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Flickr poised for much-needed interface improvements

Feb 21, 2012 at 01:34:57 GMT

OTHER NEWS FLICKR IMAGE-SHARING

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Venerable photo-sharing site Flickr is reported to be on the verge of its most drastic redesign in many years. The New York Observer's tech blog, BetaBeat interviewed Flickr's 'Head of Product' Markus Spiering, during which he demoed a remarkably Google+-like gallery interface. He also appeared to rubbish the site's clean but rather dated 'small photos, lots of white space and information' appearance. Yahoo says the improved gallery view will apply to the 'From your Contacts' page from the February 28th, with the uploader coming in March.

The redesign is bound to cause anger to long-time users (because redesigns tend to mean changing long-established ways of working), but is probably necessary if Flickr is to increase its appeal in an era when there are so many popular places that let you easily share images.

Click here to read the full article on BetaBeat

Comments

Total comments: 83

No change as at 5 March. So, is this story a spoof?

0 upvotes

Haven't seen anything yet. I am expecting big things!!

Comment edited 37 seconds after posting

0 upvotes

I don't see anything different so far?

0 upvotes

Threat the whole "Orb" issue as an artistic feature.
The camera will become a cult and in the future others will try to imitate this effect to have an "x10orb feel"
Sort of like heavy vignetting in Instagram and the like.

So grab the piece of photo history while you can ;)

0 upvotes

It's March 1st. It's me or nothing has changed yet?

0 upvotes

Holy crap, it's about time. I can't stand that site..

1 upvote

All I can say is that looking at their gallery pictures using the iPad is way more easy than looking at the Dpreview gallery !

1 upvote

I'd like to see them compete with Zenfolio, PBase and Smugmug, with a few different pricing options and product options, and especially to be very competitive on price to keep costs low, increase revenues, attract more customers, and encourage existing users on free accounts to expand for the benefits the paid account would then offer. At the moment I think Flickr falls short of where they should be aiming to be.

0 upvotes

Looking forward to seeing what they come up with! Basic layout/viewing could certainly use some updates. And it needs more interactive/community feel.

But the part that most needs overhauling is Flickr's organizational tools. Tagging, organizing, geotagging, etc., are a clunky mix of different interfaces.

0 upvotes

I like PBase myself. I've had them since 2004 & they haven't changed--and frankly, I LIKE that.

One of the things I like--you can view ALL of the thumbnails at once. ALL of them. Even if that means loading 459 thumbnails images, you can do that. I hate having to do the "hit next, wait--hit next, wait--hit next, wait" nonsense. Let me have the option to load the WHOLE thing at once & then just scroll. PBase gives you this.

1 upvote

exactly. i thought that Flickr has evolved into a modern image-hosting site. but i realised PBase is still much better in many ways with no ads.

1 upvote

Hey look, it's another facebook tumblr.

0 upvotes

Whether it will be for the good or bad, flickr does need improvements and further development. Be it the stats (which are too primitive right now) or the ability to work on tags or descriptions on several images at once when these are already uploaded.

I would also like to see more graphically pleasing and less distracting design. After all - one of the main points is to be able to view photos in a effective and pleasing way.

1 upvote

Flickr offer the option to have a photo sharing- exposing tool for free. I'm not a professional, so, for now flickr works for me and I appreciate that.

0 upvotes

Yahoo is very slow, today I logged into my 500px account and I was surprised to see a beautiful interface and upgraded site. I think yahoo's policies of flickr of such slow upgrades are going to kill it.

0 upvotes

Always avoided Flickr. Just can't stand its white background with distracting blue and red elements sprinkled around. Most images don't look their best against white and the whole thing has an amateurish feel to it, maybe good for social aspect but definitely not for photo presentation.

Then there's this endless amorphous Photostream which kinda seems to be designed to stress this attention deficit syndrome nature of social media - what was yesterday is totally forgotten and overshadowed by what's today (or 1 hour ago). Maybe it's how it should be in twitter culture.

