The whole pyapal thing is a drag – in fact, paypal made an error and double-billed me for my flickr subscription, so I would up involvuntarily spending $50 and getting a two-year subscription instead of spending $25 and getting the one year subscription I wanted. Since Flickr has that wonderful nearly-criminal “no refunds, ever, no how, no way” policy, I’m stuck with the second year that I don’t want, and my Paypal account has been frozen because I refuse to pay them the $25 that I did not want to spend. But that’s all another story. Anyway, after a few months with Flickr, I don’t even want my first year. I’m sorry I paid for a pro account, and honestly cannot understand why everybody likes Flickr so much.

Flickr’s “organizer” is totally buggy. I spend hours with it alternately showing me my pictures and then suddenly telling me I had none, even though I have over 2000 uploaded. If you hunt, they provide a link to an older organizer version, which has the same problem.

Flickr is totally inflexible. They give you abolutely no way to control other order photos are displayed in your “photostream” except by upload order. Whose brilliant idea was that? Also their display options for your main page layout are all bad. I don’t like any of them.

Flickr’s support is, if my experience was typical, completely nonexistent. Having paid my money, I contacted support about the issue I was having with Organizr. My support request was ignored completely. All I ever heard back was a survey questionairre from Yahoo two weeks later asking how my support experience was. You’d better believe I told them.

Above all, Flickr’s ideas about how your photos should be presented are awful and, once again, this is not flexible. Universally throughout Flickr, your photos are mutilated into arbitrary square thumbnails which, unless you’re taking snapshots that you care only about the subject and not the overall composition, make it literally impossible to tell what your photographs look like (not to mention that it violates the “no derivatives” Creative Commons license that Flickr itself offers.)

I challenge you to go into the Flash-based Organizr – when it’s not telling you you yor photos don’t exist – and put together a gallery of your best shots. If you are like me, and take many photos of a subject, you’d better have the best shots tagged before upload because you’re not going to be able to evaluate your composition in Organizr once your photos have been chopped into little squares. On occasion, I’ve been unable to identify what a photo was even of because they cropped out the most important details (and this wasn’t an unusual subject, It was a friend of mine standing up… they cropped his head out of the thumbnail so I couldn’t even tell what it was a picture of. Brilliant.) And aside from any rational reason, the fact is: I don’t want people seeing my photographs as little partial square bits, requiring them to click on the altered versions to see what the photograph actually looks like. Ever. That’s why I picked a “no derivatives” license. But Flickr seems to feel that I don’t need a say in this, or that they’re above the restrictions of the CC licenses they promote.

Finally, I had the frustrating experience of posting in Flickr’s “improvement suggestions” forum that, y’know, maybe Flickr shouldn’t be arbitrarily cropping our photos and showing them to the public that way, or should at least give us an option to turn it off and leave our photos unmolested. I got hit with a tidal wave of strongly negative reactions (including a some personally incensed sounding oes that have since been deleted.) Several users with “pro” accounts replied that that square thumbnails were crucial to Flickr’s “site branding” and page layout, among other things and that they’d hate to see them go – it was like they cared more about Flickr than about their photographs. I was also then cautioned by them – the “pro” users – to do my photo organizing offline if I wanted to be able to see what my photos actually look like, and that Flickr is no more reliable than my own hard drive for backing up my photos, and that most people do not use Flickr for archiving their photos, either. In fact, one highly-active user told me doesn’t upload 90% of his photos. So, pro users feel that Flickr is not good for photo organizing, too unreliable for backup, and don’t even even upload the vast majority of their photos to it in any way… I was left questioning, what the $#$%# did I just pay $50 for? I felt like I just paid good money for nothing more than to join a bulletin board, a glorified version of MySpace, except with a vague focus on posting snapshots for strangers to see. I’m left having paid my money (twice, due to Paypal’s lousy design and policies) and *still* shopping for a decent photo hosting service.

I stumbled across your posting “Why Flicks Sucks Sometimes” thru Smugmug.com Actually I agree with you that *”Flickr Sucks BIG TIME”* but my reasons are different than yours. So here is my story with the “Famous Flickr”.

I had a flickr account some time ago, of course their free account is limited, and today I have decided to upgrade my account to the pro level. After signing-in my account and clicking the upgrade button, i was taken to a page saying that all their payments are made through PayPal.
And unfortunately Paypal does not accept payments from all the countries, it is limited to certain countries, which means I can not pay because my country “Lebanon” is not on Paypal list.

So I had to take another alternative in order to make this work, I have myself an account on Paypal on which I accept donations (http://www.waddr.com), and its registered address is a US address through an international express mail service company, so it was my only left choice, and to my surprise, after logging-in with my paypal account and entering my credit card number, a new page opens where you can read something like: “sorry we dont accept credit cards not issued from the country where you are registering”.

So I had to drop the whole thing until I decide what to do, but many questions came across my mind on my way home:

How can a company like Flickr under the Yahoo umbrella, limit itself to this type of payment mode? While other smaller companies offer better payment options.

What logic is behind limiting themselves to the options of Paypal ??
They say Flickr is part of WEB 2.0, how can a company be pointed as Web 2.0 and have restrictions?

What about millions of potential customers (I am one of them), who want to buy a pro account and can not, so they get out of their site and never come back?

What if when flickr realizes this, it would be too late ?

Many many questions to ask to flickr people.

Anyway who cares about them as long as they dont care about me and my country. So frankly after searching for other photo sharing services, I have landed on Zoto.com which looks pretty cool, so I am considering having an account with you, i will register for the free to test it then upgrade for sure.

But I feel like shouting: “flickr … I AM NOT A HAPPY CUSTOMER”

Keep it up Zoto!

We first heard of Flickr when we were researching one of our first clients. His name kept showing up in searches with links to Flickr photos. That’s how we learned about Flickr, from a Google search.

If photos from someone at SmugMug had shown up in the results, then we probably would have adopted it. I just heard of it while I was following a post on another blog.

So, I don’t think they have a better PR machine. They have a product that shows up in search engines.

Which is not spin, but results. Results matter.

And when I need a tool I think “Hey, I’ve seen them in the searches I’ve done, I’ll try them.”

Re: Flickr’s fanbase:

Yeah, I totally get that. Our business is the same way – 60-80% of our customers (there’s a gray area we’re not sure of, certainly more than 60%) are referrals from other customers who are just foaming-at-the-mouth rabid about our company and product.

I should have mentioned that in my post actually – if there’s a better barometer of how much a company, whether it’s Flickr or anyone else, doesn’t suck – it’s how fanatical their customers are. And Flickr’s got some of the most and the loudest. Therefore, it can’t suck.

Don

As I’m sure you already know (but so anyone reading this now knows, too), we recommend Flickr all the time, both as an alternative to SmugMug if they’re really not looking for us, but also as an addition to SmugMug if they’re really looking for both. Which, surprisingly, is fairly often.

I understand the scaling problem and how difficult it is to solve. We can search by geography, too, and it was a pain to build – but we don’t have your scale to deal with, either, so I can only imagine.

We’re doing somewhere on the order of 30,000 cache/DB hits per second, so we’re not to the 50K level yet. Can’t wait.

Truthfully, I’m more worried about scaling our customer service than I am about scaling our infrastructure. How to scale great human-to-human service is something we spend a lot of time thinking about and working on.

Don

I think that both can be successful is awesome and proves that there are several audiences under that big ole’ digital photography market, and features often follow the audience.

Flickr’s most powerful PR engine? Their customer evangelists (I’m one of them) who love Flickr so much it is wrong.