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Flickr - world's best photo sharing application
Flickr in my opinion is the most amazing photo sharing application on the web at the moment and in this article I will try and explain why I think this is so.
I signed up for Flickr account a while back (before it was bought off by Yahoo) and my initial impressions of the application were that it was good, but I never spent much time to explore its real values and its full potential. A few months back (in an attempt to organise my photos a little more ubiquitously, I looked into Picasa Web and Flickr as many options for this task).
I was using Picasa for few months mostly for purposes of quickly clearing out the junk shots from my photo sessions and it worked well for that purpose, but Picasa Web albums is (at best) an alpha photo hosting application, which is by no means ready for commercial use of any kind (and this comes as a comment from one of Google's biggest fans).
I will start this review by covering the positive aspects of Flickr, so here we go.
Positive aspects about Flickr
Amazing speed of performance
According to the stats on Flickr page for exploring every one's photos, people upload on average around 4000 photos every minute! This means that Flickr receives around 2102400000 pictures a year (that's 2 billion and 102 million pictures a year)!
With this volume of content hitting the system all the time, it is incredible that Flickr even works, let-alone manages to work so fast. This is not even considering the fact that each of the pictures can be present throughout the system in around 10 different sizes, each of which is a separate file somewhere, as it is possible to link to each one of them with a direct link.
Great URL structure
Listening to some people from Flickr talk about how the application was built, I have learned that it was actually approached from the URL structure downwards, so it is not a great surprise to observe that Flickr's URL's are really usable, sense making and very well-structured.
Whether we are talking about sending a link to someone showing only photos with certain tags, in a certain set or whatever else, it is possible to guess the URL or quickly work it out from the structure itself. URLs are usually pretty short as well, which also makes linking to Flickr a little more 'cozy' than other applications to work with when it comes to URLs.
The reason why I am writing about URL structures is because they usually make a big difference to the application structure and its architecture. Flickr people talk about the significance of the URLs in Flickr and judging how they are organised all the implications are that Flickr's underlining architecture is world class.
No design is best design
Flickr is just a 'shell' for content (i.e. photos) - that's it. Design as such is not present in Flickr and that's definitely one of the best aspects of the applications.
There are at least couple of reasons why this is so. Design aspects would slow down the application as well as take away from the main purpose of application - to enable users to view, organise and share photos online.
The last thing I would want to have on Flickr is massive number of 'cool' rounded corner boxes all over the place which simply did not have to be there. I want to see photos, not some 'cool design' which, after only few days become boring, bland and unnecessary anyway.
So no design is definitely the best design in this case.
Amazing sharing and organisational capabilities
With Flickr it is possible to organise photos in few different ways: tags, sets and groups. Each one of them is slightly different in behaviour and usefulness. I also tend to use photo titles as a way to organise my photos to a certain extent.
Imagine having a set of 25 photos from one shoot (for example portrait shots of a child) and try giving each one of them a unique name - starts getting pretty hard to think of anything useful or meaningful. This is the reason why tend to give my 'related' photos the same title or at least same part of the title.
Adding photos to sets is easy and free accounts allow 3 sets to be created (which is limited if one has many photos to organise). Many photos do not necessarily fit into any set as such, which is where tags and groups come into play (in their own ways).
I tend to be fairly religious about tagging my photos and give each photo at least one (always relevant) tag in order to be able to quickly and easily find any relevant photo by browsing through well organised tags and narrowing down from a smaller list of photos.
There are two ways to add tags to photos on Flickr: by manually typing one in or selecting from previously added tags.
Other users are also able to tag your photos, which opens the system to various other means of cross-organisational possibilities. For example, I have noticed some people have 'invented' special tags, which they use in order to bunch a set of somehow related photos into one 'tag set'.
I am also planning to start utilising this method by creating a tag called 'FlexeFlix' in order to tag all the really appealing London photos into my own 'group' or bunch (whatever you want to call it).
To me this would mean that all these photos are somehow related to my FlexeFlix project and that I could quickly later find them by clicking on that tag. Pretty useful considering the fact that there are many billions of photos on the system and that re-finding something is a pretty complex task potentially.
Great use of AJAX
AJAX is one of those technologies on the web which can be greatly abused and overused for no value-adding purpose. This is not the case on Flickr where AJAX is only used where it really matters and where it helps users carry out their every day tasks faster and with more pleasure.
Good examples of use of AJAX on Flickr are quick editing of titles by simply clicking on the title, keying in the new text and hitting enter to save it. Similar is the case with adding descriptions to photos, with difference that enter takes the user to a new line of text, so saving requires mouse action and clicking on the 'Save' button.
There are some issues here in so far that these pages do not actually degrade, which is a major accessibility concern, but read on for an elaboration on this matter.
Free to use and very cheap Pro version
Amazingly, Flickr is free to use, while the pro version is extremely cheap (something like $25), which is near free almost. The Pro version allows ad free browsing and unlimited storage, archiving and unlimited number of sets! That's pretty incredible I think. Each of the photos hosted on the site can be up to 7MB in size, which is pretty big even for professional photographers.
Flickr has a photo uploader tool (also know as Uploadr) which can be used for easy batch upload to Flickr, adding some tags and later on giving each photo a meaningful title and so on. Its good enough for what it does and speeds up and simplifies the batch uploading process significantly, while enabling some useful additional functionality before photos are even uploaded.
Flickr's free accounts do not use those massive, tacky and annoying banners, like it is the case with PhotoBucket, which makes browsing much more pleasurable and enables me to 'stick' to the site for hours on end (if I have time).
