20 million page views on Flickr

18 responses to “20 million page views on Flickr”

1. 

   Cynthia E. Wood

   Dec 16, 2013 at 1:39 am

   Well… I can tell you this much: I really cannot stand the "new photo experience beta" (i.e., the impending changes) to the UI and am really hoping Flickr cans the whole idea and pretends it never happened.

   It often seems to me like the Flickr designers (or other leaders?) don’t realize or understand what makes Flickr special and what sets it apart from other image-sharing sites. I often get the impression that those who are in the position to make changes don’t actually use Flickr, and therefore don’t really understand how other people use it, or what about the site actually works (e.g., Flickr’s search capability via tags, or keywords, is something that worked really well — and it’s something that used to set it apart from most other sites…and still does). They should try to figure out how to leverage whatever ‘specialness’ they have.

   I definitely don’t think shoving all of the information about an image over to the far right-hand side of the screen — and thereby separating it from the image itself — is a step in the right direction in any way… The ability to include things like titles, descriptions (as you have done here), tags, and other information to enhance one’s own images, and also the experience of viewing others’ images, is one of the things I’ve always loved about Flickr.

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2. 

   JJ San

   Dec 16, 2013 at 1:49 am

   No doubt you’ll mention that your own signature way of embedding photos in your own comments to create a "story" rather than a simple image is broken in the new layout…

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3. 

   J.R. Jeppson II

   Dec 16, 2013 at 3:25 am

   One note I will add is the desire to see the mobile version(any OS) brought closer to the desktop version. I tend to stick to the website but I would imagine using the app may be a bit easier on those with limited data plans. It seems to slowly be getting better over time, yet still very much Spartan in it’s options. I just want to add a thank you for your enlightening contributions to those of us lucky enough to have stumbled upon your work on Flickr, especially your insight into SpaceX. Happy holidays!

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4. 

   jitze

   Dec 16, 2013 at 4:48 am

   Like JJ San above, I have always admired how you (i.e. Steve J) manage to include a series of reasonably sized photos within the comment stream to create a mini-narrative. I have managed only to include very small pics like this in the stream by putting in their Flickr URL enclosed within square brackets (aka braces) but that is frequently unsatisfactory because the images are then too small to be able to grok them properly so one is forced to then click on these thumbnails to see properly, which is yet another screen transition (costs time and mental context switch) which detracts from what should be a simple "scroll down for more" type of operation to "see" a short narrative at-a-glance

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5. 

   jurvetson

   Dec 16, 2013 at 6:34 am

   thanks y’all. Cynthia – you nailed it, right out of the chute. But I do think they care, and want to make it better.

   [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmania] and [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jitze1942] – Yeah, and they don’t make it easy. Making comments hard to find, only displaying a few of them, and cutting them off is the opposite of a social-focus. Instead, I would expect a social focus to increase the real estate dedicated to the comment stream… which would reduce the main photo size if anything. The format change experiments of late seem inconsistent with a social goal. And, when they started the format changes, I noticed a dramatic and immediate drop in the commentary on my pages. Each of the changes over the recent months dropped the comment count, and it bounced back a bit when they reversed the latest changes.

   If flickr wants to promote social interaction, I would suggest they don’t truncate comments, and reverse some changes from about a year ago, and let external IMG links show the image in-line (instead of a grey arrow box icon) which interrupts browsing, just like a "more" link interrupts text. Better still, automatically generate thumbnails for images and video for external links in comments (just like Facebook and the social sites do). The comments should be a rich place to hang out, a place where you might find gems of conversation and content, a place you don’t want to ignore if you want to be in the know. The richer the better.

   As it is today, to put a photo thumbnail in the comments from an external site, we have to copy the external image to our hard drive, post to flickr as a private image, grab the embed code from that page, paste into the comment field, and adjust the address in the "a href" HTML to point to the external site. On Facebook, you just have to paste a web address in a comment, and they do all the rest. I think this would be the biggest boon to social conversation.

   But opportunistic browsing of user-curated thumbnails through Sets could revive the viral spread of the early days…

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6. 

   AGrinberg

   Dec 16, 2013 at 7:47 am

   Great idea to discuss this in a more quiet and sane hangout.

   I agree, improving the comment exchange, and maintaining a sense of story are high on my list of things to wish for. And searching by keyword is critical. Maps, too!

   One thing I have not seen mentioned much is the possibility of having the user control some of the parameters of display. Remember a year ago when you could show 4 large images, or a dozen or more small ones on your "home page"? Flickr is already storing data about ourselves, so a few more fields to control display doesn’t seem like much to ask. Why, we could even choose to view comments on the right or on the bottom!

