New Flickr Group Photo Pool

Old Flickr Group Photo Pool

Today Flickr continues their impressive overhaul by converting the ugly old thumbnail photo view of their group photo pools, to their beautiful new justified photo mosaic view that they rolled out earlier this year for their “photos from your contacts” page and your “favorites” page. This is a much better way to view photos and much easier to hover/fave photos when reviewing them. This should bump up the faves that people get by putting their photos in group pools and give heavy group users more traction on their photos.

Although group photo pools are important and this improvement in Flickr groups today is nice, the real action for groups is in the threads.

The most active social photographers on Flickr live in groups. I’ve always felt that Flickr’s groups represent Yahoo’s best chance at social. If years ago Yahoo had pushed Flickr’s group format harder and across more of their services, I think that they could have had a social winner. Flickr’s groups are still the best group structure anywhere on the web. This is the one area where Yahoo leads in photo sharing. Google has no groups and Facebook’s groups are not as engaging as Flickr’s.

For many years I was one of those people who lived in Flickr groups. I administered a few very popular groups and was super active on a daily basis. I’ve quit the old groups that I was active in on Flickr and don’t use Flickr groups anymore though. The biggest problem with Flickr groups today is that Flickr lacks an effective way to block people. Some of Flickr’s groups (including those that I was active in) would attract the absolute worst sort of people in the world — trolls, griefers, harassers. I watched human beings do some of the most ugly things that I’ve ever seen human beings do inside of Flickr’s groups.

While Flickr has *some* mechanisms to deal with the psychotic, anti-social, and evil people in this world, what groups ultimately lack (and why I don’t use Flickr groups anymore) is a robust blocking tool (like Google+ has). On Google+ when you block somebody, they are really blocked. Not only can they not comment on your threads, anywhere that they exist on Google+ they are filtered out of your experience, they become 100% invisible to you. When the truly horrible people of the world began harassing you on G+ you simply block them and never have to deal with them again. They can still enjoy Google+ and still interact with everyone who is not blocking them, but it makes it much harder for them to harass *you* when you can’t see anything that they are doing.

By contrast, when you block someone on Flickr, although they can’t comment on your photos anymore, they can still comment in the groups that you are in and you have to see their vile hatred. They can also stalk you and follow you around Flickr putting comments on photos after you comment so that you see their comments in your recent activity stream, etc. There is no way on Flickr to filter out this sort of harassment at present.

Google’s superior blocking functionality does something more than just clean up your social experience though. Because the consequence for anti-social behavior is so dire (with Google’s complete and total block) it actually encourages people to be on better behavior. People are friendlier and more polite because those that just want to hurt other people or cause grief are quickly marginalized into obscurity as more and more people block them. Bad behavior removes your soapbox on Google+. Although Flickr does allow a group administrator the power to ban trolls, it doesn’t give group members the same freedom to filter them out of their personal experience. It’s either you choose the group or you don’t. You take it as it is and have no control over what you see in your group and what you don’t.

If a user decides he/she is going to bomb the group threads with SCAT porn (as has been done in Flickr groups in the past) there is no mechanism for you to take control over that account and filter it out. Instead you have to wait for an admin to come around and deal with it, or report it to Flickr to eventually deal with it. This makes groups a hostile place on Flickr and I’ve watched many of the best Flickr accounts completely abandon groups. The sad thing is that Flickr could clear this up so quickly just by adopting Google+’s superior approach of allowing us a total and complete blocking tool. For the life of me I have no idea why Flickr would want to force people who don’t want to interact with each other to interact. You should be able to block anyone for any reason.

The other thing that Flickr groups need is the ability to hide certain threads and filter them out of your flickr experience. Thread bumping can contribute to conversation in groups, but inevitably there are threads that you are just not interested in. I may love a group and love participating in it, but if I hate football, why should I have to keep seeing the “who is going to win the superbowl” thread? Why not let me filter whatever threads I want out of my group experience?

Also if I *really* like a certain thread, I should be able to subscribe to it. Flickr should then give me a single page where I can view all of the threads that I’m subscribed to across all groups sorted by recent activity. This would create much more cross pollination of groups and also help me ensure that I don’t miss the threads that I care the most about.

Finally, flickr needs to create a simple group thread reader on the mobile. These are Flickr’s most active users. Flickr should want them engaging in group threads while they are in line at the supermarket instead of browsing around on Instagram or Facebook. Today’s mobile app lacks any ability to browse group threads on Flickr and trying to view an actual thread page on flickr with a mobile browser is nearly impossible. Getting group threads into mobile should be a top priority for Flickr as the thread addicts are the most hardcore users on Flickr of all.

Quote from Mat Honan’s Gizmodo article on Flickr: “Flickr wasn’t a startup anymore,” explains the engineer, “people didn’t really want to work that hard to turn the entire product around. Even if they had, Flickr [was] very techie hipster, many didn’t use or like Facebook and considered it bland, boring, evil, poorly designed, etc., and were certainly not ready to fast follow it. Emphasis was put more on how things looked, and felt, rather than on metrics and on what worked. The whole experience was very frustrating for me all around, as I slowly watched Flickr and Yahoo fade into irrelevance.”

