I’ve been a Flickr user for four years. During that time, the service has grown, but not grown-up. I recently renewed for another couple of years, but I had to give it some serious thought. Ultimately, I renewed for the community of friends I’ve developed there and not for the service itself.
Flickr meets expectations for a photo-sharing service, but it doesn’t try to exceed expectations. As a social media company, it’s really falling behind the curve. Even as a photo sharing service, it’s starting to feel pretty dated. Flickr doesn’t integrate well with other elements of the Internet. Neither the parent company, Yahoo, or Flickr employees themselves really seem to have any interest in communicating with customers to make the service better. My own efforts were generally rebuffed with a response telling me “that’s the way it is.” I just don’t see any recognition that Flickr is failing to meet the needs as its audience grows with the service, and as a result, there doesn’t seem to be any effort for Flickr to grow up with the rest of the Internet.
- Photos are small - You have two options for the size of your photo display on Flickr – small or medium. Both options are too small. Perhaps it made sense years ago when dial-up was more ubiquitous than broadband access, but not today. We want the option to share our images in a larger size display.
- It Doesn’t Work as Advertised - Flickr offers a level of granular controls, but some of them don’t work. For example, I use Flickr to share photos on that site and interact with specific groups and people who leave me comments. One of the things I don’t want is for other people to blog my images. Flickr allows me to change my settings to remove the “Blog This” button from everyone else’s view, except that it doesn’t work. I still find new images showing up in my stats being referenced from other sites. When I visit the site, I discover they’ve used Flickr’s tools to blog my photo.I’ve tried to complain about this on the Flickr Help forum on the past, only to find my issue was immediately dismissed because “Flickr is a sharing site.” The Flickr staff wouldn’t take the time to realize that I wanted my photos shared on Flickr, not elsewhere. It’s not just me, either. If you peruse the old, closed thread on the Help forum, you’ll find that this is a frequent topic and it’s continually dismissed. Flickr staff simply isn’t willing to listen to its customers. The only way to prevent anyone from blogging my photos is to hide them from everyone, which defeats the purpose of a sharing site like Flickr.If you’re wondering why I don’t want other people to blog my photos, it’s because I’ve been disgusted with some of the results. What I find is that they’re most often used by people who setup a blog with no original content, load it with ads, and they make some profit off the unsuspecting backs of people on Flickr. That just annoys the hell out of me. I know there are other photographers out there who don’t care about these trolls, but I just see it as inconsiderate and selfish. I don’t want to enable those folks.
- Blog links keep breaking - Even if I didn’t have to contend with those folks, Flickr doesn’t let you update a photo and retain the link to a blog. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across a blank image with nothing more than the Flickr logo and a notice that states “This photo is currently unavailable.” That’s not really true. If I decided to re-process the image and upload it again, the link to the blog disappears. That’s just poor programming and it’s been like that for years. I’ve tried using Flickr to host images on blogs and ultimately decided that it’s a waste of time and energy. Flickr is an undependable service for bloggers.
- I’m tired of the pervs - I’m not advocating that Flickr should ban the sex addicts and pervs. It’s just that I don’t want to see them and I don’t even think I want them to see my photos. My photo stream was reviewed by Flickr and marked Safe. While I have some model shots and a few bikini contests posted up there (the latter have since been hidden), none of the women are naked or in a sexual circumstance. However, I keep finding that I get friend requests from some really disturbing folks showing me things that, quite honestly, I don’t want to see. They have a right to be on Flickr, but I’d like some safety valve so I don’t have to deal with them. When I see that someone marked me as “friends & family” and I’ve never heard of them, there’s a better than 50% chance that the first image on their photo stream is a picture of some unattractive genitalia.Gross. The people I see naked on Flickr in friend requests are NOT the people I want to see naked. I’m not on Flickr to hook up with anyone, find masturbatory material, and I’d rather not think about people using my photo of some model for their own efforts. What I’d like is a way to pre-emptively block anyone whose own rating on Flickr is not Safe. Flickr needs to give more thought to granular controls for work-safe and child-safe browsing and contact. While I don’t want to exclude anyone from the Flickr community, I would just prefer not to deal with some of them who are after a different agenda than I am.
- Flickr isn’t fair - I’m convinced that Flickr plays favorites with some users over others. It’s not uncommon to find some people with multiple photos that appeared in Explore, but yet others with more compelling or better images never make it. Flickr likes to say that the recipe it uses for determining which photos get into Explore is a secret, which further leads me to believe it’s less than fair. Some people have learned how to game the system by posting comments on lots of other photos. They don’t do that because they’re particularly compelled by the image, but rather to get those folks and image viewers to come back and see their photos. Basically, Flickr rewards you for being an attention-whore in comments. However, I’m told you’re penalized if your image is posted to more than three or four groups. As a result, this spawns a plethora of groups where uses MUST post a few comments on other images for every image they include in the group.How sad is that? I’m of the opinion that you leave a comment on an image because you’re moved to do so, not as a means to enhance your own prospects for some reward or exposure on Explore. As a result, a lot of the images on Explore involve repetitive themes and processing techniques. It doesn’t really help you explore the Flickr community, but rather, a subset of those who fit the image that Flickr staff wants to promote. Explore is, essentially, a lie. My own images that have made it onto Explore are never the ones I’ve thought should be there, or would really prefer to have included. Seriously, two of them are just snapshots of signs and one is a picture of a rubber duck covered in chocolate syrup (don’t ask).
Overall, it seems that the folks who run Flickr don’t really want to integrate well with other parts of the Internet or interact with the community. The Flickr blog doesn’t even support comments. Flickr’s management seems to want to isolate themselves from the people who use the service. Oddly enough, these are the people responsible for community management. I’m not sure how you successfully manage a community when you won’t listen to them. Maybe that’s why I’m so disappointed in Flickr these days. I see so much potential being wasted.
