Alternatives to Flickr

Any smugmug users? For $40/year, it seems I get all of what I used to have with my Flickr "Pro" account, and much more control over my layout. I'll let my "pro" expire and leave Flickr alone, but it's just so much more annoying to use now that I doubt I'll be adding anything to it ever again.

Alas, google+ also forces a black background, which I hate, and also doesn't allow me to choose my own layout.

Honestly, if Flickr "improved" things by adding more layout options, rather than forcing one that I happen to loathe, then I bet there'd be a lot less complaining. The older layout was stale, but I liked having the titles and descriptions and using a decent amount of white space between images. Stupid Yahoos!
 
brbo said:
It's not gone, yet. But it will be gone, I'm afraid.

I think previous layout encouraged users to put text and tags to go with pictures, put them in specific groups, comment on other photos, etc. Now flickr is doing everything to hide as much of this info as possible. People won't even click on images anymore, since you get mega size full frontal assault on the first page.

Sure, I'll still be punching in my tags (I only have film cameras so no exif form me), but other users might not bother. And then the search-by-tags will not be relevant anymore, groups will be less populated and flickr community will not be the same.

You might not care about this, but many do.
Click to expand...

Sorry but I don't get this. Maybe it's because I'm an engineer and therefore too logical oriented. In the "old days" (aka last week) It needed two clicks from the single photo view to open the dialogue for adding a photo to a group. Now it takes the same two clicks. The difference is, that the menu was on the upper left of the photo and is now on the lower right of the photo. Tags is a bit more complicated, because you have to scroll the photo a few pixels up to see the same tagging function that was there before.

A lot of people don't even have to use this because their photo uploader already takes care of tags and descriptions.

So it takes the same effort to tag and put photos in groups. If someone cared about tags and groups before then I don't see why that person should suddenly stop that now.
 
I'm an engineer too : it is not a logic problem in my case. The problem is in the layout : I absolutely cannot stand the new photostream for example, where all pictures are crammed together. No space between pictures = bad wallpaper. I did not like the "contacts" pictures stream either.

I used the photostream as a journey in time, to see the evolution in my pictures. Now it looks like I barfed colors and contrasts on my screen.

It is just my personal opinion, but it looks like I'm not alone.
 
i don't like 500px at all. every photo i see - and i admit i don't look very hard - looks like a postcard or an art project. really, really boring. flickr has its share of junk, to be sure, but i can find via the groups a lot of stuff i like. and people that like what i do. i'm not inclined to change although the ipernity link is appealing. i'm not crazy about the new flickr look (i wish they had an "old format" option), but it's not a disaster.

i'm really hoping they make a couple of changes as part of the tumblr acquisition, starting with the ability to change usernames.
 
I wasn't with Flickr for very long before the sudden change. But, that's the rub...sudden change with no warning, no solicitation of desired features, nothing. Someone just decided the layout is going to change and that's that. I also hear the pricing schedule went up by about 100%.

This just doesn't seem like the kind of behavior a successful site uses to retain the customers that have made it successful to date. The PR is bound to repel as many new users as attract, so in the end, Flickr is likely to suffer. How much is still a big question.

Something I noticed: the new layout crops my images when cramming them into full-justified rows. I don't know if this is how others see my photos, but if they do, they will not actually see my photos as intended. Now, I haven't checked to see if that's how images are displayed when I visit someone else's photostream yet, so it might not be as big a deal as it could be.

Alternatives? My wife (Flickr Pro user of several years) is migrating to ipernity as we speak.
 
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Giant Ginkgo said:
I stand corrected about the calendar, but you did say you were looking at his first posted photo, and that view gives you a far faster access to points in a stream than just a bunch of meaningless numbered pages.

I'm not quite clear what sort of search you're trying to do that isn't available now. If you're just trying to visually search for a picture, I don't think clicking one by one through hundreds of pages individually with a handful of small thumbnails is really that much slower than the new auto-loading system with the much larger and easier to see previews. I do fully agree that dial-up or slow connection users will suffer, though...