[Warning, this is going to be a very long post by me. I've got a lot to say about Flickr.]

Mat Honan has a pretty detailed and in-depth story on the history of Flickr and how Yahoo strangled the once exciting and promising photo sharing site over at Gizmodo. Mat talks to a lot of insiders and former insiders and the picture he paints overall is pretty bleak. I have no idea how accurate the story is. Many of the people cited in the article are cited unnamed and anonymously, but a lot of it feels about right to me.

I joined Flickr during their first year in 2004 — pre-Yahoo. I’m what you’d call “old skool” on Flickr and have been pretty active there just about every single day since signing up except for a brief hiatus. I’ve uploaded over 71,000 photos, participated actively in groups for years, and have handed out thousands of comments and over 100,000 favorites.

After the Yahoo acquisition I became more and more and more negative on Flickr over time. This manifested itself in countless blog posts I wrote criticizing the company and its management.

For me, most of my frustration was around three key issues.

1. It felt like Flickr simply refused to innovate.

2. It felt like the people who managed Flickr and worked for Flickr simply didn’t care about the users or the product.

3. My data didn’t feel safe and I worried about the community management team irrevocably and permanently deleting accounts without warning to users.

In my frustration, primarily over these three issues, I wrote open letters to Yahoo executives. I wrote an article that got alot of attention titled Flickr is Dead. When promising competitors came on the scene like 500px or Google+ I lauded their efforts. Forcing competition on Flickr felt like a good thing to me.

Because of my criticism I felt like Flickr had retaliated against me. I was banned from the Flickr Help Forum after criticizing the company and their practices. I was blacklisted from the popular Explore section of the site (even as Flickr’s former community manager Heather Champ denied that an Explore blacklist existed).

I think I was so passionately vocal about my feelings on Flickr because I’d become so emotionally invested in it over the years. I found real community there for so long — in the groups, in the photowalks, in the photo trips and meetups, in the day to day back and forth between me and people that I met and became friends with through the site. I wanted so much more for Flickr than what it felt like it had stagnated into.

I wanted the people who ran Yahoo and who worked on Flickr to care and to give a damn. I wanted to see passion and people who wanted to change the world.

By being so vocal and negative about Flickr I made a lot of enemies. In hindsight I’m not sure my approach was the best one. Over the years Flickr has had their band of sycophantic defenders who have simply refused to accept anyone saying anything critical about the site. These people by and large hate my guts today.

Some of Flickr’s most ardent supporters over the years created a cabal on the site. They’d dominate the Flickr Help forum and talk down to users who expressed any sort of dissatisfaction over the service. They would attack me there when I was banned and unable to defend myself.

When users would complain about having their account deleted without warning, they would almost always blame and attack the user rather than admit that a system with no “undo” button on deletions was dangerous and stupid. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, even Flickr censors. This problem went ignored for years until Yahoo accidentally deleted Mirco Wilhelm’s account last year and ended up getting trashed in the mainstream media on sites like CNN over it.

It’s almost cathartic a little to read Mat’s detailed post on Flickr because so much of it resonates with me as a heavy user over the years — the forcing of everyone into Yahoo accounts for example (which we were told would have no impact on us whatsoever but which was soon used to censor photos to German and other members). Mat’s description of focus by Yahoo executives on money and short-term profits and business while they ignored the huge social significance of what Flickr could have become feels spot on. In my mind Flickr could have become Facebook if only Yahoo had tried. They could have been just as big. Flickr could have been the company completely dominating Yahoo instead of the other way around. It could have been so much more than just photosharing.

I do think there are some things that Mat gets wrong in his article though. Mat paints Flickr today as an abandoned ghost town. Mat writes, “The site that once had the best social tools, the most vibrant userbase, and toppest-notch storage is rapidly passing into the irrelevance of abandonment. Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis. Yards gone to seed. Rusting bikes in the front yard. Tattered flags. At address, after address, after address, no one is home.”

He adds, “As I scroll down I note that friend after friend has quit posting. At the bottom of the page I am already back in mid 2010. So many of my friends have vanished. It feels like MySpace, circa 2009.”

I’m more active on Flickr today than Mat is. I still use the site daily and this doesn’t really describe my experience there. If I boot up my contacts photos there is still page after page after page of new and vibrant photos freshly added, not just this year or this month or this week, but this very day.

A lot of what your Flickr experience will be today depends on who you follow. I still have new users adding my photostream every single day. New blood is the lifeblood of every community and Flickr does indeed still get alot of new blood even as many old users have left. You have to keep up with these new people too and that takes energy. Page views on my photos were declining for a while, but they were always significant. Today I probably average about 14,000 views a day per Flickr’s stat program. That’s probably up 20% or so for me since the beginning of the year.

I think that there are tons of people who are still quite active on Flickr and will be for a very long time, even if overall traffic has been down for the site with people being pulled away by competition.

Flickr has the Getty deal which is pretty compelling even if the paltry 20% payout to photographers feels unfair. What other site out there will actually *pay* you for photo sharing?

