Camera Talk

Not sure where to post, so I put it here.

My flickr pro subscription has expired and I don't think I'm going to renew it. I hate the new interface, and I don't feel I'm getting my money's worth.

Can people suggest some other services. Preferably cheaper or even free.

Cheers Mike

I continue to pay for my Flickr pro account. But I agree that every improvement (ahem, "awesomeness") they have made in two or three years has been a diminishment of service.

Meantime, I have used Photobucket for years for certain things. Often I want to have a picture ready to post to a bulletin board like here or Nff, and I don't want to include it in my Flickr stream, so I'll use Photobucket. It's useful but clunky and nowhere near as social as Flickr is or was.

Last year I started posting parallel to Flickr and to Ipernity; that is, everytime something goes to Flickr, it also goes to Ipernity. Ipernity lovers like to say that it runs on the system that Flickr started with and used until five or eight years ago, and there are similarities. But it's not as user-friendly as Flickr was. I have a small number of Ipernity friends, but nothing like the community of people I hang out with on Flickr.

I have just today reached the 200-free limit on Ipernity. Any new pictures I post will push my oldest pictures into Ipernity-Obscurity unless I buy their version of the Flickr Pro account. I'm not going to do that.

Some people use Facebook to post their pictures, but that is very different and Facebook processes pictures in a weird way, so they often do not look the way they start. I use Facebook to post some pictures but I'm very finicky about that.

Google-Plus tries to be Facebook but has other problems. Its auto-back-up is fine for some limited things but unless you pay them money, they strip your larger pictures back to a size and format they like.

There are other services that host pictures too but I haven't tried them.

After all this, I'm staying with Flickr -- at least for the time being. I have my language set to Spanish or Italian, depending on my mood: this allows me to keep the old white-background format they did away with earlier this year for English-speaking users. Neither my Spanish nor my Italian is very good, so I find myself switching back to English sometimes for using Flickr for things I don't use every day, and that confuses me since that brings on that weird black-background format. But there you go. I have reached the point where I think of Flickr as a crazy relative: I don't like what it does, but it's my relative.

Philip

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Continue to use flickr, but stop paying. The new interface will still suck, but at least you get what you pay for. Seriously, when they upped the free memory to a tera, the pro subscription stopped making sense.

... but you will get adverts with the free account, I think (and other people looking at your 'stream' will see adverts: the Pro account is the only one that doesn't show adverts to visitors to your pages).

My biggest gripe about all the changes at Flickr is they did away with the Notes feature. Not only can you no longer add notes to your photos, but the ones that were there are gone. All that work I did adding connotation to my repair photos is all for naught. The only way around that now is to take the extra steps of adding circles and arrows in another program, and writing all the descriptions before I post the photos to the Uploader. Which as far as I can tell, is also no longer available, unless you have a stupid iphone.

PF

I understand the Note feature is still there if you do as Philip said - switch Flickr to another language (but while you're set to English, the notes are still there, but they only appear down by the tags). I also read on the Help forum (which is also not so easy to get to now that Help means Yahoo Help) that Flickr may bring notes back.

Yes, as Dustin says, notes are still there if you change your default language. Mind you, Flickr never really made it possible to use all the features on tablets: my iPad often sees the notes without being able to read them. I can still add notes -- I just checked that on one of your photos, Phil:

Mike,

Here's a wild idea. You could grab a low-cost hosting contract with Go Daddy or a similar company.

And then you could install WordPress, add a photo gallery plug-in and build your own.

The initial part would have a learning curve, I know, but once you get it up and running, you control the content.

The downside: I think you would be looking at a server space limit of maybe 5GB for the base package. Plus, the learning curve of setting up WordPress, installing the photo gallery and learning how that runs.

You also don't get the same exposure to display your work with other users as you do with Flickr.

I've set up WordPress, just so I could learn it. I'll try dropping in a photo gallery plug-in and let you know how complicated this is. WordPress generally is easy to set up and configure.

With WordPress, you could post to your site from your phone, if you wanted.

Just an option to consider. At least, it would give you total control over the content and the display -- well, within the limits of the photo gallery plug-in.

Philip wrote:Yes, as Dustin says, notes are still there if you change your default language. Mind you, Flickr never really made it possible to use all the features on tablets: my iPad often sees the notes without being able to read them. I can still add notes -- I just checked that on one of your photos, Phil:

Dang, ya larn something new ever day! I did not know the notes were visible, but I still don't see where I can put them on new photos. And they should be above the location listings, not below it. It was much easier though when you just moused over the image. Everything is now being designed for tablets and phones instead of the desktop.

Thanks for the information, Philip.

PF

Phil, you should be able to add a note by pushing the three-dot icon at lower right. (That is if you have already changed your language! Since I keep mine set at non-English, I don't know where that button is, of if it still exists in the English format.) The three-dot button opens up fifteen different things you can do, one of which is "Escribir una nota" in Spanish.