Flickr - why does it get so hard ?

[zarniwhoop]

I've finally got some more of my less-than-wonderful photos to a state where they might be ready for public consumption, and uploaded them to flickr. No link yet, I'm still going through them *slowly* to sort out tags and descriptions, and anyway most people here probably aren't interested in the Pinzgaubahn.

 

But the UI seems to get worse every time I use flickr (admittedly there are months between each upload). And in particular, setting sensible tags has become a lot slower. Last time I did that it was easy to put in a tag or three and then move on to the next picture.

 

But now it auto-generates tags on most of these photos - railway, train, railroad are common (but not normally useful), but I'm also seeing suggestions of grass, wood (any planked building), building (a detail shot of a building), road (including any pic with gravel in it), tree, sky,  mountain (maybe they are small mountains in the background, but hill seems more accurate), and animal if there is, or might be, an animal in the view.

 

The trouble is that if I just type in the tags which I think are useful, these spurious suggestions get added. So I have to delete them, by mousing towards the end of a tag to bring up an 'x' and then clicking on that. And half the time I do that, it takes me to "pictures recently tagged with sky" (or whatever).

 

Ooh, I get so angry, it makes my blood boil - I think I'll have to move to Purley

 

Thanks for reading my rant. And BTW, these "processed" photos remind me of the style of that firm which used to sell railway postcards in the 70s (Salmon?) - some have a certain "maybe not true" feel to them, and if your monitor is set to be excessively bright then they *will* hurt your eyes,

 

ĸen

[Rivercider]

A couple of years ago I got 'locked out' of my own Flickr account to which which I had added over 2,000 photos over several years, with many more to go.

I started a second account, but have only added a few to it and now can't be bothered to continue as I feared something else will go wrong!

 

cheers

[Robert]

Unfortunately, this seems to be a sign of the times.

 

All of the "social media" sites seem to change their interface on a regular basis, as does (of course) Microsoft.  That is something that is particularly frustrating.  Given that so many people use the Office products at work, I'd hate to think how much time is lost learning a completely different way of doing things with each new version!

 

Still, small consolation, but at least Flickr haven't suddenly started charging their members 400$ a year if they want to link to photos - like a certain other photo hosting company.

[Quarryscapes]

Flickr only auto adds tags if you've added them yourself to the files before upload, such as in Lightroom or whatever you use to edit/catalogue your images. You can still add as many tags as you like in one go by separating each in a list with a comma. 

[unravelled]

I let flickr get on with it. I'm sure it's not designed for collections like mine, but I'm happy to use it . I use the old Flickr uploadr linked from Picasa on my PC. I add tags in picasa, but not as many as I could, then  titles and albums using the uploadr, . I guess the real point of flickr's autotagging is to train their ai systems, and i wonder if every time we delete an autotag it hinders rather than helps. Perhaps in time it will begin to add tags useful to us, recognising detail in photos we might leave untagged. The one thing autotagging has made be do is think about my tags, and try to use more specific words, even codes, to make it do what I want.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[sir douglas]

ive been using flickr for 7 years and havent ever used the tags

[royaloak]

ive been using flickr for 7 years and havent ever used the tags

So you dont want other people to look at your pictures then?

 

The whole point of adding tags is so they show up in a search, if you dont have the tags then the search tools cant find your pictures.

[Rivercider]

So you dont want other people to look at your pictures then?

 

The whole point of adding tags is so they show up in a search, if you dont have the tags then the search tools cant find your pictures.

I have never added tags to any of my photos, though I did try to include a fairly comprehensive caption to each one

which does help when searching through them for particular images 

 

cheers

[PaulCheffus]

So you dont want other people to look at your pictures then?

 

The whole point of adding tags is so they show up in a search, if you dont have the tags then the search tools cant find your pictures.

Hi

 

Not necessarily as you can search for images based on the contents of other images.

 

Cheers

 

Paul

[antrobuscp]

I've added nearly 2,500 photos to Flickr over the last 12 months. I can't say that I've found the user interface a problem. There are things I'd like to improve - greater/easier ability to change the display order of certain items - but I've not found the "tagging" problematic. I usually just add any specific tags that I feel are appropriate, and generally leave the "standard" tags alone. They are often American versions of English terms - ocean for sea, for example - or so widely drawn that I don't feel they add or detract from likely searches. The tags I add are the ones I feel would assist in targeted searches.