SmugMug [who sponsors my weekly photo show Photo Talk Plus] has a similarly attractive financial engine paying photographers 85%, but other than Flickr/Getty and SmugMug, there are not really many social avenues where you can monetize your photos. I do make a lot of stock photography sales through people finding my photos on Google Image Search (which probably ties into Google+ through “Search Plus Your World”), but neither Google+ or Facebook have any direct stock photography path at present.

Flickr has a lot of people currently participating in the Getty deal. At present there are over 382,000 Flickr photographs represented on Getty. Thousands of people make from a few bucks to several hundred dollars a month through that deal. These are some of the most talented photographers on Flickr and these people are not likely to leave anytime soon unless someone can give them a better way to sell their photos as stock than Flickr does.

Mat acknowledges that Flickr is in fact trying to turn the ship around. “Despite years of neglect, Flickr’s miniscule yet highly talented team is trying desperately to right the ship,” he writes.

I think I’d emphasize the significance of this more than he has.

More specifically, I think Markus Spiering, who took over as Product Chief for Flickr after Matthew Rothenberg quit deserves a ton of credit. I was critical of Rothenberg. He had an award with a masturbating dinosaur in his office for “excellence in the field of community abuse and advocacy.” Maybe that was a joke, but it felt to me more like a big “I don’t really care about you the user” from my seat. The photo was taken by Heather Champ who was the one who’d banned me from the Help Forum and nuked a popular group I ran without warning.

I reached out to Markus when he became the new Head of Product but didn’t hear back from him initially. Eventually I did though and through him and Zack Sheppard (the current community manager) my ban from the Help Forum and blacklist from Explore were both removed.

Markus took the time to have lunch with me and shared his vision about a new and improved Flickr. After what felt to me like years of stagnation he talked with me about the big plans that he had this coming year for Flickr.

In January of this year Markus wrote a blog post promising us all a renewed sense of purpose for Flickr and I think he’s largely delivering on that. The first big push came in the form of a redesign of the “photos from your contacts” page. Markus chose Adrianne Jeffries as the journalist to first offer this story to. Adrienne is one of the best journalists covering Flickr out there today. She’s reported more deeply than others and I thought that was a great choice for him to go with for this story that got a ton of attention online.

In addition to the “photos from your contacts” page redesign, Flickr seems to be reigniting their interest in social events and photowalks. After years of limiting our photo file sizes to 20MB, last month they increased that limit to 50MB (for Pros) along with a pretty cool new photo uploader — and just today Flickr rolled out their new “liquid” photo page.

Markus feels to me like an enthusiastic, passionate leader who cares about the future of the site and one who has embraced innovation rather than the status quo which was a big part of what was bringing Flickr down.

I no longer feel like Flickr is dying. It’s got a long way to go, but I think they’ve still got a fighting chance left. I think they lost their opportunity to become Facebook, but they are improving and innovating once again and I think this will pay dividends over the next few years. Users feel like they are more respected to me. There is now an undo if Flickr deletes your account. A friend of mine even deleted his own account and was able to get them to reinstate it. This is all very positive.

I don’t know what the future of Flickr looks like, but as long as Markus and his team continue down the path of innovation, I think they are moving in the right direction. I suspect you’ll see more innovation in mobile later this year and I think other areas of the site will continue to be refreshed. Flickr’s new justified view for “your contacts photos” and for your “favorites” page is beautiful. I hope it’s rolled out to our sets page next.

It would be great to see Jeremy Brooks’ SuprSetr technology actually integrated into Flickr. Flickr still has the best album/set functionality in the business, photo organization remains their strong suit. I’ve got over 1,700 sets there and they have all been built by keywords on my photos with Jeremy’s awesome app. There is a ton of improvement that can still be made with groups and especially with mobile.

I’m more hopeful on Flickr than I’ve been in a long, long time. They still have the best image search in the business. They still have the best photo organizational tools in the business. They seem to have positive leadership.

Given the turmoil that’s going on at Yahoo and the poor fit for Flickr over the years, I actually think Flickr would make an impressive acquisition target for either Google or Facebook. With Dan Loeb running the show at Yahoo now there’s a strong case to be made for maximizing Yahoo shareholder value by breaking it up.

Google probably needs the leg up in social more than Facebook right now, but both could probably turn Flickr into a stock photography juggernaut, with it’s rich, highly organized archive. Both could also probably better optimize the rich library of photographs there into their other social properties and both could probably benefit from the relationships that Flickr has built with important institutional accounts like the White House, the Royals, or the countless number of museums, libraries and other historical and cultural institutions that now have a presence on the site.

Time will tell, I suppose, time will tell.

New Flickr Photo Page on a 17″ MacBook Pro

New Flickr Photo Page on a 27″ Apple Cinema Display

Quick, go to one of your flickr photo pages, right now. You like that bigger photo? Awesome right? Flickr seems to be cranking out one cool thing after another this year and today they’ve nailed it yet again with their new “liquid” photo page.

What is a liquid photo page?

