Flick It!

Flickr is driving me crazy.

As many of you know, I've been posting photographs on Flickr since 2006, and while I've had complaints about it from time to time, I've mostly been satisfied with it.  Recently, however, Yahoo made so many changes to it that I hardly recognize it.  But that 's not what's driving me crazy.  

It was bad enough that Flickr changed its screen format, so that the titles of my photos don't automatically appear on my photostream unless you move the cursor over the photo - or that I now have to click on the photo itself (any photo) to see how many views it's gotten.  Also, users have no control over the layout of a profile page.  But, since the look of the photostream pages were changed, I've had a new problem - automatic Facebook links.  They flat don't work any more.  I'll usually wait twenty or thirty minutes, the normal wait time, for the automatic link to my latest Flickr upload to appear on my Facebook page, and . . . it doesn't appear.  Not immediately, not at all.

Contacting Flickr is no help.  I explain the problem to the Flickr technicians and, either they'll declare the problem solved if I haven't followed up with them after three days (aren't they supposed to follow up with me?) when it hasn't, or the problem will be taken care of within three days, they'll write me on the third day to tell me they consider the case closed, when . . . guess what! The problem starts all over again!

When Flickr updates don't automatically appear on Facebook, you're supposed to remove the Facebook connection and then reinstate it.  I tried that.  I removed the Facebook connection and tried to put it back on, only to get the following message: "There was a problem connecting your account to Facebook.  Please try again later."  And  I kept getting that message for a week! 

Earlier this week I finally got my Facebook connection restored.  It worked fine for a day or two. Then it stopped working again.  I tried the resolve the problem by alerting Flickr technicians.  Nothing came of it.  That was it; I'd had enough.

No, I'm not quitting Flickr.  I have 4,086 reasons not to - namely, the number of photos I have on my account as of this writing.  However, I am not going to bother fixing the Facebook connection again.  When I upload new pictures, I'll just enter my photostream URL on my Facebook page manually, like I do with posts on my blogs.  So what if the thumbnail for each new photostream link is a picture from a previous upload rather than one of the pictures from my latest upload? Solution: Don't use a thumbnail.

Anyway, automatic Facebook updates are now for only one photo from a new upload. It used to be that automatic Facebook updates would say that I uploaded three or six photos to Flickr, depending on how many pictures were in a single upload.  No more.  I'm wasting my time trying to fix this problem.

Yes, I know free-account users now get an extra terabyte - a trillion bytes, a thousand times more space than Picasa.  But I am in fact a paying customer. 

Oh well, there are a few new features in the Flickr redesign that I like, so maybe I shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.