   There have been a lot of complaints that the photos don’t have room to "breath". How about a single "margin" setting so we could isolate the display of our photos a little bit. One reason I stay away from posting full res photos is that I can’t look at them on a nice background (see flickriver.com for a clean idea).

   This is not programming rocket science. 🙂

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7. 

   jitze

   Dec 16, 2013 at 8:07 am

   A suggestion to handle what I was talking about above… today every image has its own page and a stream of comments (on the same page) about it. Add to this model the idea that the image referred to above is a "primary" image, and associated with a primary image you can have a number (perhaps limited to < 10) of "appendix" images whose purpose is to further elucidate/expand on the primary image. The appendix images appear in sequence below the primary image, and each image has its own thread of comments. Appendix images may already exist in their own right as primary images elsewhere on Flickr, or they may be uploaded in situ solely to exist on Flickr as an appendix image to the primary image under which they reside. Appendix images for a given primary image can only be created by the owner of that primary image. If others want to show an image within a comment stream, they are limited to the options that exist today.

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8. 

   jgury

   Dec 16, 2013 at 9:08 am

   The grey arrow box icon is particularly bad for commenting with images external to Flickr. Total flow kill and so much awkward extra work. Plus it plays to the weakness of Flickr being single image post threaded. Both FB and G+ now follow the album / image heap model for basic posts, which is what you really follow for updates given nobody, other than maybe cyber stalkers, has time to monitor all the changes going on with albums and activity from people and content they want to look at. That said, the big strengths are what I found interesting from the beginning and that is all photography specific and has stayed relevant even with huge changes like film to digital, the rise of mass videos, mobile etc. That and the level of the user community / content quality. It is not Imgur or Instagram in other words, and Twitter – if that is the only way to reach someone I just put the text in an image or communicate everything in Haiku.

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9. 

   obskura

   Dec 16, 2013 at 12:58 pm

   Good idea to narrow the discussion down a bit 🙂 Maybe the Flickr UI engineers should also consult long-standing groups with professionals (e.g. http://www.flickr.com/groups/ngproinvitation/ ) as they also have threads discussing how the UI impacts what they do. Of course the question is if flickr wants professionals, or rather the largest amount of users and snapshots.

   Here are some reasons I can think of why I don’t post more photos on flickr (I’m not a professional, I just use the same gear… 😉 )
   – I’d like more control over my main page. In particular, I preferred the photos to be bigger than they are in the new justified scroller, maybe just one photo per column. The current layout makes it easy to see all my uploads very quickly, but none of them properly. I do like the continuous scrolling though. Didn’t Yahoo just buy Tumblr?
   – Also, more control which photos are on my main profile page. I don’t want all my recent uploads to show equally there, and often don’t upload pictures that I don’t want to "mess up" my front page. At the moment I come across as a huge cycling fan, only because I uploaded more than one photo from the events I went to. One approach would be to group pictures into "events" or albums, and only show one, selectable photo per event on the main page.

   In the early days of flickr, it was all about a few active groups I belonged to, that were very active in discussions, competitions, advice, and real-world meets (now I just mostly come back every day to see if you posted a new interesting entry 😉 )
   It seems the groups that organise a local community to also meet in real-world worked best, or groups that were somehow a tightly-knit community with something to talk about. Groups that people just post photos to in order to get to explore have no real value in my book, and I never look at their group page.
   I think if flickr cares about real social interaction vs. sheer numbers of clicks and likes, they should focus on fostering deep interaction – group discussion threads, blog-like structures like your page, meaningful longer comments, and no clutter with likes and hearts and "you won the sparkly diamond award" comments (which fortunately seem to have completely disappeared now…). Just noticing, why is my comment box sooo small? I can’t even read what I just wrote, just the last 2 lines… never mind, I just found out it’s resizable. Neat.

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10. 

    earsplitting spiders

    Dec 16, 2013 at 1:13 pm

    Congrats on the 20 Million, that’s amazing. I’m not a "photo techie" like many of the commentators in this forum but I’m working in improving my novice status with my photos. That being said, I am not a fan of the new Flickr format. I really preferred the old format which appeared to me easier to navigate and in my opinion provided a better format to view other’s photos. I realize nothing stays the same and enhancements have to be made but I believe Flickr didn’t take into consideration that a complete overhaul was a major turnoff with those who have passion of photography and even novices like myself. It was probably the mindset of Yahoo to target the young social media crowd who are posting mobile photos on instagram, but in doing so Flickr ruined it’s identity as it sold out to the selfie movement.

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11. 

    scleroplex

    Dec 16, 2013 at 1:20 pm

    congratulations!
    i too have learnt an enormous amount from being on flickr.
    it enriches my life everyday and i hope the programmers are not forced to ruin it all…….