Well, in the past, the photo on Flickr’s main photo page was a static photo size of 640px wide. Now the size of the photo will depend on what size browser window/monitor you are viewing it on. The bigger the monitor, the bigger the photo. Check out the three screenshots above. The first is the old flickr photo page, the second is the new flickr photo page on my 17″ MacBook Pro and the third was taken on my 27″ Apple Cinema Display.

While the new Flickr photo page looks bigger/better on my MacBook Pro, WOAH do photos look AMAZING on my 27″ Cinema Display. I’m a huge fan of big photos online and so I’m super pleased to see Flickr rolling this out today.

The last time Flickr improved the image size on photo pages was when they went from 500px to 640px in 2010. According to Flickr, there is absolutely no upscaling with the new, bigger photos and they try to avoid downsampling as much as possible. The title and the sidebar are visible without scrolling on landscape oriented photos, which are the vast majority of photos on Flickr. It’s a lot more complicated than this though and if you want to get into the actual algorithm and how it works more specifically, check out this post by Ross Harmes on the Flickr Engineering blog.

What does this mean for you, as a photographer? Well, it means that people are going to be seeing MUCH larger versions of your photos on a regular basis. They may have already been seeing larger versions of your photos in the lightbox or under “all sizes” if they’ve been clicking through, but now they’ll see A LOT more of your photos large because the main photo page is viewed more than the “all sizes” photo view page.

As a photographer this means that you will want to think about how your photos look large. With large photos little imperfections will be much more noticeable. Is there a dust spot on your sensor? You’ll want to be sure and clean that up before uploading your photo, because with larger photos it will be more noticeable — so will noise in your photographs or other imperfections.

Also, if you are the type of person who uploads smaller, resized photos online, you may want to rethink that strategy. If you are limiting your photos to 640px wide or even 800px or 900px wide, your photos won’t look as good on larger displays as those uploaded at full size by other users. Earlier this year flickr increased the size limit for accounts — from 20MB to 50MB for Pro accounts and 15MB to 30MB for free accounts.

It’s great to see Flickr continue down the path towards innovation and refreshing their layout and design. Earlier this year Flickr completely retooled their “photos from your contacts” page and “favorites” page into large (sort of) infinite scrolling photo mosiac walls. They’ve also recently better integrated with the popular scrapbooking site Pinterest and set up a cool page on Meetup.com to build Flickr photowalks worldwide. For the first time in many years, under new leadership of Flickr Product Chief Markus Spiering, it feels like Flickr is moving the ball forward in significant ways. They’ve made some great advancements in the first half of this year so far and I’m looking forward to what they come up with in the second half of the year.

One area where I suspect Flickr will continue innovating going forward is mobile. It was interesting to see Facebook stepping up their game in mobile yesterday with larger photos for the Facebook mobile app. It feels like between the many players in photo sharing these days (Flickr, Google+, Facebook, Instagram, SmugMug, 500px, etc.) competition is making photos on the web better for us all.

Pinterest has been one of the most popular social sharing sites of the past year. It’s growth has been explosive. Last week Pinterest said that Monday and Tuesday were their highest traffic days ever. Last month Experian said that Pinterest was now the third most popular social network behind Facebook and Twitter.

Photographer reaction to Pinterest has been mixed. Some photographers have been pleased with yet another avenue for their work to be seen, promoted and enjoyed by the world. Other photographers have expressed reservations about their work being pinned to the site without their permission, which they feel is a violation of their copyright. One of the big concerns about Pinterest has been that oftentimes photos are pinned without any sort of attribution to the original photographer. With so many beautiful images floating all over the web it seems easy for users to simply grab an image anywhere and pin it.

In what seems like a win-win-win for Pinterest, Flickr, and photographers, Flickr and Pinterest are announcing today that they are more deeply integrating their two sites. Most significantly, photographers will receive attribution on any of their Flickr photos that appear on Pinterest both in the future and for any of their Flickr photos posted in the past. This attribution will visibly include their name as well as a link back to their original Flickr photo.

“We want to embrace photo sharing, make it easy and beautiful and at the same time want to ensure that photographers are credited and attributed correctly. We also will continue to work with Pinterest on future enhancements to make sure Flickr members get the best tools to maintain control while sharing their photos with the world,” said Flickr head of product Markus Spiering.

So what does this new deeper integration between Flickr and Pinterest mean more specifically?

First, starting today Flickr members can share directly from Flickr to Pinterest. Pinterest will be included in Flickr’s share infrastructure.

Second, all Flickr photos pined to Pinterest (for both new photos and old photos already pinned from Flickr) will include attribution, including the Flickr photographer name, photo title, and a direct link back to their photo on Flickr. This attribution cannot be edited by the Pinterest user and will ride with the photo wherever it is repinned on Pinterest.

Third, anywhere someone grabs your photo that is linked back to Flickr (even non-Flickr blogs, websites, etc.) your attribution will flow through into Pinterest as long as your Flickr photo is the linked original source of the image.

Fourth, as always you can always opt out of Pinterest sharing entirely. Flickr has a setting that you can enable which will restrict your Flickr photos from being pinned to Pinterest or shared elsewhere on the web.

