Flickr Video…
Apr 11 2008 0 Comments
Well, 2 days go on April 9th, 2008 a popular website that is owned by Yahoo! decided that they were going to introduce video as a format that they allow to be uploaded and viewed to by other account holders. If you haven’t guessed, I am talking about Flickr.
My girlfriend and I, being serious hobbyist/amateur photographers, we payed for a pro account so that we could be a better contributer to that photography-specific-community. Well, now that community is not just for photographers and it’s really upsetting. If i was into video (im not. but in the off chance that i was…) i would have signed up for another community dedicated to video such as youtube or vimeo.
Why is this bad you ask? well, because i paid for it. i paid for it because of the community that it was. i didn’t think it would change and steer away from what it was, but i did expect other changes. changes that would better serve us as photographers. better discussion boards, enhance FlickrMail, ad some kind of post tracking to the discussion topics so i can follow the topics i have posted in without searching through hundreds of pages. maybe add an option to sell licenses to your photos or something. but definitely not video.
There are a thousand and one ‘bad’ photos on flickr. 999 of which probably are mine, lol. But… now us photographers are going to have to browse past thousands of poor quality videos as well as photos to get to the ones that we like. not to mention the people who browse flickr at work. as a community dedicated to photography, it was okay. now with video it’s going to cause a lot of problems. especially with the auto play option set to on. this is retarded… say someone sends me a link to a flickr page., i assume it’s a photo so i click it. BAM! my speakers just happen to be turned up quite loud for some odd reason and the entire office is wandering what the hell is going on. then my boss is at my desk asking why i am browsing flickr and not doing what i should be.. you all do it so don’t act like you don’t. anyways, it leads to trouble.
I dont mind the photos and videos in one place so much, well, yes i do. i paid for a photo site. but anyways, they ‘can’ co-exist. but as a dedicated photography community since it’s early stages in 2004, they should have made this video addition an opt-in instead of opt-out feature. if you want to see video, enable it. not make it to where all of us have to disable it if we do not want to see it.
so in protest i have created this image for everyone to upload to their streams. spread it around and let them know how we feel as a community.