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12. 

    jgury

    Dec 16, 2013 at 4:35 pm

    The grey arrow box icon totally ruins your jokes too when you are going for image one liners

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13. 

    sbove

    Dec 16, 2013 at 7:49 pm

    Top 5:
    1) make my flickr home page EXACTLY like tumblr…a high rez sharable stream in chronological order of everyone I follow. They should have done that 5 years BEFORE tumblr.
    2) fix the damn log in system so if I’m logged into yahoo, I’m logged in at flickr. this has been BORKED since the acquisition. inexcusable.
    3) nuance: let me designate public photos as "for stream" or "not for stream". If "not for stream" they’re still public, show up in sets etc., but do NOT show up in the main stream. This allows users who have more than ONE interest to feature their MAIN interests in the stream and still upload tons of stuff to others sets/galleries etc. without diluting the focus of the stream seen by everyone following.
    4) Fix the current bug that crashes Safari on Mac when I go into full screen view, see a few photos, then hit esc to get out of it. Totally crashes the browser.
    5) The BIG KAHUNA: Turn the uploader into a desk top file system for photos that syncs ALL albums on Flickr to the desktop and vice versa – transparently, in the background, perfectly. This would by default enable instant drag/drop uploading of single photos to any set or the main stream. Think iPhoto bi-directionally connected to Flickr but designed by someone with a 180 interaction IQ. 😉

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14. 

    jgury

    Dec 16, 2013 at 9:47 pm

    Since this is about developers. Ideas out of the App garden are very much worth watching http://www.flickr.com/services/
    I forgot it was out there, along with the interesting blog. blog.flickr.net/en all things I find sticky (as in stick around a site, how clever) and engaging.
    Another thing I find sticky and engaging is to have paid something for a service and to get extras from that. Multiple studies, which I recall taking part in, support the value of pay in / pay out in all kinds of ways, obviously. The non-obvious was how small they can be to get optimal responses. This was certainly known to many groups I’ve worked for -the flinty b-tards, including my family, or especially family which is I think is the norm. This goes along with everyone’s favorite, and for good reasons, gamification. So you gamify Flickr by getting users to pay in for whatever, gold stars, photokina passes, flickr world’s most interesting man etc. – which makes me wonder, what exactly am I getting for my $30 or $40 annual fee here? What, a chance to get selected for….ONE MILLION dollars….uhh or better 100 BILLION extra photo dollars.

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15. 

    tarmo888

    Dec 17, 2013 at 9:10 pm

    I generally like the improvements and I kind of understand some of the reasons, but some things are ridiculous and just bad. But I guess, desperate companies do desperate things. There are lot of other sites now out there that are not so broken.

    * Collections – makes me cry how unimportant is this feature now.

    * Ken Burns effect on slideshow – enough said xkcd.com/1264/

    * Front page infinite scroll & slowness – Try to catch up more than couple days of recent uploads, the browser will slow down to stop because all the images loaded to the page. Nice looking edge-to-edge photostream is also so slow, even on computers with multiple cores and broadband connection.

    * Forcing the "new experiance" on non-logged in Internet Explorer users – Why would somebody even do that? Doesn’t this company have any computer with IE to see that it’s so broken.

    * This god damn small comment box & narrow comment list – I had to use the notepad to write a comment because Flickr new comment box is so tiny and the list of comments is so narrow that comments longer than "nice picture" are unreadable.

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16. 

    obskura

    Dec 18, 2013 at 10:07 am

    [http://www.flickr.com/photos/tarmo888] I agree on the small comment box, it should be much bigger by default. As I just realised typing my comment above, it can be resized by dragging the bottom right corner – never expected this as it’s not common on websites.

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17. 

    Cynthia E. Wood

    Dec 18, 2013 at 9:17 pm

    [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson] Hi Steve. I wonder if you could tell me (us) who Flickr sees as their primary competitor, or primary competitors? (I think their one true rival is Instagram – all the others are inconsequential.) I’m also wondering if you know what audience Flickr ultimately hopes to appeal to (primarily) — i.e., is it professional or ‘serious’ photographers? or the casual hobbyist…? I feel like I have more thoughts I’d like to share, but it would be really helpful to know where the Flickr folks’ heads are at so that I could organize and frame my thoughts with those goals in mind… You gave me a glimmer of hope by saying you think they really do care and want to make Flickr better.

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18. 

    !fatima

    May 29, 2014 at 11:22 pm

    Holy Cow! 20 million! 🙂 you definitely know how to rock it! Can’t wait to see you at the Beta Group soon Chief.

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