Comment edited 1 minute after posting

1 upvote

A word of warning!
Picasa did much the same back in Dec. and it was a disaster for a lot of folks. It scrambled their Picasa databases beyond repair and would continue in a loop that kept updating files and changing them. It did it to mine.

0 upvotes

most annoying for me is that after deleting a photo in Photostream I am taken to my latest page rather than staying on the page from which I deleted the image.

0 upvotes

And for the dutch marked, no one is mentioning pictureplaza.nl

0 upvotes

That looks like a very outdated an amateurish site ....

0 upvotes

Glad to read that many here have the same issues with Flickr that I've had: too many clicks, poorly implemented category/organization functions on people's gallery home pages, terrible multiple image size and viewing options, and generally poor photo viewing experience.

Frankly I've felt a little crazy at times with so many people seeming to be in love with Flickr, and I just can't stand it. So it's good to see I'm not alone. I for one am very much looking forward to the redesign.

Regarding alternatives, I am rather surprised to see no one mention SmugMug. I will grant that its social features are far behind Flickr, which is unfortunate. But otherwise Smugmug is a helluvalot more customizable and has *much* better presentation of photos. Auto-sizing photos to the user's screen? What a novel concept. Flickr could learn a few things. Let's hope they already have...

0 upvotes

I suppose the Flickr hang-ons like FlickRiver will still be there for those who dislike the new layout...
M.

0 upvotes

I hope they keep it simple. Forgetting the KISS rule is the most common mistake websites make when trying to improve.

For me, the one change I'd like to see is to allow me to choose all photos shown on the first page of my photostream. Last first is not often what I want to show.

5 upvotes

Excellent point! I quite agree!

0 upvotes

This would be VERY nice, indeed.

Comment edited 11 seconds after posting

0 upvotes

You CAN actually control what's in your frontpage of your photostream!

Though it's not straightforward, but just try to change the upload date of any of your (older) photo to the current time and voila, it's immediately on your front page!

it's that easy

0 upvotes

No doubt Flickr is the least bad of these photo-sharing sites.

2 upvotes

I prefer pbase myself. It's simpler, less commercial and looks better, imo.

Comment edited 16 seconds after posting

2 upvotes

It has a few quirks and an interface design overhaul sounds like a good idea. But overall I like it and has been a good site for me so far to a) share images with friends and family and b) search for images and groups to check out samples of cameras, lenses, etc. And often you stumble upon really nice and inspirational work.

For everything else I have zenfolio.

0 upvotes

As a recent arrival in the online photo sharing world, I have been pretty amazed at the deficits on flickr and all the other sites I've looked at, and I'm very disappointed not to see any comments here pointing to the "best" or "clearly better" share site. Guess it's not just my imagination that all are appallingly badly designed?

With flickr, it starts with what is to me the bizarre standard interface that throws all your photos together into one giant bucket. I spend all my time carefully arranging them into sets, but every time I go to the site I see the giant bucket and have to search around for the sets. I can't even begin to guess why the giant bucket would be default rather than itself be the hard to find option?

0 upvotes

Did you know you can change the layout of your home page?

0 upvotes

I'll have to research that, but to be honest, I find it remarkably painful to research and implement flickr functionality, it's a pretty user hostile site.

0 upvotes

I'm a complete puter numpty. It took me 5 minutes to set up 'sets', and sort images into 'em. Never used Collections feature, sets work fine.
You CAN change the display order to, I believe, those with most hits, or likes, etc.
Or just use a pre written Big Huge Labs script to create a new Your Favourites set???

0 upvotes

Afraid I don't really see any significant ability to change the layout of the home page. You can move around how many large vs small images you see, but I see no "customize homepage" option at all, neither does google.

0 upvotes

I have avoided flickr like the plague. My reasons are the same as many others have commented. Too much white background space, small thumbnails and the need to click extra times just to see a set... I've been using PBase but I miss the social and search functionalities that flickr has. I look forward to seeing the updated site.

2 upvotes

It was about time that Flickr improved their interface. It's a terrible interface and I use flickr only to publish the newest images and I keep the most appreciates ones. The rest I swap for some new ones.

