Re: Flickr purge

1

So, saving the contents of the Flickr group requires someone to (a) pony up $50, or (b) download all the photos on it, save them on their hard drive or other storage medium of choice, and make them available elsewhere, by tomorrow? I'm not offering to do it myself, I've used the Unfogged Flickr group very little or not at all, but those problems don't seem completely insurmountable. If people want to pay the annual fee, I'll chip in $5-10 out of a general sense of community; I can't swear I've never used it. And personally I probably don't have enough hard drive space at home to save the whole Flickr group, even if I otherwise had permission to. But if anyone around here actually does use and care about the Flickr pool, it seems like there's a way forward.

How Yahoo Killed Flickr, linked just a paragraph before the blockquote, is yet another one of those things that makes me feel like a Luddite despite spending so much of my time online. I guess Flickr should be added to RSS feeds, video or audio content when text would do just as well, and avid recreational use of Facebook to the list of Internet trends that have passed me by, despite me spending about 10-12 hours a day in front of computers. Is there a word for that feeling?


Posted by: Cyrus | Link to this comment | 02- 4-19 1:22 PM
horizontal rule
2

"humblesmug"


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 02- 4-19 1:28 PM
horizontal rule
3

Heh, fair enough. And I suppose "getting old" is another valid name for that feeling. Might not be 100 percent accurate, I know people older than me who are more advanced about a lot of that stuff and people younger than me who are the reverse, but it describes the feeling.


Posted by: Cyrus | Link to this comment | 02- 4-19 1:34 PM
horizontal rule
4

I'd pony up but I've lost my log in.


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 02- 4-19 1:40 PM
horizontal rule
5

Save our Flickr!


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 02- 4-19 1:41 PM
horizontal rule
6

the humblesmugmug flickr bundle


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 02- 4-19 1:50 PM
horizontal rule
7

Flickr did this once before and eventually opened it back up, so I wouldn't be so sure this is actually the end.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 02- 4-19 1:58 PM
horizontal rule
8

I'd contribute to keeping the flickr group alive.

I've never contributed photos and only looked at it a couple of times when it's been mentioned in comments, but I like knowing it's there -- and I have some photos from last year that I was thinking about uploading.


Posted by: NickS | Link to this comment | 02- 4-19 2:48 PM
horizontal rule
9

Sad. Would give $5 but don't know how to do this or have the hard drive space.

Also, why did Apple have to discontinue Airport and Time Capsule. I love having Time Capsule back up my hard drives so much.


Posted by: Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 02- 4-19 5:24 PM
horizontal rule
10

Were all the penis pictures on Flickr?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 02- 4-19 6:32 PM
horizontal rule
11

The way to do it would be to migrate it to an AWS S3 bucket. Storage cost would be about 2.3 cents per GB per month.

Probably would need to rethink how access is managed, tho.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 02- 4-19 8:11 PM
horizontal rule
12

Also there is the task of going though the archives and remapping any Flickr URLs to the new S3 links. Maybe we could stick the intern on it?


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 02- 4-19 8:15 PM
horizontal rule
13

I'm a paid Flickr user and plan to continue to be until something substantially better shakes me out of my torpor. Can I do anything useful?


Posted by: Nathan Williams | Link to this comment | 02- 4-19 9:17 PM
horizontal rule
14

This wouldn't be an issue if Flickr was on the blockchain.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 02- 4-19 9:20 PM
horizontal rule
15

I'm willing to contribute the canonical found $5. Maybe move it to a FB group?


Posted by: Awl | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 2:33 AM
horizontal rule
16

I am especially annoyed by this as I was a paying customer when they announced 1TB for everyone!! and therefore made paying for it worthless.


Posted by: Alex | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 3:42 AM
horizontal rule
17

AAAK. Their e-commerce page doesn't work in Firefox. This "you must use only our authorised browser" bullshit is creeping up again. And better yet, it won't take my money because of something about my address, presumably that it's not in the USA.