Today’s announcement should go a long way towards improving the relationship between Flickr photographers concerned about unauthorized photo usage on Pinterest and Pinterest. While someone still could download/screenshot your photo and reupload it to the web without attribution, at least where images are pinned directly there is a serious attempt being made here to credit the photographer for the image.

This is also smart from both Flickr and Pinterest’s viewpoint. Although Flickr/Pinterest declined to release the total number of Flickr photos that have been pinned to date, the number is very large and now this means that Flickr just earned a boatload of new links directly back to Flickr. This should be good for Flickr’s page view count and drive traffic back to the site. For Pinterest, they are getting valuable real estate as a direct sharing partner for Flickr photos which should also drive more existing Flickr users to their site.

Flickr more deeply integrating with one of the hottest social sharing sites on the web right now is yet another positive step forward for Flickr and is more evidence that Flickr is serious about ramping up innovation on the site as promised earlier this year. For Pinterest, this can be seen as a positive step forward in showing that they are more serious about addressing copyright/attribution concerns which have plagued the site over the course of the past year.

You can follow me on Pinterest here and on Flickr here.

I know you’re not supposed to have a favorite crop, but the square crop is my favorite.

I’m not sure if anybody’s noticed or not, but I think in the past few days Facebook has added a few little redesign elements into our timeline views. Most notably it seems like the “your contacts” that they show you are better positioned. More and more these days I’ve noticed that from a design standpoint facebook seems to be favoring the square crop. I love this.

Look how square all of the photos look on my Timeline screenshot above. I get a big bold photo (square). I get thumbnails of 8 of my friends (I have no idea how Facebook chooses who to show here do you? — but again square). I get avatars of 58 friends I’ve added recently (again square). Square, square, square. Of course Facebook also just bought the most square photo site of all Instagram.

I’m not a designer, but personally I think this page looks GREAT. I can’t believe how far Facebook has come. I remember when I used to bitch at Facebook all of the time because they gave us these microscopic thumbnail sized photos on our pages and that was it — but now we get these gorgeous oversized square photos on our timeline page. We also have a tool to “feature” a photo on Facebook now (just hover over a photo on your timeline and push the star button).

Facebook also now has the absolute best full screen photo view in the business. (click on a photo, click on options when it comes up big, click on enter full screen). From here you can just use your arrow keys to go back and forth through someone’s full screen photos.

Now next Facebook needs to increase the size of the photos in the regular feed. They are still way too small there.

One thing for sure with photos online is that bigger is better. I love that on Google+ the photos keep getting bigger too. The recent redesign there showed us a big bump up in landscape sized photos in our stream. It also came with the introduction of the black bars that people don’t seem to like. I like them for some reason, but I’m weird.

There is one very simple way G+ could improve the photo though and that is to make square photos even BIGGER. If you let a square photo on G+ fill the entire envelope on a post, you’d make the square photo the largest photo of all on G+. This would look great. Look at my Flickr stream here. Notice how the square photos are bigger than the other photos. Smart, smart, smart flickr. Look how much better the square photo looks than the other ones simply because it’s bigger.

Again, bigger is better (just ask Jeff Wall or Richard Serra).

The other thing that I like, besides the square, are photo mosaics. This is my favorite page of my photography that exists on any site, anywhere on the internet. So many photos and with infinite scroll. You know what else is cool? The hover over fave. Hover over any photo on this page and click on that little +1 button (hey thanks for the +1 by the way!)

Flickr’s new justified view is another example of this. Look how cool my favorites on flickr look as a photo mosaic. Flickr also uses this view for the photos from your contacts. Flickr pretty much ripped off Google+’s page design here but that’s ok because Google then ripped off their hover over fave/+1. I love it when photo sharing sites rip each other off and take the best elements of design. Flickr does need to remove the photographer name from their mosaic views though. That looks ugly. They should only show the name if someone hovers over the photo. It looks too much like a watermark the way they are doing it now and we all know how ugly photo watermarks and signatures look on photos. Also Flickr still needs to give us more infinite infinite scroll. Six pages of photos is not enough. Maybe if they bumped it up to 25 pages that might work.

I’d love to see sites do more and more mosaics like this. That’s what I want to see in the future of online photo display — more mosaics and more squares. What about you?

Good news for Flickr users today. Along with the announcement of a new and improved uploader they’ve also announced that they are increasing the size limits on photos. Pro account users can now upload photos up to 50MB (previously 20MB limit) in size and free accounts can now upload photos up to 30MB (previously 15MB limit).

This is a welcome announcement as today’s larger megapixel DSLRs are increasingly producing original JPG image files larger than 20MB. Previously if you tried to upload these photos to Flickr the uploader would reject them and the bulk uploader would accept them but resize them down to super small photo sizes.

Flickr’s new uploader is a marked improvement over the previous uploader and feels much more like their more professional bulk uploader that they previously offered as an add on. Users simply drag and drop multiple photos into an app like interface where they can rearrange photos into the order that they want to upload them.

(Pro tip: make sure the last 5 photos and especially the last single photo you upload are your strongest in any given batch).