 

Just my view and, of course, I only joined in December 2016 so I can't express a view as to whether what I'm using is better or worse than that which went before.

 

Colin

[sir douglas]

doesnt a search mainly work with titles and descriptions, most of my photos dont get seen because i dont annotate them as they are just uploaded as hosting for RMweb so i dont care about them not being seen directly

Edited December 7, 2017 by sir douglas

[BG John]

doesnt a search mainly work with titles and descriptions, most of my photos dont get seen because i dont annotate them as they are just uploaded as hosting for RMweb so i dont care about them not being seen directly

Why use it for hosting for RMweb when you can upload directly to here? For those of us with slow broadband, it makes your interesting topics verge on the unreadable, because of the time it takes pages to load, and the way the page jumps around, and ends up on a post I'd already seen days ago, rather than the first unread post.

[antrobuscp]

When I first joined Flickr, most photos only received a handful of views. That changed completely when I joined groups, and since then most photos receive a much larger number of views. I occasionally use the search facility, but normally only for rather general types of subject.

 

Colin 

[Classsix T]

When I used fotopic (ahh, fotopic) I was deliberately reticent about adding gen to the images, purely from an anti piracy point of view. I'd sue twelve ways from Sunday anyone who pinches my work and proof of date working, location etc. with an entry in a log book just adds another legal string to my bow.

 

They were also kept deliberately low res and had copyright text added (and layer flattened) in PhotoShop.

 

I don't flatter myself that I ever took much worth stealing by the way, but I am also Editor of a class specific diesel enthusiast newsletter and more than once have had to ask a supplier of copy if they owned or had permission to use a submission.

 

C6T.

[jonny777]

I used to upload to Flickr quite regularly, but I have now slowed right down to almost nothing. 

 

I am not sure why, although I have found Flickr to have become less interesting now it has been saturated by billions of digital photos from the last five years. A search for a station which used to bring up a selection of views from recent decades, now seems to turn up about a million almost identical shots from last year, and even trying to add dates has the effect of random results (non railway) from those dates. 

 

This is not a singular complaint about Flickr; I find the same with Google and Facebook images these days. 

[zarniwhoop]

Flickr only auto adds tags if you've added them yourself to the files before upload, such as in Lightroom or whatever you use to edit/catalogue your images. You can still add as many tags as you like in one go by separating each in a list with a comma. 

I guess I wasn't clear: it *suggests* tags. On one photo I added my intended tag, and the Add also added the suggestions.

[sir douglas]

i used to upload directly but when i changed to the current camera the photos were too big to upload directly and i already had a flickr account so ive done that since

 

and about having good photos to look at regularly,  its about who you follow and what groups your in to find what you want

[railsquid]

Why use it for hosting for RMweb when you can upload directly to here? For those of us with slow broadband, it makes your interesting topics verge on the unreadable, because of the time it takes pages to load, and the way the page jumps around, and ends up on a post I'd already seen days ago, rather than the first unread post.

 

I often post pictures to multiple forums and it's easier to upload them into one place (currently Flickr) rather than remember how to use/link the multitude of different forum gallery systems and which photo I've uploaded where... The downside is the risk of Flickr going all Photobucket, of course...

 

BTW even on fast broadband, pages with lots of photos jump all over the place when loading. (And if I ever rub a bottle and the Forum Genie pops out, I'll request that he prevents people from quoting posts with dozens of photos, which makes the situation even worse).

[royaloak]

 

BTW even on fast broadband, pages with lots of photos jump all over the place when loading. (And if I ever rub a bottle and the Forum Genie pops out, I'll request that he prevents people from quoting posts with dozens of photos, which makes the situation even worse).

Especially when all they add is 'nice pictures' or some other non comment.

 

Like the third post in this thread-

http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/128972-nice-one-chiltern/

 

I see no reason to quote the original post at all.

 

No offence meant and I am only using it as an example of posts which completely eff up people trying to view the thread on mobile devices or slow internet.

Edited December 10, 2017 by royaloak