get you back to a three column thumbnail display a little like the previous photostream. The film strip view in Organizr, under the three dots on the right hand side of your photostream view, will still let you scan through your images quickly enough. The details of each photo are there, still on a white background, but cleverly hidden under the fold, so just scroll down when you have a single picture displayed. So we will just need to get used to it. I'm not ecstatic but happy enough to give it a try but first it appears I'll have to recreated a bigger better Buddy Icon.

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