If you ever want to see just how much whining a million Interneters can produce, try giving them something wonderful at no charge.
Take Flickr, for example, the Web site that Yahoo bought in 2005. Its central concept was cool and useful: It’s an online gallery of everyone’s photographs that the whole world can search, annotate and admire. It’s a place to study photography, to applaud good work by fellow camera buffs, to back up all those precious JPEGs, and to post a photographic record of weddings, vacations and other achievements for friends and families to enjoy.
Flickr was disappointing, however, for two reasons. First, the free account permitted you to display only your 200 most recent photos. The $25-a-year Pro account offered unlimited space.
Second, Flickr was ugly, cramped and baffling. It seemed to display your pictures in only two sizes: tiny square thumbnails (which made no sense — how many photos are perfectly square?) and full size. It took a lot of clicking and experimenting to navigate. And good luck figuring out how to download a photo; the process was so nonintuitive and buried, it could have been a “Saturday Night Live” skit.
Last week, the new Flickr was born. First, the good news: Every free account holder gets one terabyte of storage. That is an insane, historic, vast amount of space. That’s enough room for about 600,000 typical photos, enough to last you the next couple of birthday parties, at least.
That’s 70 times the free space of the next closest competitor, Google Drive. And those are full resolution photos, too — the originals. Flickr doesn’t compress photos, degrading their quality, the way Facebook does.
Flickr, in other words, is no longer just a way to present photos to your admirers. (Indeed, it’s easy to keep them private, or share them only with family or friends.) It’s now an excellent way simply to back them up. An external drive for this purpose costs about $100 — and is worthless in case of fire or burglary. Yahoo is giving you that backup space for nothing.
(Most photo software, like iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom, can send pictures directly to Flickr, or you can upload huge batches using various free Mac or Windows apps. If disaster ever strikes, you may be alarmed to discover that Flickr offers no way to download photos en masse — only one photo at a time. Fortunately, free programs and Web sites like Bulkr or flickandshare.com make bulk downloading from Flickr a piece of cake.)
And now the other good news: Flickr’s redesign is, on the whole, a gigantic improvement. The primary screens are wall-to-wall photos. Not weensy little thumbnails, but big, four-inch-wide representations, tiled to fill your entire browser window, scrolling down and down and down. Point to one to view its title, photographer, and the Favorite and Comment buttons.
This is an incredibly successful way to give you an overview of a set of pictures. They’re big enough to see clearly (unlike the old thumbnails), yet small enough to take in hundreds without having to click to another page. For a visitor who wants to see your shots of some place, person or event, these scrolling views offer a quick, satisfying way to get the (ahem) big picture.
This display is especially effective in displaying panoramic photos, of the sort that, for example, the iPhone and Sony cameras can create automatically. Finally, they get the full-screen-width treatment they deserve.
All right, so the new Flickr is generous and lovely. Then, why are longtime members screaming bloody murder?
Take Flickr, for example, the Web site that Yahoo bought in 2005. Its central concept was cool and useful: It’s an online gallery of everyone’s photographs that the whole world can search, annotate and admire. It’s a place to study photography, to applaud good work by fellow camera buffs, to back up all those precious JPEGs, and to post a photographic record of weddings, vacations and other achievements for friends and families to enjoy.Flickr was disappointing, however, for two reasons. First, the free account permitted you to display only your 200 most recent photos. The $25-a-year Pro account offered unlimited space.
Second, Flickr was ugly, cramped and baffling. It seemed to display your pictures in only two sizes: tiny square thumbnails (which made no sense — how many photos are perfectly square?) and full size. It took a lot of clicking and experimenting to navigate. And good luck figuring out how to download a photo; the process was so nonintuitive and buried, it could have been a “Saturday Night Live” skit.
Last week, the new Flickr was born. First, the good news: Every free account holder gets one terabyte of storage. That is an insane, historic, vast amount of space. That’s enough room for about 600,000 typical photos, enough to last you the next couple of birthday parties, at least.
That’s 70 times the free space of the next closest competitor, Google Drive. And those are full resolution photos, too — the originals. Flickr doesn’t compress photos, degrading their quality, the way Facebook does.
Flickr, in other words, is no longer just a way to present photos to your admirers. (Indeed, it’s easy to keep them private, or share them only with family or friends.) It’s now an excellent way simply to back them up. An external drive for this purpose costs about $100 — and is worthless in case of fire or burglary. Yahoo is giving you that backup space for nothing.
(Most photo software, like iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom, can send pictures directly to Flickr, or you can upload huge batches using various free Mac or Windows apps. If disaster ever strikes, you may be alarmed to discover that Flickr offers no way to download photos en masse — only one photo at a time. Fortunately, free programs and Web sites like Bulkr or flickandshare.com make bulk downloading from Flickr a piece of cake.)
And now the other good news: Flickr’s redesign is, on the whole, a gigantic improvement. The primary screens are wall-to-wall photos. Not weensy little thumbnails, but big, four-inch-wide representations, tiled to fill your entire browser window, scrolling down and down and down. Point to one to view its title, photographer, and the Favorite and Comment buttons.
This is an incredibly successful way to give you an overview of a set of pictures. They’re big enough to see clearly (unlike the old thumbnails), yet small enough to take in hundreds without having to click to another page. For a visitor who wants to see your shots of some place, person or event, these scrolling views offer a quick, satisfying way to get the (ahem) big picture.
This display is especially effective in displaying panoramic photos, of the sort that, for example, the iPhone and Sony cameras can create automatically. Finally, they get the full-screen-width treatment they deserve.
All right, so the new Flickr is generous and lovely. Then, why are longtime members screaming bloody murder?
by David Pogue, NY Times | Read more:
Image: NY Times
