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December 8, 2008
Why I hate Flickr
Some parts of Flickr are really well done. Like the Organize screen; drag and drop works just the way you'd want it to. But there's plenty of stuff I really can't stand.
- The interface:
- The syrupy greetings and cutesy button labels and other cheesy trash. At first it was merely annoying, now it's unbelievably grating.
- The way forking out cash to Flickr for extra storage allocation gets you a little picture next to your name that says "pro". PROTIP: unless you make a living from your photographs, you're not.
- The massive lack of styling options for your album, oh, I'm sorry, "photostream" [sic] (ecch).
- The way Flickr think they know better than you.
- They nanny-edit your comments (ever tried writing something in all upper case? Think again).
- Maybe you like making empty folders, or sets, or whatever you want to call them, and then filling them up with stuff. Flickr's nauseously-named "Organizr" won't let you.
- The users:
- The camera-obsessive parts of the user base that think they're so goddamn great.
- The parts of the user base that leave twee little pictures in comments saying WOW GREAT PIC, YOU ARE INVITED TO THE PINK STAR AWESOME KITTY KAT PLATINUM PHOTO AWARD GROUP and other similar dreck.
- The technical failings:
- Linux users are second class citizens.
- "Collections can contain collections or sets (but not both). Collections can be nested 5 deep." Arbitrary restrictions, wonderful.
- Worst of all, everything is squashed into a stream. As this is the single way that almost everyone will see your pictures, it means that any organized collections of photographs that you have and upload to the site are presented to the viewer as a meaningless jumble of images, bereft of the sorting you've applied to them. This is almost intolerable.
However, my number-one hate feature of Flickr is a single, particular user.
Me.
Because I just gave up writing my own photo management software, after failing to finish it in over two years of dribs and drabs of development; and because due to that I just paid Flickr for an account because it's the easiest way for me to put my photos on the Web somewhere, even though it is so very hateful.
I have a very low tolerance threshold for annoyance, so I may well just delete the whole thing out of hand if the Flickr crud gets to me enough. At that point I'll probably give up for good on the whole idea of having my photos online; we'll see.
Dec. 18th 2008: I deleted everything. That's that.
Posted by hex at 11:50 PM in: ha ha only serious, web 2.0
