Flickr 2014 Review

I joined Flickr in 2009. I made use of Flickr up until March 2010. By that time I had nearly 200 images and that was the limit for a free account. That is almost 4 years ago. A lot has changed. More is changing. Yahoo is changing Flickr faster than people make tutorials for it.

I was way behind on Flickr. I didn’t know how it had changed. Many of you probably already know. For those that don’t here is some news.

Flickr 2014 - Image by: Alexander Kaiser, Flickr

Flickr 2014 – Image by: Alexander Kaiser, Flickr

With Jo Yardley adding a new group named Second Life is Looking Good I wanted to add it to my collection of contacts and groups. Wile I haven’t been adding photos I have been looking at what others post and I use it as a source of Creative Commons images I can use in my blog. I think I have some interesting images to add and wondered what it was going to cost me to with a Pro account. They don’t have ‘Pro’ accounts any more.

What Flickr has now is an ad-free account for US$50/year. With only a free account you are limited to a terabyte of storage or about a half million images. I’ve used less than 1% of my terabyte allotment.

Images other than JPEG, GIF, and PNG will be converted to JPEG. Images are now saved at the original upload resolution.

You are limited to 200 images in any one-batch upload. Images are limited to 200mb each and videos to 1gb each. I can’t find any other limits listed by Yahoo/Flickr. People are talking about all sorts of other limits. But, there were just telling me I was limited to 200 images and other old limits that no longer apply. Flickr help explicitly says I have 1 terabyte storage limit and unlimited images. I suspect the limits things are from people just as clueless about recent Flickr changes as I was.

Images are saved in a number of various sizes and compressed. See: Upload limitations in Flickr.

These changes make Flickr far more useful to me.

The uploader has been changed to drag and drop. I remember having trouble with the past uploaders. I haven’t done enough uploads yet to know well this one works. I do like the new user interface for adding descriptions, tags, and selecting which ‘set’ the images will be placed in. Also, the copyright settings are easy to change.

I’ve started doing more photography in Second Life. The changes in Flickr give me an ideal place to share some of those shots.

Adobe Lightroom & Flickr

It is possible to publish images and videos directly from Lightroom to Flickr or Facebook. There is a video from Lynda.com by Chris Orwig that shows how to set up the accounts For FB and Flickr in Lightroom and share images. The video is a bit old, but it is free and not much has really changed. See: Uploading photos to Facebook and Flickr.

With the deal Adobe is offering this month, you may find Lightroom a handy tool to have. Flickr has certainly become much more handy.

Blogs

Flickr still wants to link people to Flickr when Flickr stored images are used in web pages or forums. But, that isn’t much of a problem. Some may see it as a handy thing.

Also they have lots of Creative Common licensed images that only require attribution to use.

One thought on “Flickr 2014 Review

  1. The new interface is less than useful for bulk uploading or bulk edits. Perhaps I’m just slow or stupid, but I’ve been using the new version for a while and it still makes little sense to me as a power tool.

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