The previews are so much friendlier for visual searching, for example, my panorama photos aren't twenty pixels tall any more. There still is the [1 2 3 4 5 6] at the bottom of the page, but each page now loads 100 photos at a time. The UI also intelligently resizes to the window, so if you make the window smaller, the images get a bit smaller. Full screen Flickr browsing of contacts on my 27 inch monitor is awesome!

Otherwise, you can search a user's photo by the search field at the top, or by tag, location and the other traditional Flickr methods. For your own pics, Organize is still there, with it's tiny thumbnails at the bottom and you can switch to the old page view with "Edit."
Click to expand...

... I said it was difficult to navigate, which it is ... and that it looked ghastly which it does

You seem to know all about this new layout very quickly .. did you get a tutorial?
 
tom.w.bn said:
Sorry but I don't get this. Maybe it's because I'm an engineer and therefore too logical oriented. In the "old days" (aka last week) It needed two clicks from the single photo view to open the dialogue for adding a photo to a group. Now it takes the same two clicks. The difference is, that the menu was on the upper left of the photo and is now on the lower right of the photo. Tags is a bit more complicated, because you have to scroll the photo a few pixels up to see the same tagging function that was there before.

A lot of people don't even have to use this because their photo uploader already takes care of tags and descriptions.

So it takes the same effort to tag and put photos in groups. If someone cared about tags and groups before then I don't see why that person should suddenly stop that now.
Click to expand...

So, I'll try to talk to you as a software engineer that I am. And someone who pretends to know at least something about UI and user experience and behaviour.

If you build a layout that hides certain information, that means that you discourage consumption AND production of that info. A new flickr user could be totally unaware that flickr even has groups, that tags provide a wealth of information etc.

Note that I'm not saying that flickr did a poor job (bugs will be squashed eventually) as I simply don't know the motivation (and goals) behind this redesign. They are too big and too smart to miss things that obvious. I'm almost sure the goal was to produce something of a cross between Instagram and Facebook. Furthermore, I'm not saying that this is flickr's demise or something like that. Those changes might even grow their user numbers considerably. But thinking that "technically it's all still there, so it's the same as before" is just... well, a bit narrow.
 
Flickr for hosting, tumblr or Wordpress for presentation. Once set up, it takes just a click to post a photo on your blog. Plus you get the advantage of a social network and the layout options of a Blog. Works for me, but i'm neither a pro nor a paying member.
SayCheese
 
paradoxbox said:
This is such a disaster for the online photographic community.


Flickr had a monopoly on almost all serious photographers who were active on the internet. If you wanted to research about a kind of film, or a lens type, or a camera type, you could just search around on flickr and find photographic examples of what you were looking for.

If you wanted a place to store and use as a host, you could just upload your photos to flickr and people would randomly find and sometimes order your photographs.

Now all of that is gone.

This is the biggest blow to photography in the last several years IMO. Yahoo has killed flickr and they won't change it back.
Click to expand...
Nonsense.
Flickr had an awfull interface and was completely useless for anything remotely serious. No serious photographer would put his/her pictures on Flickr. They used their own sites or the likes of Smugmug or Zenfolia if they had a serious web presence.

A update of Flickr was long due, and now it might be a big step for some... But it is necessary for Flickr - now at least it looks good 😎
 
Strange thread ... mainly dedicated to slagging flickr in spite of it's title!

Several othere sites offer very good hosting with options galore if you pay. I choose Zenfolio because I like the look of it's interface and I can tune that to suit my needs.
 
Keith said:
Strange thread ... mainly dedicated to slagging flickr in spite of it's title!

Several othere sites offer very good hosting with options galore if you pay. I choose Zenfolio because I like the look of it's interface and I can tune that to suit my needs.
Click to expand...

People get fussy when something they did not pay for turns out be not exactly what they want.

Darn those freeloading free services.

Lots of options in this free market. Stop whining, go shopping.
 
Aristophanes said:
People get fussy when something they did not pay for turns out be not exactly what they want.

Darn those freeloading free services.

Lots of options in this free market. Stop whining, go shopping.
Click to expand...

It sounds like many, if not all Flickr users are paying the fee for a Pro Account. I am, but, how long will I be grandfathered in to a service not made available to new users?

Ipernity is a good alternative... Old Flickr like in some ways....
$30.00 for a year.
 
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