OddThinking

These notes on Flickr Pro are based on a (slightly) deeper evaluation I did in early December. They should be read in conjunction with my previous notes on Flickr.

Each bullet point has been given a general rating; I reckon you can figure out the rating system explanation.

• – While Flickr has been around for years, the co-founders left the organisation in June.
• – Yahoo (the owners) have a history of forcing users to migrate their photos.
• + The API looks fine and WEB 2.0-ey.
• + There are three different Python-wrappers for the APIs.
• + I did a routine check for sucks.com. It is worth checking out what I found: www.flickrsucks.com (archived version)
• – I was shown adverts, for example, during the photo uploads. I expect that would go away when I upgraded to Flickr Pro.
• – Won’t read copyright owner info from the Exif (even Windows can do that!)
• ? Flickr Pro gets the you the “collections” feature, but I don’t know yet what that is.
• – The has buttons that say “Thanks” instead of “Ok” in places. I bet some people like that. I don’t.
• - - I have to take away some of the credit for CAT11 (Area or points of photograph tagged). You can tag “notes” on a rectangle on the photo, but they are not real tags. They cannot be easily corrected (e.g. update the spelling of Crystal’s name to Kristarll everywhere it appears); they don’t appear in tag clouds; and you can’t give the url easily – they require a full-text search to find.
• + Flickr tags can be added by someone else. I tried adding a tag to someone-else’s photo. It seemed simple enough, but I didn’t get to see the back-end approval process. Is there one?
• — I don’t know why I claimed that COMM2 was a Y; I don’t believe there is any notification to you if you are tagged in a photo.
• - - - Only privacy options are Yes or No to Public, Yes or No to Family, Yes or No to Friends. That’s not good enough for scenarios 1, 2 or 4 (e.g. the Vegas trip)
• - - - I can’t change which EXIF data is displayed. Most EXIF data is irrelevant to most people.
• - - I think the site is a bit cluttered, in that the amount of screen aimed at actually displaying the photographs seems minimal.

Conclusion

Flickr has a much higher user-base amongst my friends, so the social networking aspects are likely to be more successful. It is probably a better fit for me than SmugMug. However, but I still feel that I will not be happy with Flickr. I hope that the self-hosted options prove to be more successful.