How useful/rewarding are you finding Flickr?

September 12, 2004 3:17 PM

How useful / rewarding are you finding Flickr? Is it worth it for me to spend time uploading and tagging photos, and to bug my friends to join? It looks very cool and like a social network that's actually good for something: it also looks like kind of a lot of work, especially since I can't keep all my photos there or print pictures from Flickr.

My love of cool web apps says "yea," while my schedule says "nay." What say ye?

If anyone is using Flickr heavily on a Mac, in combo with iPhoto or iView, I'd be curious too as to whether you're having a Crazy Photo Management Nightmare or a Silky Smooth Photo Management Soy Caramel Latte Macchiato type experience.

posted by josh to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

I don't use a Mac, but I'd say it's way more of a nice smoothie than klingon raktajino, to stick with your metaphor. You can upload in any of several ways, not counting direct email from a cameraphone, which is pretty much instant. Using uploading via browser from my camera's memory cards, I never spend more than a couple minutes on the upload. The time eater is browsing your friends' pictures (and their friends, and their friends' tags, and strangers tags, and...).
posted by Stoatfarm at 3:35 PM on September 12, 2004

Yikes, I meant to link to this. That'll teach me to link to something kinda off-topic!
posted by Stoatfarm at 3:41 PM on September 12, 2004

I don't really like Flash, but maybe one day I'll use the more high-end rich-media stuff. For now, however, I use Flickr primarily for moblogging, and secondarily to see what my contacts are taking pictures of.
posted by brownpau at 3:58 PM on September 12, 2004

I like it; it ties in nicely with Blogger or LiveJournal blogs, letting you select one of your uploaded photos and write a blog entry to accompany it, which Flickr posts for you. Also, it's very easy to get five other people (real or not) to start an account, which will get you a huge upload limit for a month.

Unfortunately, Flickr is really slow some days; today I have to wait forever, or try repeatedly, just to get to my photos, and it even times out sometimes. On one try it even defaulted to some odd search page, which turned out to be a company that Google purchased last year. And now and then when I try to log onto Flickr, the fonts are totally different, and none of the Java stuff works.

It's definitely in beta, and feels like they're doing work on it all the time. But when it works, it's fun to use and an easy way to share photos and browse other folks' pictures.
posted by icetaco at 4:05 PM on September 12, 2004

There's a beta of a plugin for iPhoto which is pretty good and lets you resize the images before you send them on.

The Uploadr app for Mac OS is nice, but if you drag an image from iPhoto into it that is say 5MP then you suck up all of your monthly bandwidth very quickly [Flickr's servers will scale it down to a 1024x768 image but after your bandwidth has been counted]

I just got upgraded today but Flickr seems to be taking the day off. When it is working it is cool. When it isn't...

It holds a lot of promise and I'm pleased with what they've done so far. It will be interesting to see what lies next with Flickr API apps and what the pricing, etc will be when it goes out of beta.
posted by birdherder at 4:19 PM on September 12, 2004

I haven't been so impressed with a web thing in a very long time, and I'm one of those people who's been on the net since it was gopherspace.

I get the feeling it started as a bit of a 'wheee! this is cool! let's build social browser-app stuff!' using the team's experience from GNE, and it felt a bit fuzzily-focussed to me at the outset. Now, though (and this may be mainly because I think I get it now), it amazes me how many good, smart decisions they've made, and keep making, design- and IA-wise.

I liked it so much, I wheedled 5 friends into joining, so I could get a Pro account. That's downright bizarre for me. I despise things like Orkut and Friendster and so on -- Flickr is something very different, and deeper, and better.

[/shill]

I've never had the sort of issues icetaco describes, but if I did, like (s)he said, it's in beta, and free, so it's all good.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:24 PM on September 12, 2004

if you drag an image from iPhoto into it that is say 5MP then you suck up all of your monthly bandwidth very quickly

Hey, I just now did that when I was testing the new uploader thing that I hadn't heard about until this post. I must say, the interface with iPhoto [excluding the sizing thing which is my fault really] works really well, looks nice and insulted me not at all, which is unusual for pretty much any web-based app nowadays. I feel sort of like Stav. "Wow, I don't like stuff like this... but I like this"
posted by jessamyn at 4:33 PM on September 12, 2004

Where can I find the iPhoto plugin? All I see is the standard OS X one, and that crashes on my 6megapx photos.
posted by mathowie at 5:34 PM on September 12, 2004

Download link and discussion here.
posted by icetaco at 5:52 PM on September 12, 2004

I love it, and my Imac has not squealed in displeasure yet. I agree with the other comments about 'why hasn't anyone made it this easy before?' and 'everyone is truly nice and enthusiastic.' I had a comment from Stewart within moments of my first post, and that was most gratifying.
Hmm, there have been a few slow and no response times, but they also keep a solid update on their blog.
The tags feature is fantastic (especially the Ebay-like misspellings and invented words), and also finding out what camera was used in many pictures. The amateur/ share pictures with friends/family part of me loves the convenience, and the creator/getting back into photography part of me makes me realize I am utilizing about 10% of my camera's features/my creativity as well.
posted by TomSophieIvy at 7:50 PM on September 12, 2004

I have converted to Flickr in a big way in the past couple of weeks and I'm loving it.

Moving from my MT photo of the day site to Flickr--thanks to the iPhoto plugin--has greatly reduced the complexity of my workflow to upload photos. I don't have to take stuff through Photoshop, for example. It really helps to get your photos tagged, titled and commented in iPhoto before uploading them. For this, the iPhoto Keyword Assistant is invaluable. (The iPhoto plug in seeds the tags field with iPhoto keywords, if they are assigned.)

I look forward to Flickr rolling out features that organize photos based on exif data.
posted by tomharpel at 11:02 PM on September 12, 2004