Tag: Flickr

New Flickr Still Sucks on Android

I wrote a post a couple months ago asking Flickr why they can’t add automatic photo upload to their Android app. Today, Yahoo made a lot of updates to Flickr, along with their purchase of Tumblr, but that’s a whole other story.

The new Flickr Android app interface is definitely better than it was. But it’s still missing the one key feature that it needs, and that’s automatic photo uploading. Dropbox does it, Google+ does it, there’s even third party apps to do this with Flickr, even though none seem to work any longer.

I managed to kind of sync my phone photos to Flickr. It involves using Ifttt, copying my photos to a specific public Dropbox folder, and telling Ifttt to send all photos in that folder to Flickr. Not the best solution but it’s all I’ve got for now.

Yahoo, please, please add automatic photo uploading in the next version of your Android app. I’m literally begging you. Flickr is supposed to be the place that ALL my photos end up, but that can’t be until you implement automatic photo uploading.

I’ve been a Pro member for at least 7 years. The least you can do is hook me up with a much needed feature. 🙂

0

Why No Auto Camera Upload, Flickr?

I’ve been a pro Flickr member for many years (since 2004 actually). Every photo I’ve taken since probably 2002 or so is on Flickr. Flickr released a decent Android app a while back, but it’s lacking one major feature, auto uploading photos.

Dropbox does it, Google+ does it, even the Facebook app does it. Yet Flickr, a fucking photo website, does not have this feature in their Android app. Not only that, but there’s not even a bulk upload option. Only way to upload an image to Flickr through the official Flickr app is to upload photos one by one. And uploading one by one isn’t gonna happen when I snap 20+ photos every day on my LGE Nexus 4.

There’s a fair number of apps in the Google Play Store that do automatic photo uploads, but it’s really painful for me to use a separate app for something that should be included in the official Flickr app. I just can’t fathom why they would not add this feature. I understand this feature not being there right off the bat, but it’s been over a year since the official Flickr app for Android was released.

I’ve used a couple of the third-party Flickr apps that have auto upload functionality. Many of them are clunky and none (that I’ve seen) adhere to the Android style guidelines. I did just install Flicker (sic) Uploader Free, as I have never used it before. However, I have a little bit of an issue with an app that doesn’t even get the name of the service it supports correct. Maybe spelling Flickr as “Flicker” was intentional, I dunno.

Bottom line is there’s no great solution for automatically uploading photos taken on your Android device to Flickr. Here’s to hoping Flickr steps up and adds this functionality at some point, even if it doesn’t come until a year from now.

0

My Canon Digital Rebel XT (EOS 350D)

I just got a new digital camera a couple weeks ago! It’s a Canon Digital Rebel XT (EOS 350D). I’m still pretty excited, my new Canon is a major upgrade from my old Olympus.
[ad]
My new Digital Rebel XT has been a pleasure to shoot with so far, but I still have a lot of things to learn, this is my first experience with SLR cameras. One thing I absolutely love about the camera is it’s ability to continuously shoot. It’s extremely nice for photographing fast moving children who never sit still. No more missed shots while waiting for my camera to focus.

The Digital Rebel XT is very easy to use. After receiving the camera, I immediately put the lens on, popped a cf card in, and was able to start shooting. Ashley was even able to pick it up and shoot without any instructions. I’ve been really happy with the camera so far and am very much looking forward to more opportunities to shoot with it, should be fun.

0

Flickr is Back

Flickr is back online after their unexpected downtime. I’m sure they’re still in the process of moving photos to the other datacenter. 20 terabytes is an amazing amount, although the one photo of mine that was unavailable is now displaying just fine.

Anyway, everything seems to be alright over at Flickr now. Wonder who’s gonna win the contest?

0

Flickr: Unexpected Downtime

The main Flickr site is down, but it looks like all of the relatively new photos are still showing without problems. They had a “temporary storage failure”, which affected about 20 terabytes of older photos. That’s a freakin amazing amount of photos. And to add to that, they’re transferring that 20 terabytes from one of their datacenters to another, a few thousand miles away. That’s some serious data transfer right there, but probably not a whole lot more than Flickr sees on a normal day.

It sounds like they’re gonna be bringing the site back online shortly, just so they’re “up”. They say some photos will be “unavailable”. Those photos will show up once they’ve all made it to the other datacenter. Here’s an update from the Flickr blog:

UPDATE [4:59pm, pacific time (GMT-8)]: Weather report – everything is still cool. We’re going to try to bring the site back online shortly (there will still be photos which appear as unavailable, and they will gradually fill in – no need to do anything on your part, dear user).

In the meantime, Flickr is running a contest. All you need to do is print the circles seen temporarily on the flickr homepage, color them in some neat way, and upload back to flickr once it’s back up. If your “coloring” gets picked you’ll get a free Flickr Pro account:

Because this sucks*, we thought you might like to enter an impromptu competition to win a FREE PRO ACCOUNT!

Just print out this page and colour in the dots. When the site’s back up, take a photo of your creation and post it to Flickr, tagged with “flickrcolourcontest”.

Team Flickr will pick a winner in the next couple of days, and that lucky duck will get a free year of Pro.

I won’t be participating as I purchased my pro account quite some time ago. I miss you Flickr! Please come back soon, I got some new photos for ya!

UPDATE: Looks like they’re having some issues with bringing the site back online, but the photos are still nice and safe:

UPDATE 2 [5:52pm, pacific time (GMT-8)]: We’ve had some issues bringing the site back online without this storage system but everything is still quite safe and we are working hard to get back as soon as humanly possible. One thousand apologies!

UPDATE 2: Looks like Flickr is back.

0