Posted by: Alex | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 4:38 AM
horizontal rule
18

15 No FB please, I'm not on it and never will be.


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 5:31 AM
horizontal rule
19

I have a Pro account - is there any way to link something up to that to keep things from disappearing?


Posted by: sam | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 5:54 AM
horizontal rule
20

I followed the piece linked in @1 and once I hit the comments, realised that was written back in 2012.

It reminded me of this - I bet the balance of crap to good in the start-ups acquired and eliminated still favours the former.


Posted by: chris s | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 9:07 AM
horizontal rule
21

I'm pretty sure the Flickr group per se will not be affected by the 1000 photo limit. The photos don't actually reside in the group; they belong primarily to individual users' accounts, and are linked to within the group.

However, if you as an individual Flickr user have uploaded more than 1000 photos, then your older photos (1001 and beyond) might disappear, regardless of whether those photos belong to a group.


Posted by: My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 10:41 AM
horizontal rule
22

I think MAE is correct. I don't have 1000 photos on flickr, though I would pony up if I did. I have a lot of sympathy with the idea of paying for it if you're a heave (semi-professional) user rather than have the whole thing funded by advertising. I mean, if you have taken 1,000 photos you care about enough to put on flickr rather than facebook, you're going to be someone who takes photography seriously enough that another $50 won't kill you.


Posted by: NW | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 11:28 AM
horizontal rule
23

The general enshittening of the web over the past 2 years has been driving me nuts. OK, so all the cookie notifications and GDRP browser crap, which makes everything, even major content providers, look like some shitty geocities site from 1997, and then, sliding panels that cover half the content, and then you read something and some fucking other panel or popup appears, and then their site asks if it can push notifications at you (no, fuck off, never), etc.*

Everything has gotten shit. Or rather, the brief interregnum of good design and user experience between basically everything looking like shit and having shit UX (late 90s, early 2000s) and everything looking like shit and having shit UX (now), is over.

* and then someone will come along and say, "Why don't you install UnfuckyInternet plugin, and SuperMofoAdBlockPlus, and DontSuckAllMyPreciousDataFluids plugin, and disable these ten features in Chrome, and block this specific set of that ...". It shouldn't be like this.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 12:12 PM
horizontal rule
24

I think I still have a paid Flickr account, but their login process is a fucking pain in the arse. Every time I go there, I find myself using 2FA or something to reset my password. Actually, logging in (eventually), I do still have a paid Flickr account.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 12:15 PM
horizontal rule
25

Or rather, the brief interregnum of good design and user experience between basically everything looking like shit and having shit UX (late 90s, early 2000s) and everything looking like shit and having shit UX (now), is over.

My nostalgia for previous eras of industrial and product design is getting worse. I'm continuously struck by how shit the user experience of so many things is. I'm sure there's an element of survivor bias in this. We celebrate the Parker 51* (say), but not the 100 other pieces of shit. But still ... it's fucking obvious that the vast sums of money being spent on "stuff" are not being spent on good industrial design.

* pen nerd.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 12:19 PM
horizontal rule
26

It's all been downhill since Banyan VINES.


Posted by: | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 12:23 PM
horizontal rule
27

Stupid phone.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 12:23 PM
horizontal rule
28

re: 27

I rest my case, m'lud.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 12:31 PM
horizontal rule
29

The basic amazon.com storefront/product landing page is like Starbucks coffee or commercial air travel: dripping (in the Starbucks case, literally) with contempt for the customer, who is by some law of abusive relationships economics responsible for the bad UX by consenting to the seller's market dominance. I'm a very infrequent Amazon user and so never do anything to optimize the site, but it's such an eyesore in its raw form.