I hope they will also be aware of the costs in comparison to other photosites. There was a moment I had published around 500 images on Windows Live Skydrive without any costs and Flickr linits is to 200?

Besides that Flickr is treating the images very badly. The enlargement of the images in the slideshow mode makes the images unsharp, so that I only use the lightbox to watch my images.
On Skydrive the enlargement doesn't have that effect and images are much sharper displayed, while uploaded at about the same resolution.
Not that Skydrive is the answer on all the fuss, far from it. It lacks in photo and album management as well, but imo the picture quality is OK.

1 upvote

When is dpreview coming out with it's own paid gallery account? It was 'coming soon' at least a year ago.

0 upvotes

I agree with others that said they avoid flickr. The interface really is terrible...and when people link to flickr, 9 times out of 10 i just dont bother clicking. Its actually amazing that they have gone this long with out major upgrades to the ol dinosaur.

They should involve the community more, do some live testing and get feedback from the community so they can turn it into what the people want.

1 upvote

1) Would like to easily adjust the sequence of pix in my photostream.
2) Need replacement for Picnik as an in-flickr image editor.
3) Would like an easy way to see if my pix make it into Explore - currently I only find out from those who comment or I have to go outside flickr (to Scout). Maybe this feature exists but I missed the memo?
4) When I download my pix from flickr the file name is some random alphanumeric instead of the name I gave them - minor annoyance.

2 upvotes

Well, I use Flikr quite a lot both for my work as for my own private photography. The problem what I feel with Flikr is that they want to be AND and photo sharing site, AND a photography blog, AND a facebook community clone.

Flikr itself is great value for money and it's a treasure by means of collection they have by their users.So I think the service itself (that of storing photo's) is very good. I just wished they gave you room to store in other formats than JPEG as well, I wouldn't mind to pay more if I can store my RAW files as well.

1 upvote

I quite like the flickr interface.

5 upvotes

I may be missing something and if so I apologise but PLEEEEASE can I BROWSE search results? You do a search, click on one of the results for a closer look and then you have to click the back button and click on the next result and so on, if I want to look at photos of a specific subject I want to sift through the photos as if I am browsing a photo stream or set, I don't want to have to keep going backwards and forwards for each result!

0 upvotes

Also can we select multiple groups at one time to send photos to? I love to share with groups but sometimes you have about 8 different groups that your photo is suitable for and you have to drag and drop the photo over each one and then WAIT for a confirmation, if it just put things in a queue and didn't make you click ok after each submission it would help!

0 upvotes

There is a Greasemonkey script called "Multi Group Sender". I think you need to use Firefox in order to run it. It is done nicely and works very well.

Comment edited 21 seconds after posting

0 upvotes

Click "Slideshow" when you have the results up and you can browse back and forth, looking at each photo.

0 upvotes

OK, I'm lost here. I have added one photo to well over 20 groups, in a single hit? Just pull down a Groups Menu, tick the ones you want, click ADD, and it's done????

0 upvotes

I always steer well clear of flickr, even to go and look at someone else's pictures. It's just so dismal and depressing, apparently designed to distract attention away from the overly small pictures, annoy you with a zillion conflicting options, ads and comments, all in a layout that looks like 'my first wordpress'. Picasa is marginally better, and even the now defunct mobileme makes a better job of the simple task of displaying images. I could never face putting my own pics on flickr as I'd never want to inflict their revolting interface on anyone that wanted to see my pics.
On the upside, pretty much anything would be an improvement so hopefully they can't go far wrong.

0 upvotes

I hope they make groups better. For Paris city, where i live, there is tons of groups of course with same photos in it. If only there is a means to group the groups.

0 upvotes

Not needing 5 clicks to do the simplest thing would be a start. But customisation should be the goal, not imposing another designer led, fixed concept on people, but letting them choose.

0 upvotes

Oh boy. If flickr becomes anything like Google Plus I'll probably have to find a new place for sharing photos... I hope the photostream is not going away.

Comment edited 1 minute after posting

2 upvotes

Would be nice to have more flexibility in presenting your best shots as a sort of portfolio with either white or black background, e.g., as a slideshow. Zenfolio does this quite well, although I don't like the way they display sets and collections.

