Flickr – Page 4 – Ciaran Laval

June 7, 2013June 7, 2013

Are Flickr Going For Tumblr Intergration?

I’m still using Flickr, despite my serious reservations about the new design, which I think is quite frankly awful. I’m not complaining about change for the sake of it, the new Flickr landing page for signed in accounts is full of too much noise and only offers the justified view. Despite performance improvements, large images and infinite style scrolling are bandiwidth and RAM hogs.

However Flickr is still a good place for storing images and groups are pretty much the same as they ever were, with a variety of views available. The way groups work should be the norm, not the exception. However Flickr, despite the howls of protest from users, have steadfastly refused to allow people to customise their views on the landing page, or when they explore. Why? I have no idea but I’m going to speculate that it’s part of a longer term plan to intergrate with Tumblr, because the idea that they’re annoying so many users just to implement adverts holds little water, if they haven’t got website designers who can incorporate adverts into different views, they should hire some who can. I believe their staff are more than capable of serving adverts in different views.

So my guess is that there is going to be some intergration with Tumblr. Coincidentally enough Tumblr’s homepage has had a revamp this week and one that, according to Mashable’s Samantha Murphy is : “a photo-rich design very reminiscent of its new sister site Flickr”

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June 3, 2013June 3, 2013

Tips To Ease The Flickr Pain

There’s a hefty thread on the Flickr forums regarding feedback on the new Flickr, you can see it here. I’m sorely tempted to point them in the direction of the Texture Usage Page on the Second Life Wiki for tips on how to optimise their site! The reason people are having performance issues is due to loading lots of large textures.

Anyway amongst the complaints and allegations that even in beta the feedback was negative, there are some tips on how to ease the pain. When it comes to groups this is easy because you have a user preference on how you view the page. However for photostreams you need to type after the URL. I’ll use Strawberry Singh’s photostream as an example because it’s an excellent stream to view.

New annoying Flickr link to the awesome photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/strawberrysingh/

Now to make that less taxing, all I need to do is add ?details=1 after the last slash in the URL so:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/strawberrysingh/?details=1

Now I can view it at my leisure and there’s pagination instead of the silly endless scrolling.

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May 31, 2013May 31, 2013

For Flickr’s Sake!

So whilst I was away, Flickr got a makeover and it’s not one that has made the site more attractive for me, indeed it’s so bad that I’ve had to bookmark another Flickr page to avoid the horrendous experience of the default Flickr landing page. I’m not the only one unhappy about this. Originally there was an official feedback thread, however this got abusive and too busy for the Flickr staff to keep up with, so they opened a second feedback thread, which isn’t quite as abusive but there’s a running theme that plenty of users don’t like the new Flickr.

I know I know, people don’t like change blah blah blah. We’ve seen it with Second Life when the client has drastically changed, but Linden Lab should actually be commended for some of the changes they’ve introduced after user feedback and with third party clients around, there’s plenty of choice in the design stakes for Second Life users. Flickr could learn a thing or two from Linden Lab about user interface changes, so too could Microsoft because I recently tried Office 2013 and that was bland, boring and painful on the eye, to such an extent that my boss agreed with me that we’d never get away with rolling that out to our users and avoid them forming a line at the helpdesk armed with torches and pitchforks. I’m also not the only one who finds Office 2013 painful either, an example of one of many technet threads on the issues can be seen here.

Microsoft have however announced that some old features, such as a start button, will be returning to Windows 8, so maybe there’s hope they will get around to dealing with Office 2013. However what of Flickr? Well there’s some bad news for a start, staff have said: “To put an end to speculation, and to hopefully give some people closure, the old site is not coming back.” Booooo! Well I don’t want the old site back permanently, some people like the new site, I want the choice of the old site view back, which really shouldn’t be that difficult.

There is so much wrong with the new site, but here’s one aspect of it, the help forum where the threads asking for feedback can be found via a link at the bottom of pages. Good luck getting there from the main landing page if you have a busy feed because the photos keep loading as you scroll down, users of Twitter or the Second Life My Second Life feed will be familiar with how this work, but on Twitter and My Second Life, the links to other pages about the company are positioned so you can, you know, actually click on them. The links are there on Flickr, they just vanish when you scroll down because more pictures start loading.

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June 17, 2012

Flickr Pickle

Linden Lab have recently found themselves in a user permissions pickle over their use of pictures for their pic of the day blog posts. Wizard Gynoid pointed this out to me in a recent comment, whereby Whiskey Monday surprisingly found that her picture had been used.

The main issue is a lack of communication, nobody from Linden Lab told Whiskey that her picture had been selected. Photos submitted to the Second Life group pool on flickr were being used on sites such as Facebook, Tumblr and Google +, no matter which rights had been selected by the author on flickr. There are two problems here, one is ignoring permissions but probably the larger issue is not informing the author. Most people would be happy to allow Linden Lab to use their photos for promotional purposes, as long as there’s attribution and communication.

However in this case, Linden Lab have decided to make some changes, as Whiskey Monday outlines here and create a new Flickr Group, with new terms and conditions.

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January 24, 2012January 24, 2012

What’s In A Name Yet Again!

“Lastly, I really do regret I that spoiled ‘Ciaran Laval’ s night away from the pub. The way this election is going he may find me there before long.” – Sir Norman Tebbit, April 19th 2010.

The above quote is relevant in the name stakes because it demonstrates I have a persistent online identity outside Second Life circles, although what I was ever doing on The Torygraph blogs whilst sober still remains a mystery, what Sir Norman was referring to is that I’d stated on another blog post of his that I was stone cold sober and agreeing with him, it was a scary evening.

Which brings us to the latest episode of the nym wars and Google +, which rears its head in the shape of form of Google’s Bradley Horowitz suggesting a new and more inclusive naming policy is being r0lled out. Now before you get too excited you need to tread carefully here, Violet Blue, who was very involved in the nym wars because her name was considered to be fake (it isn’t) has posted over at Zdnet suggesting that pseudonyms still aren’t welcome. However Violet seems to be getting a tad confused, Bradley Horowitz is talking of one name nyms, rather than normal looking nyms and this is where it all gets confusing.

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