I’ve been a Flickr user since march 2007, but as of today this has come to an end. I’ve even been a pro-user for three years – obviously this has also come to an end.
There are in fact several reasons for my departure from Flickr, and in all fairness I do have had more good than bad experiences with Flickr, but certain factors has just gained to much weight now. My main reasons for departing from Flickr are (in prioritized order):
- The interface. It’s not very intuitive, and after three years I still get lost sometimes.
- The staffs “infatuating” concern with being nice and only doing what’s politically correct. Of course being evil and all shouldn’t be a goal by itself, but when honest opinions are being suffocated with “Now that’s not being nice. Let’s close this thread.” it’s taken to far…
- Their more and more aggressive censorship and oppression of freedom of speech. This is somewhat connected to the point above, but when you remove a collage made in protest of theft, limit accessibility for an entire country or closes a guys account simply because he posted critical comments of president Obama it’s over the limit. Not cool.
- Statements like “Let’s close this puppy” when a thread has reached a conclusion and “Flickr has the hiccups” when there is a technical malfunction of sorts really rubs me the wrong way. I’m an adult. As are most Flickr-users. Please – oh pretty please – treat us like adults and not five years. We can handle the real world you know.
- The Flickr tagging system. Separating tags by commas is pretty much standard. I’d say that something like 19 out 20 systems does tags this way. Flickr separates them with spaces and uses “’s for tags with more than one word. Why not go standard?
- I’m bound to a Yahoo!-account. Why? Use OpenID or something fancy, but don’t force me to create and use an account I wouldn’t have otherwise (Panoramio suffers from the same – it’s just Google-accounts there…)
- Lack of control of the layout. I have like six options for the layout of my pages. That’s it. No changing colours. No custom sizes. Only the six ways Flickr has defined. And I don’t prefer white background…
So – there is enough of reasons for me to depart Flickr. After reviewing the main alternatives: 23hq, Picasaweb, Panoramio, PhotoBucket, photoSIG and Zoomr and ended up choosing between 23hq and Picasaweb. I’m already a Panoramio user, but it simply offers to little as a primary photo-sharing site (like where are groups?). PhotoBucket and Zoomr are even lower cut. photoSIG did present some interesting elements (like a very clever rating system), but it’s more a photo evaluation site than an actual sharing site.
Picasaweb is actually pretty good, but I can’t see it being a photo sharing site. It’s more like a digital photo book which isn’t quite what I’m after either. So I ended up with 23hq and here’s why:
- I decide the layout. At least way more than compared Flickr.
- It has albums and groups (though no sets).
- It’s a Danish company. Yes that actually counts for something for me :)
- It’s under constant development. New features seems to be added regularly and the developers actually listens and act upon user-input.
- I can also choose a license of my favourite flavour here.
Of course 23hq isn’t all happy-happy-joy-joy though. It doesn’t seem to be able to extract geotags from EXIF, it has a way lesser user-base, it does also have a horizontal limit in the gallery and I’m having trouble getting their uploader working on MacOS X. Also I now have to find a replacement for Flickr Uploadr, which works rather good (for Flickr).
So this is what I’ve went from and to:
The Flickr-stream. Three photos horizontal is the maximum, so there is a lot of waste-space. Also it’s white-only background.
23hq. Now I can at least have five images in a row, but there is still some waste-space. Also note the nice black background :)
And getting there? I’m using this cool little freeware tool called Migratr. It does moving, titling, descriptions and albums automatically. That’s pretty sweet. It isn’t 100% perfect; I’ll have to do a little neating of all the photos (1.204 items), but it has certainly saved me a lot of work. Me like :)