What The Flickr! Three Things that Drive me Crazy About Flickr

Sets on Flickr

I’ve been using Flickr since before forever! Well, at long time at least. I never really made much of it, and I’ve reset my account on more than one occasion and started all over again. But now that I have a smart phone and I’ve got Flync installed on it I’ve got a lot more photos on Flickr than ever before. Just like Google+ my photos are auto-magically uploaded to Flickr via Flync. I also use it to host my Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr pictures in one shot!

So with all those photos on Flickr I need to do a bit of organizing. Flickr has a convenient Organizer that lets you manipulate batches of your photos all at once. But it does have a few short-comings.

Hopefully Marissa Mayer is reading this blog and takes this criticism constructively so we see some improvements to Flickr!

The three issues I have with Flickr, especially after the exercise of organizing several thousand photos, are:

  1. Events vs. Sets: some sets are related to an event (i.e.: date and location and participants) so there should be fields to add that information in a structured way, and display it when I hover over or open the Set and allow me to sort my Sets on the date;
  2. Collections: what are they?! They seem to appear sporadically, I haven’t found a consistent way to access my Collections and see the Sets in them (they’re in the Organizer and in some other menu but not in the main navigation menu); and
  3. Defaults: primarily sort order, so that I can choose how a Set or a Collection or whatever is sorted and when I add new ones they are placed in the preferred order!

There also seems to be a lot unnecessary scrolling. I can’t go back to where I was, I always start back at the top. Besides the fact the interface needs an update there’s some navigation issues they should fix right away!

I don’t necessarily want to see Flickr implement the auto-awesome features of Google+. Not that having instant HDR or Panoramas of my photos isn’t cool – it is! But Aviary should implement those features and Flickr can concentrate on organizing and sharing the photos.

Now don’t get me started on the Android app! Thank goodness for people like Adam, who created Flync, but why is it so hard for Flickr to come up with an app the matches (or surpasses) Google at what Flickr does best?!

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

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