Flickr actually begins processing and uploading the photos in the background before you even press upload but you have until you are ready to upload to commit the photos to your account. This is one speed enhancement improvement. Overall Flickr says that uploads of large files with the new uploader will now be up to 60% faster for users overseas and up to 30% faster for users in the US.

I’ve been beta testing the new uploader for the past few months and can confirm that photos do seem to upload much faster.

Other photo sharing sites had previously increased size limits and it was important for Flickr to keep up with today’s move. SmugMug announced in March that they were increasing file sizes to 50MB and photo sharing site 500px now offers 60MB file sizes.

Google’s Picasa service still limits photographs to 20MB. I can’t find anywhere where either Google+ or Facebook explicitily state a MB file size limit, however, in the past I’ve noticed that photos on Google+ fail to upload if they are over 20MB. Both Facebook and G+ resize your photos to smaller versions than the original sizes.

This is the second major enhancement that the Flickr site has completed this year. Earlier this year Flickr served up a redesign in their “Photos from your contacts” page that now shows these photos in a larger justified page format that allows bigger photo views and the ability to hover over a photo and fave the photo directly from this page.

This is another positive move forward by Flickr Chief Markus Spiering and his team coming off of Spiering’s promise of a “renewed sense of purpose” that he blogged about on the Flickr blog in January. Flickr has also established a new photowalking meetup site and has held major East Coast photowalks earlier this year in New York and Philadelphia and one this past Saturday in San Francisco.

On Friday I started a poll — similar to one I’d done several months back asking a simple question. Where is the best place to share photos? I was frankly surprised to see how well Flickr did, garnering the first place result with 41% of the poll. 2nd place went to Google+ with 36% of the poll. A distant third place went to 500px.

Given their size, both Facebook and Instagram seemed really poorly represented in the poll, garnering 6% and 3% respectively.

I posted the poll to my G+ stream, to my Flickr stream, to Twitter and to my Facebook account. I have lots of followers on all of these sites. The poll is not at all scientific of course and there are a million reasons why it could be horribly flawed, but it got me thinking more about flickr.

A few months after Google+ had launched I penned a dramatic post entitled “Flickr is Dead.” My feeling on Flickr at that time was that it was a sinking ship — a former photo sharing heavyweight who simply refused to innovate no matter what. The site felt poorly managed with an anti-user ethos. It felt like it had been left to it’s own devices by a dying parent company that was simply unaware or didn’t care.

Against an increasingly competitive backdrop of new and old photo sharing options (Google+, Instagram, 500px, SmugMug) it felt like users were jumping ship. Unique users were/are down as measured by compete.com at Flickr. But lately it’s starting to feel a bit like Flickr might be ramping up a bit.

In February Flickr rolled out a refresh to their photos from your contacts page — one of the first significant refreshes the site has had in years. The page still feels a touch clunky (infinite scrolling doesn’t feel quite as infinite as things like Cool Iris — or does any remember Flickrleech from years ago?) but it’s a huge improvement over the old page that was there. You can now see reasonable sized images in an attractive mosaic where they are easy to fave. Flickr should consider taking away the “more photos” paging button for paid Pro accounts who don’t abuse it — that would be a nice distinction to get people to upgrade to Pro. They’ve also rolled out their new page design to users’ favorite photos section as well.

Flickr also seems to be stepping up a bit in the community management area. They’ve set up a very nice new photo meetup board with meetup.com. They held a few successful photowalks on the East Coast and have a big San Francisco photowalk coming up on this Saturday (I’m attending this one myself).

In January Flickr Chief Markus Spiering promised us a renewed Flickr. So far I like what I’m seeing. I think more work still needs to be done (flickr needs circles/buckets, more robust blocking tools, notifications, an improved mobile experience that includes a group thread reader, and lots more) but they seem to be headed in the right direction. I’ve also noticed what feels like a pick up in activity on Flickr. I’ve noticed that the views on my own photos there recently seem to have picked up a bit.

Flickr seems to be doing better with fewer employees as well. At the end of 2010 flickr had 56 staffers. Today, after a couple of rounds of layoffs, Flickr has 41. They lost at least three people in Yahoo’s big restructure last week and they laid off a number of people in their customer service dept earlier this year. Nolan Caudill, a former Flickr staffer, blasted Yahoo after the January layoffs, but more and more I’m of the opinion that those layoffs were a good thing for Flickr, not a bad thing. In many regards Flickr’s customer service folks were some of the most disliked people by actual users. Getting rid of some of the staffers that were making things bad for users could have actually been smart management.

Which brings me to my next point.

Google should buy Flickr.

Now is the time to get this done. Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram and I actually think that Flickr has far more potential than Instagram. Google’s got a ton of cash. Yahoo is dying. Facebook is Google’s biggest competitor now and Yahoo is officially at patent war with Facebook. As odd as it would be for these two former search foes to come together for a deal, Flickr makes all the sense in the world for Google who could throw some amazing engineering talent and legitimacy to the site.