I know I'm stating the obvious here, and adding value by using clumsy language, but the brief interregnum probably had a lot to do with a drive to converge on a single platform (desktop web browser for two OS options + Unix/Linux flavors) and pretty invariant UX. The push to create adequate designs for accessing the same stuff via multiple user interfaces is going to reward mediocrity at best, and because I hate talking to AIs and am ambivalent about a lot of SSO/platform-based UX, like my entire Android phone, I am not getting happier with my options as time goes on. I should learn more about the Luddites.


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 12:50 PM
horizontal rule
30

I can't really say that I use my paid account for anything that other sites don't also serve a purpose for (including, actually, my own website). I don't use it for storage per se (that's what giant hard drives and multiple backup systems are for), and I don't upload full-res versions of my photos there anyway, because of potential IP theft.

But it is nice to have a place that is...just photos that is a bit more robust than, say, instagram. I don't connect to people I work with on places like FB and twitter, and I'm even careful about who I share my personal website with (while these days it's almost all photos, it does go back over ten years, and it was not always so...diplomatic). Sometimes flickr is a nice convenient alternative to share with folks that doesn't have any of the extraneous stuff.

If it disappeared though, I wouldn't be devastated, but only because I've never depended on it the way I think some others did.

(I will never use an online 'service' as the primary method of storing my photos or data that doesn't, at minimum, also involve keeping a full resolution copy of everything on my own computer. I use icloud for photos, but that's only to sync between devices, and I still keep a full res version of absolutely everything on my desktop mac at home, which is then also backed up to a connected 4TB external drive hourly)


Posted by: sam | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 12:50 PM
horizontal rule
31

23.1: It's bizarre how pop-up windows are this zombie bad idea that refuses to die.

Everyone hated them the first time back in the 90s. Everyone has hated them every time they've made a comeback since then. And yet they keep reappearing.

In 25 years, advertisers haven't thought of a better way to get users' attention than "Throw some shit in front of the content they actually want to read/watch".


Posted by: AcademicLurker | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 1:02 PM
horizontal rule
32

One of the few good new things about the internet this decade is Patreon, but its investors demand exponential growth and so its management is continually on the verge of jacking up the fees to make it unusable for small artists. I really hope some organization like AO3 will pick up the torch and make something like it a collective enterprise.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 1:22 PM
horizontal rule
33

re: 31

Also, the various privacy and cookie notification laws, which many/most sites have chosen to implement in the most obtrusive way possible, have given people license to basically go, "Well, I'm popping shit in front of their content in order to do this thing, so, I might as well use the same pattern for all these other things, and while I'm at it, I'll make shit move around in an irritating as fuck way, too."


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 1:23 PM
horizontal rule
34

If you turn off cookies, the "Remember personal info?" button doesn't work and your phone will forget you.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 1:27 PM
horizontal rule
35

32: Absolutely absurd. It's amazing how VC can turn a useful, profitable product into a mess that'll fold because growth is more important than profit. Then again, it's worth looking at who runs Thrive Capital.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 2:55 PM
horizontal rule
36

I'm even careful about who I share my personal website with (while these days it's almost all photos, it does go back over ten years, and it was not always so...diplomatic)

This inspired me to click through for I think the first time. Great pictures! I especially like the Alaska ones.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 3:35 PM
horizontal rule
37

Hah, and now I clicked through and there's a picture of a sign from the family-separation march last summer: "This Is Some Straight Up Nazi Bullshit". I took a picture of the same sign.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 3:41 PM
horizontal rule
38

I tried to read an old article on Wired using a computer that didn't have an adblocker installed and I got so irritated by the layout changing while ads appeared as I scrolled that I gave up.


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 02- 5-19 6:01 PM
horizontal rule
39

36/37 - thanks (and hah!)

photography is what I refer to as my 'serious hobby'. I basically practice law to keep myself in photography equipment.


Posted by: sam | Link to this comment | 02- 6-19 10:16 AM
horizontal rule
40

37 I don't suppose you saw one that just said, "NO!"? (Shout out to jackmormon for that great sign.)


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 02- 6-19 10:19 AM
horizontal rule