So I bought into the buzz around Flickr as the next big, inherently better thing in photo sharing sites.  It was hyped up pretty strongly at An Event Apart, presumably for the Web 2.0-ish social networking aspects that allow you to tag photos with keywords and share them with the world.  Pretty cool idea I suppose, but my main objective with a photo sharing service is to easily and efficiently share my photos with the people who care about them – i.e., my friends and family (DUH).  Anyway, I made some assumptions based past experience with photo-sharing sites (namely: free, easy to use, simple organization tools, and scalable) that have turned out to be quite less than accurate.  For instance…

  • Did you know that Flickr caps the number of photos you can display in your free account in any one time at 200?  I took three times that many shots on a 5-day trip last week – that’s NOTHING in a digital world.  And they don’t exactly advertise this limitation – I bumped up against it quite accidentally last night while beginning to migrate my old photos to Flickr, and received a message that I had to upgrade to the ‘Pro’ account ($25) in order to view more than 200 photos.  Whaaa?   Storage is C-H-E-A-P, and free unlimited (or at least high-limit) photo hosting is pretty standard now.
  • The same ‘Pro’ account stipulation applies to creating any more than three ’sets’ of photos – i.e. folders that distinguish trips, events, subjects, etc.  So I guess free customers can only do three things in their lives that are photo-worthy - not four or more.
  • By default, Flickr organizes your photos within sets based on when they’re uploaded.  So if you do a batch upload and for some weird server reason photo #18 uploads before #17, then your set is out of order and you must take the time to sift through their overly complex organization suite to reorder them.  The simpler method is to just upload them one at a time to make sure they’re displayed correctly (GRRRRR), which is a major step backward in an automated world.
  • Also, unless I’m just missing something, you can’t choose the thumbnail image Flickr displays for each set of photos, but rather it just assigns the last photo uploaded as the thumbnail image.  Quite random, and I don’t really think it’s too much to expect to be able to pick my thumbnail image from a set.  Maybe photo #36 of 50 best captures the set’s essence - don’t penalize that photo because it wasn’t the last one I took that day!
  • Additionally, maybe I’m just not hip enough, but their slide show interface is much worse than any I’ve used previously.  Not easily located, no ability to navigate between sets of photos or get descriptions about the photos within the slideshows (which is kinda the whole point of one), no ‘Photo X of Y’ status counter, and more difficult to navigate than it has to be.

OK, so that’s my soapbox for the day.  It’s just my opinion, and Flickr loyalists would probably dispute this vociferously, but for my needs, a free service like Slide.com does a much better job on all of the above points.  Slide isn’t perfect (kinda juvenile at times, plenty of ads, a little flashy), but it just does what I want to do with my photos - display them in a way that my friends can enjoy – for free.  I don’t need to pay $25 so that a cattle farmer in Montana can view my vacation photos in a much less friendly interface than my free service provides.  So it only took three days for this web designer to abandon the ’hip’ site for something more practical and functional. Go figure.