More than anything else at Google, Google is betting big on Google+ — and for good reason. Google+ provides Google very valuable data that can be used for advertising. Yesterday I was talking with my friend Robert Scoble about the money Facebook paid for Instagram. Robert said that he thought Facebook bought Instagram for so much because they want the data that’s in the photos.

Think about all the data that is in our photos: who you are photographed with in a photo (maybe an algorithm should show you more of these people’s posts), when it was taken, where it was taken, what concerts you go to, what restaurants you eat at, etc.

What about the photos that you favorite or comment on or like? Isn’t this even more data and more signal that you provide? Do I favorite lots of photos of ice cream? Maybe I like ice cream. Do I favorite lots of photos of fashion? Maybe I care about fashion. Do I fave lots of photos of Nascar, or bicycles or surfing, or… you get the idea. By analyzing what is in the photos that we take and post and what we like and favorite, we provide an amazing amount of information about who we are as human beings. What we like. What we might buy if it were advertised towards us.

So what would Google get with Flickr? For starters they would get the largest highly organized library of images in the world with an impecable pedigree and social DNA. Other sites like Facebook may have more photos, but nobody has a library as organized as Flickr’s. For years people have tagged and organized their photos in all kinds of ways. This data around the photos is very valuable for Flickr. It tells us what is inside of a photo without having to resort to image recognition software.

Google would also get alot of potential high profile accounts. President Obama is on Flickr. The Royal Family is on flickr. The Library of Congress is on Flickr. Lots of big institutions, libraries, art museums, etc.

They would also get Flickr’s excellent photo organizational capabilities. This is one area where Flickr shines compared to anyone else. I have almost 1,700 sets on Flickr now. Why do I use Flickr for my sets instead of Google+ or Facebook or other sites? Easy, I can use Jeremy Brooks excellent program SuprSetr to organize my sets by keywords. Imagine if your Flickr stream could just autopost to your Google+ stream in full big size just like Google+. How cool would that be?

Facebook buying Instagram is upping the ante in the photo sharing game. Facebook paid a billion for Instragram. Google is sitting on over $44 billion in cash. The entire company Yahoo is only valued at $17 billion. Of that, most of the value is related to the positions that they own in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba.

If Instagram is worth a billion, Flickr is worth more. By selling Flickr to Google, this would allow Yahoo to unlock some value for shareholders with an asset that likely contributes very little to Yahoo’s bottom line.

You can follow me on Flickr here.

Today Flickr is rolling out their new “Photos from Your Contacts” page and it looks pretty awesome. They announced that this was coming last week and it looks similar to how it was reported on then. I think it’s being rolled out in waves and everyone might not have it at once. I do have the page now myself though.

Photos are now placed in a new “Justified” jigsaw pattern that makes the photos as large as they can possibly be, emphasizing the photos over surrounding white space. Even better, the page now has infinite scrolling. Paging sucks and now you don’t have to page this page anymore — simply scroll to the bottom of the page and more photos will be loaded. If you hover over each photo you have an opportunity to both fave the photo (stars are white and click them to make them pink) or click comment which will take you to the comment box on a photo’s actual main photo page.

Flickr has chosen to display the photographer’s name in small white letters over the photos, which feels a bit distracting at times, but it’s nice that it makes it easier to find your favorite friends’ photos by name.

Overall, I’m incredibly pleased with the redesign of this page. The justified view feels a lot like Google+’s “Photos From Your Circles” page, but from a functionality perspective it’s a lot better. You can fave photos on this page on Flickr but not Google+ and Flickr’s most recent view is better than the algorithm that Google is currently serving which seems more an odd combination of randomness and female faces.

I’m also really happy that this new design represents a moment of innovation and improvement for Flickr. It seems like under Flickr’s Head of Product, Markus Spiering, that they have a renewed sense of purpose. Shipping this new design is great proof in the pudding that they are serious about improving the site for their users, which is probably the most exciting thing about this new design of all. Congrats to the Flickr team who redesigned this page and rolled it out.

As much as I like this page and am happy to see it today, I KNOW that this page can even be awesomer than it already is. Here are some ideas on how to make this page even better!

1. When we hover over a photo let us press the F key to fave. We can press the F key to fave a photo on the photo page; let us also use it to fave photos on hover. This will make it easier and faster to fave resulting in more faves, and more user interaction.

2. Right now there is only 1 way that this page serves photos, by recency. Flickr could build in 5 other views in a pull down menu on this page: most interesting by the last hour, last 12 hours, last 24 hours, last week, last month. Especially with my contacts (I have a lot more contacts than friends), this will allow me to see the best of their work in various time frames and help surface the absolute best of what my contacts are putting up.

3. Let me filter this view by buckets. Right now I have only two ways that I can filter this view, by contacts or friends and family. What if I wanted to see though all of the photos by my SF photog buddies? Or what if I want to see this page only for my upcoming Utah friends because I’m going to Utah next month and what to immerse myself in their work ahead of the trip? Google has circles, Flickr should have buckets. Once they have buckets then we should be able to filter this page by contacts, friends, or any other bucket that we create.

Anyways, I think all three of these items would make this page even that much better and I hope that today’s redesign is just the beginning for making this page as awesome as it can possibly be. What do you think of the new page? Do you like it? Not like it?