1 upvote

Flickr's interface is garbage, including linking numbers of pictures being a joke.

I'd love to see an improvement, which might even make me finally buy a membership.

3 upvotes

I can't agree. There is always room for improvement but the Flickr interface is very functional. Other similar sites make it more difficult to browse by groups, tags etc

5 upvotes

Flickr is №1 photo sharing service! I love Flickr with its simple and clear interface. I will be happy if it will be better, but I hope they won''t spoil it!

Comment edited 4 minutes after posting

7 upvotes

I totally agree

0 upvotes

Flickr has been good to me, but an interface revamp is definitely needed.

1 upvote

BLACK, for god sake let me have a BLACK BACKGROUND $@&@#$!!! How hard is it, seriously.

4 upvotes

I agree totally. A bit more customization of our Photostreams would be simple to do and extremely welcome.

3 upvotes

I love Flickr the way it is. I hope they improve it without messing it up. I don't want another Facebook. A few new features would be nice, though, and with Picnik closing in April, they'll need something to replace that.

1 upvote

I wonder if they could replace Picnik with Pixlr. I've found that to be a good online editor. I have the Pixlr Grabber extension in Firefox. If, while reading forums, I see a photo that seems to need certain tweaks, I can take it straight to Pixlr for a quick edit, to confirm my impressions.

0 upvotes

if flickr wants to increase its user base it needs to build community. Some community features are laughable. Most critically, there's no way to be notified of replies to group discussion posts.

0 upvotes

Hope its good as i stayed away from flickr cos the user interface just didn't work for me. Too many clicks and too many sizes.

1 upvote

I've never liked the Flickr interface. Looking forward to something new!

3 upvotes

I hope that they don't make any changes that break 3rd party uses of Flickr - I use it mainly because it (had) good 3rd party tools for uploading and also for viewing content - like Flickriver, and OnBlack, for example. Consequently the interface was not very important to me.

RSS feeds out to blogs were also extremely useful to me. I hope they don't break those. It also worked with Yahoo! Pipes (though that might not be around for long).

0 upvotes

Yep especially hope they don't change the RSS...

0 upvotes

You should email their customer service and let them know you are concerned about their new upgrade, more specifically, the impact it may have on RSS.

0 upvotes

This is a great point. I don't think they'll mess with RSS but if they do, they'll lose me. Publishing my Flickr photos on my home page is one of the best things about Flickr.

0 upvotes

I really quite like the Flickr interface. It offers a lot more control than Google Plus.

0 upvotes

"He also appeared to rubbish the site's clean but rather dated..."

To... "rubbish" it? To put garbage upon it? Eh? Is this some turn of phrase with which I am unfamiliar?

0 upvotes

Apparently it is. Means "to speak disparagingly of".

0 upvotes

There's no reason you should be familiar with it, fyngyrs. It's Brit slang. (A new word every minute.) It's rubbish. We're really cooked when Thai slang starts being used.

Comment edited 2 minutes after posting

0 upvotes

It's not slang, it's an accepted usage in UK English.

The problem is that it's hard to second-guess which words and phrases aren't used in the US.

0 upvotes

Ha, yeah, first time I've heard it like that. Thanks 36/Richard for clearing it up.

0 upvotes

Mmmm.... a little worried about this. I like flickr as-is, at least as far as how the pages are displayed. Been a paying member for years. I have a 500px account too, but it doesn't even remotely compare to flickr.

Not that I wouldn't like to see some changes:

Galleries, sets and collections need some work, the site desperately needs a blog facility, and as another poster here remarked, it'd be nice to be able to control which images appear on your account's photos page. The Favorites capability *really* needs some work (hasn't it occurred to *someone* over there that we might collect favorites along more than one line of interest, and jamming them all together is... well, lame?)

1 upvote

I've mostly lost interest in Flickr, and have been slowly making the move to 500px. I was just about to buy their Pro account, but maybe now I'll wait and see what this turns out to be.

0 upvotes

Total comments: 83


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