Yes, it looks like Flickr went too far with this update, judging from the community uproar
-- and my own impressions.
They seem to be targeting consumers over 'prosumers' -- and are leaving long-time
'Pro' users like me in the dust.
(I have over 20k images on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fabola/ ).
I personally don't mind the new photo-centric UI, which has some real benefits, but I
miss some key features like the set overview page, which gave us plenty of room to feature
a text description (I used it all the time to write a short report on that set's
content -- and to link to other sets or related pages). And I too hate that people can no
longer download my photos at any size they want, as Nemo points out below.
That's disappointing, as features like these were an important reason for sticking
with Flickr as a publishing tool. Now that it's more like Facebook or Instagram, I
have less of an incentive to use it for casual photo-sharing. The main thing that's
keeping me there now is the ability to upload images at a high resolution, its suite of
organizing tools -- and the fact that so much of my work is already on Flickr.
Once we modernize our multimedia platform and features, we can provide a viable
alternative to folks like me, who want more than just a simple photo sharing site -- and
want to contribute to our cause.
To be continued,
Fabrice
On May 23, 2013, at 8:20 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
Erik Moeller, 21/05/2013 19:40:
Here's one of many overviews of Flickr's
redesign:
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/121165-old-flickr-vs-new-flickr-what-s-new
Next time you feel that Wikimedia's community is particularly change
averse, take a spin through the comments here. :-)
http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633547442506/
AFAICS, they also:
1) collapsed the button that allows you to set the license of an image of yours, which is
now hidden below a "more" link in the metadata section that was moved outside
the screen (or did this happen before? certainly after 2010) ;
2) removed any UI path to the advanced search and to the search for free/CC images, so
that now you can find them only on the advanced search, by knowing its URL:
http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/ ;
3) less importantly, hid under that mysterious triple-ball "ellipsis" button
the option to find high resolution versions of the image, consistent with a similar
regression in the interface of Google Plus compared to PicasaWeb.
I found also some bugs, at least for Linux, which make (2) worse.
So, what's the future of CC on Flickr?
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ shows only 260M CC images: there were already 220M
in 2011 if I read news correctly; only 60M are free. 75 % of the times I ask a user to put
an image under cc-by-sa they choose -nc-nd because "it was the first option"
(and some of course "what, isn't Wikipedia non-commercial?!).
Is this the price to pay to Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook? Will the
unusable&pretty-fication help bring more people to an environment where they may meet
free knowledge, or will free knowledge just be sacrificed? It's unclear to me
what's going on.
Nemo
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