Adrianne Jeffries over at Betabeat has a nice scoop on the fresh new page design that Flickr is apparently rolling out next Tuesday for their photos from your contacts page. In her post titled “Flickr is Getting a Major Makeover” she reports on her meeting with Flickr Head of Product Markus Spiering and includes at least one screen shot of what the new page is going to look like.

I haven’t played around with the new page yet, but I’m liking what I see so far from the screenshot. The photos from your contacts’ page is of one of the most popular and visited pages on Flickr.

The old layout for this page was sort of a clunky screen that hadn’t changed much for many years at flickr. It was criticized last year by Flickr Designer Timoni West when she still worked at Flickr in a post titled “The Most Important Page on Flickr.”

The new design looks much more interactive with a focus on larger photos, hover over pop out magnification, and a jigsaw sort of layout that allows the photos on the page to take the maximum space possible with very little white space. It looks quite a bit more like what Google+’s photo pages look like actually and feels like a much more elegant design. Now how cool would it be if this new page also had infinite scrolling as well.

According to Jefferies, the new page is scheduled to roll out next Tuesday, February 28th along with a revamp of Flickr’s upload page as well.

I have to say that I like seeing this sort of fresh new look come out of Flickr — and I think it’s a good sign that Chief Markus Spiering is looking to make good on his promise last month of a renewed focus on Flickr this year.

I don’t know anything about how the functionality of the page might change yet, but hopefully we see some improvement there as well — either with this roll out or subsequent roll outs. At present the current page offers you four ways to view your contacts’ photos.

1. The last 1 photo by all of your “friends.”
2. The last 1 photo by all of your “contacts” (contacts include “friends” and “contacts”).
3. The last 5 photos by all of your “friends.”
4. The last 5 photos by all of your “contacts.”

Personally I’d like to see more ways that flickr users can group their contacts. Having only two buckets contacts vs. friends/family is not enough. Flickr needs circles like Google+ has where we can filter this page view by more than just these two buckets.

I’d also like to see new ways to sort photos on this page beyond just recency. It would be super cool if flickr let us sort this page also by interestingness within time periods (last hour, 12 hours, day, week month). I suspect this sort of functionality enhancement would involve a bit more coding than flickr may have done for next week’s refresh, but the important thing is that Flickr is improving this page and that’s a huge step in the right direction and a positive sign coming from Flickr. G+’s equivalent photo page could use some of this sort of functionality as well.

Also in her article, Jefferies comments about the recent round of layoffs that took place in the customer service area at Flickr. Former Flickr engineer Nolan Caudill wrote a pretty scathing blog post about the layoffs and cited it as evidence that the suits at Yahoo were out of touch with Flickr. Former Yahoo Andy Baio circulated a rumor on twitter that Flickr management was actually blindsided by the layoffs. In Jeffries’ article though she quotes Spiering that the layoffs were done to centralize Flickr’s support with other Yahoo customer support, making it available 24 hours a day.

Initially I wondered about those layoffs myself and blogged on them here — but the more I think about them I’m now starting to wonder if those layoffs actually aren’t a positive step forward by Flickr. I’m not going to name names and I mean no disrespect to anyone who lost their job, but at least one of the individuals who reportedly lost their job in the layoffs really was seen as one of the most hated customer service reps on the site and had taken a lot of criticism over the years for what many users felt were bad account and content deletion decisions. Perhaps clearing out some of the dead wood so to speak is actually a step forward and not backwards.

Anyways, a very solid article on change at Flickr by Jeffries, who is covering flickr better than just about anyone out there these days — and exciting that we’ll likely be able to play with a cooler new version of Flickr next Tuesday. Revamping the contacts photo page and making it easier/faster/bigger/better to see your contacts’ photos should create more interactivity on Flickr which is a super positive thing.

Update: Apparently Flickr has been testing this new layout for almost 6 weeks now. Here’s a link to the group of people who have been testing the new layout if you want to try to get into it deeper. Comments in this group would seem to confirm that continuous scrolling is also coming to flickr.

“Yay! The gates are open and welcome Flickr testers. We are now in what is considered our preview release 1 of public beta. We’ll be fixing bugs, monitoring scaling issues on the back end, and adding a few features before going into preview release 2. Then we’ll go into preview release 3 and then when that’s good to go the beta period will be officially over.” February 10, 2004.

Today is Flickr’s 8th Birthday. Whatever you may or may not think of the service today, without a doubt Flickr pioneered social photography.

I joined Flickr during year one in August of 2004, shortly after it was launched to the public. What I found there was more than just a place to host my photos, I found a vibrant community full of great photographers who were willing and eager to engage with each other through the site. I found an audience that appreciated creativity and the ability for us to come together and share art in mostly a non-commercial setting.

The photo above was taken at Flickr’s 2nd Birthday party in San Francisco. Since Flickr’s launch, social photography has flourished on the web in so many different ways and in so many different places. I’ve been fortunate to have benefited tremendously from that over the years.

Happy Birthday to Flickr.