Questions, and Opinions, About Flickr

My column this week about the new, revised Flickr has generated plenty of responses from readers.

When researching the column, I read thousands upon thousands of complaints from users of Flickr, the online photo gallery, trying to pin down what, exactly, their beef was. Unfortunately, a huge majority just said, “I hate the changes,” without indicating specifically why.

As noted in the column, the largest population of offended Flickr fans consists of professional photographers. They deeply object to the friendlier, less technical presentation of photos. Here’s one example:

“When you click a photo to open it, the photo now has a black background instead of white. If the photo has lots of black in it, you can no longer see clearly where the edges are.”

Well, fine â€" but couldn’t you argue that the old presentation (white background) presented the same problem with photos that were mostly white?

In any case, it seems as though it would be easy enough for Yahoo to give members a choice (black, white, gray), and put this one to bed.

Here’s another comment: “One thing I don’t understand at all: the new mechanism for assigning a key photo (a representative thumbnail) to a photo set. On Picasa, it’s really simple and works really well. On Flickr, you never know what the result will be; when you center the representative photo in the little frame, that’s not what you’ll actually see when you view the set. It’s often chopped off at the top.”

True enough. It’s a dumb bug. Yahoo should fix it.

And then, there’s this complaint: “I can no longer download a photo.”

Yes, actually, you can. It’s not much simpler than it was before, though. Click to open a photo. Right-click it; from the shortcut menu, choose one of the “View all sizes” options (like “Original”). Now you see the “Download the Original size of this photo” link, which you can click to begin the download.

And this: “The dispute with Flickr on the part of users has to do with the rug being pulled out from under us.”

It seems clear that the suddenness of the switch is causing some of Flickr’s member unhappiness. When Facebook or Gmail changes its layout, for example, there’s often a transitional period where you can adopt or reject the new design. But that’s not so in this case.

That’s probably because the auto-renewing Pro members get to keep their unlimited storage. If people had known the change in policy was coming, they would have rushed to sign up for that deal. And clearly, Yahoo would prefer that most people to sign up for the one-terabyte free account instead.

“If Flickr’s free one terabyte of storage is such a big deal to you, why didn’t you mention Shutterfly? It offers unlimited free storage!”

Holy cow â€" because I didn’t know that!

Shutterfly is aimed more at letting you turn your photos into prints, mugs, mouse pads and other personal goodies than at serving as a social network for photo fans (like Flickr). But in terms of the storage deal, you certainly can’t beat unlimited and free.

Finally, I was amused and surprised by the number of readers who e-mailed sentiments like this:

“What offends me most is that you presented your OPINION as though it’s FACT. You’ve written your own bias in a news story.”

To me, it seems that some people fundamentally don’t understand the function of a critic. Drama critics, movie critics, restaurant critics, music critics, tech critics â€" all of us, it seems to me â€" are hired specifically to present our opinions.

I would never describe my weekly columns as “news stories,” even if there’s sometimes a news element. They are reviews meant to guide readers toward products that, in my opinion, are good or bad.

You can certainly disagree with a critic. Sometimes, knowing that you almost always disagree with a certain critic is just as helpful in guiding your buying decisions as always agreeing.

But in the end, a reviewer is entitled to like the new Flickr just as much as longtime photographers are entitled to hate it.

Either way, the incredibly generous amount of free storage on Flickr (one terabyte) and attractive new presentation of the photos are worth a look â€" and the substantive complaints of the Flickerati are worth listening to. That means you, Yahoo.