Tag Archives: Flickr

Few thoughts about the new Flickr

So, Marissa Mayer has finally started implementing some major changes at the company. Tumblr purchase was huge and expensive. More expensive than what Facebook paid for Instagram. But cheaper than what Google paid for YouTube.

On that day, I almost cursed Mayer for spending so much money on Tumblr when she could have just made Flickr storage policies more liberal.

And incidentally she ended up doing just that this week!

1TB free storage on Flickr. This is huge. This is as iconic as the launch of Gmail with 1GB storage. Rival services back then were still stuck on 2-5 MB free storage at that time. Rival services of Flickr are quite similar in comparison today.

Let’s look at the competition…

Google offers 15GB of free storage on their Google+ platform.
Microsoft SkyDrive is not a direct challenger but it offers 7GB of free storage.
Dropbox is again not a direct rival and it offers 2GB!
Facebook does not store your original photos so it is not even comparable.
500px offers 20 uploads per week on free accounts.
SmugMug does not even have a free plan!

So… What do I think about the new Flickr? I like the new design. It’s a mess but I like mess. It’s heavy and I am ok with that (I love the new Google+ in case you were wondering). 1TB is a lot of storage. I used Flickr Pro for 4-5 years back in the 2000s and stored loads of photos taken from my 10mp camera.

And even I am using just 5% of the free storage quota! So, if you are not a pro photographer storing thousands of 20-30MB photos online every week/month, it should be ok for you! If you are a super heavy user with huge storage requirements, I believe you can still subscribe to the Pro plans on Flickr. USD 25 for unlimited storage was and still remains an excellent value for money offering.

I think Flickr has taken a very serious shot at the entire competition ranging from Facebook to SmugMug. It is very likely that some of them (if not all) would have to respond. I would personally love to see Google respond with something even more spectacular though I have my doubts here.

Flickr has also made some other changes that I really appreciate. You get access to your original photos on free accounts. This is a huge policy change for the company. There is one minor problem regarding ads. Free accounts are likely to see loads of ads in the user stream and around user photos. But I guess few people mind that.

One more thing I was hoping to see on Flickr for a long time now is Data Liberation services. Flickr needs to provide a solid official tool to download all your photos back to your computer if you so require/desire. I know there are loads of third party apps both free and paid. But all of them rely upon Flickr’s API which has a history of being unreliable. For me to take Flickr seriously? I want them to offer me tools to:

1. Easily upload all my photos to it.
2. Easily download all my photos from it.

The web based uploader is very restrictive (200 photos in one go I hear). Desktop uploader has not been updated in 4 years now though I imagine it should get an update soon. I want a tool that lets me sync my Flickr account with my local machine. I want a tool that lets me arrange photos offline which are then synced with my Flickr account. Yes, I am asking for something like Google Drive/SkyDrive/Dropbox. A tool like this would make Flickr a perfect photo storage and sharing companion which provides you complete freedom with your own content right from your own computer.

If Flickr can provide it, it just might become slightly more tempting for someone like me who decided few years ago to avoid them like plague!

Flickr offering three months of Flickr Pro for free. It’s a trap!

Flickr offering three months of Flickr Pro for free. It’s a trap!

Instagram messed up big time earlier this week when they launched their new terms of use and privacy policies. The language of the policy was so absurd that the internet went bad. The company had to revert back to a saner version of the policy but the damage was done.

Flickr responded by highlighting the advantages of using their platform for sharing photos online. But it took a while for them to actually launch their full-fledged assault.

The Yahoo owned service is offering three months of free Pro access. Flickr Pro offers unlimited storage for around USD 25 per year. You can get a taste of it for free by going to this link.

But if you are going to make use of this offer, you should need to know the bigger issues with Flickr…

Flickr Pro is a trap. You need to remain a Pro user to have access to your photos. Flickr’s free account is severely limited…

1. You lose access to full version of the photos.
2. You can only access the most recent 200 photos.

In other words, do not fall for this trap unless you plan to continue paying for the Pro account on Flickr.

There is another thing worth mentioning here. Flickr does not have an official data liberation service. Which means you would need to look at third party apps and services to download all your data back to your computer. They practically hold your data hostage. Not good.

Instagram does a Facebook on their users

Instagram does a Facebook on their users

Instagram is no longer Instagram. It is essentially a Facebook product. And we got to see a good example of that when they launched their new terms of use and privacy policy this week. These new rules would be enforced from next month.

The new terms and privacy policy were so absurd that the internet went crazy about them. Tons of blog posts about how Instagram wanted to sell your photos to advertisers.

And the expected happened. Instagram posted a blog post on how the internet got it all wrong and they needed to revise the language to make their intentions clear.

This is not the first time we have seen this happen. Facebook does it on a regular basis. They would do something really absurd but would tone down the absurdity based on user complaints. But in the end, the end user still loses because the changes were still made and user privacy was again mocked on the internet.

Fine, I understand that when you use a free service, you are the product being sold to advertisers. But what Facebook is doing with their own network and now with Instagram is astoundingly bad. There are competing services which offer similar products and services. I have moved on to them. You should consider doing the same!

A side note on this. Flickr is trying to entice users to switch from Instagram to their own platform. It would have made sense if they fix the problems with free accounts on their network. In its current form, Flickr is insanely restrictive. Get yourself a Tumblr blog to share photos on the move. Or best, run your own WordPress powered blog and retain complete control over your content!

Flickr launches their official Google Android app

And it sucks.

Ok. It does most of the basic things. Like taking images. Uploading it to your Flickr account.

It also has filters! Yawn.

It can also post images to other social networks like Twitter, Facebook and even Tumblr.

But it does not do a lot of things.

It cannot sync the photos on the phone with my Flickr account. This was the most basic feature this app should have offered.

It does not even seem to follow my upload settings! Photo uploads were labeled as public when the default setting in my account is private.

The photo taking process is painfully slow. The app tries to mimic Apple iPhone’s camera which I think is horrible.

If you played around with this app… What do you think about it?

Why I dislike Google Buzz?

Google recently launched Buzz as their challenger (alternative) to Twitter and Facebook status updates.

Integration with Gmail makes it a service that I can use on a regular basis. I like it how it allows me to post what I want to post without worrying about character limits.

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