A very useful aspect of Flickr is that it is one of those applications (such as FaceBook) where 'everything is a link'. In other words everything that can be linked to is linked to. This means that following various links presented in a user journey a typical user can get lost in the application and end up in various interesting and bizzare related and unrelated places (more about this later on as well).
I also like Flickr very much because of the fact that I can see list of cameras in use on the application, see some sample photos taken by those cameras, see how popular they are amongst users and so on. For each photo (usually) I also get presented a link for the camera with which the photo was taken, so I can really get a good understanding on what each camera is capable of - useful when you are looking to very meaningfully spend those £500 or so.
Only for photos
One very simple aspect of Flickr (and most popular social networks) is the fact that it has focused on only one aspect of media to deal with (i.e. photos in this case). FaceBook is about faces essentially, MySpace about music, while YouTube is about videos. Flickr is definitely about photos and that is what I expect from it.
There is a rumour at the moment that Flickr team are planning to bring in video hosting as well, but my gut feeling on this matter is that they should not do it, as it would be mixing aims and paradigms too much. YouTube can be used for hosting any form of files, but I have still to meet someone using it to host and promote just their music or just their pictures.
Although competition is a good thing, I think that another video sharing web site would be a little too much for web users to be getting used to and that Flickr should not be 'diluted' with this file format as well. So Flickr please do not bring in videos to your web site!
API
Judging by other applications which have sprung up and which are based on Flickr, the API is pretty good. Two good examples come to mind: Picnik which actually allows simple editing of photos from Flickr (just like Picasa does) and uploading them back to Flickr as edits and PictureSandbox which is pretty good for carrying out searches of creative commons material from Flickr and saving them as separate 'folders'.
I have used both and it is pretty incredible how it all works so well and so smoothly. I am personally planning to play around with the Flickr API in the near future to see what I can come up with as well.
Error free
It seems as though still today no web site is free of various JavaScript based errors which crop up but do not pose problems during the user journeys, so I will not comment about those errors (more like non-compliance issues).
Flickr seems to be error free in so far that I have not had my user journey interrupted as yet due to some weird issue that has been caused by the interface (something I encountered as soon as I signed up for PhotoBucket services just now and which made me abandon my test run of the application).
Negative aspects about Flickr
As anything else in the world, Flickr is by no means a perfect application and it has its down aspects that along with the positive aspects I have outlined above. Here they are:
Not graceful enough
Graceful degradation is pretty important in applications which utilise AJAX to an extent that Flickr does, but it is unfortunate to know that the main Flickr pages do not work at all when JavaScript is turned off. This is contrary to the fact that the creators of Flickr talk about the application working in progressively enhancing manner.
Yes there are pages on Flickr which gracefully degrade, but the an expectation from a system like this would be that every page would behave in this manner, which is not at all the case. Something for Flickr team to work on I suppose. Oh yes, and the top navigation is complete inaccessible without JavaScript, something that should be quite easy to achieve without JavaScript.
Make it easier to use
Even though most of Flickr is pretty easy to use, works quick and well, I still feel there is room for improvement on the navigational paradigm throughout the system. I still find it pretty hard to remember where certain links are on the system and I also feel that the home page is pretty badly utilised (i.e. it does not offer me the typical material I would want to quickly jump to).
Also, once I am viewing a picture and can see related pictures on the right hand side, I cannot help but feel that having 4-6 pictures in the preview would be much more useful and usable - I suppose there is a performance reason why Flickr guys have made it possible only to view 2 related pictures in the set, but this to me is a usability issue on the interface.
I would like to have (at least) limited possibility to customise my homepage on Flickr, so I can get the most important material and my favourite links in one quickly accessible place - this should not be too hard for Flickr to do, and perhaps the Pro account has this capability, but I cannot comment about this since I have not (yet) gone Pro on Flickr.
I have heard many people complain to me about the purpose of top navigation on Flickr and the fact that they are unable to comprehend its functionality. After a little while I have got used to the top navigation, but I still feel it could be better organised, or at least some more links added to it so that every meaningful aspect of the system can be accessed through the top navigation.
Standards compliance issues
I find it fairly incredible to observe that applications like Flickr are still developed using HTML 4.01 transitional! I have been using XHTML1.0 strict for good 3-4 years now find it much better behaved under most browsers and easier to work with.
Use of HTML 4.01 transitional is also present in Google's PicasaWeb, which is also pretty bad example of an interface, full of standards compliance errors and essentially bad, non semantic code.
I know that Flickr are utilising some microformats in their interfaces, which I generally think is a good idea and am looking to leverage as much as possible in the near future.
I need a blog
Often I feel like I want to write an article on Flickr about some of the shots I have taken. I have spent a little while looking for 'my blog' link on the system and realised that it does not exist. I think this is a great shame as I think it would be quite nice to give every user an opportunity to blog about their photography, thoughts and experience.
This would strengthen the Flickr community (feel) even more and encourage positive discussions about photography, techniques, adventures related to photo taking and so on.
I want to sell my material
Some of my pictures (I feel) are worthy of putting up for sale to various people around the world. I am not sure why Flickr does not have functionality which would enable me to sell my photos to my friends for various purposes (web design, screen savers, etc.).
I think that bringing in this functionality to Flickr would really bring some users very close to the application and firmly concrete in the usefulness of Flickr beyond just archiving, organising and browsing.
Being able to sell my material directly from Flickr would be a real advantage and I think it is a real shame that Flickr does not provide this - of course I would be more than happy to share any profit with Yahoo on every sale I made. It would be a win-win combination.
The dark side of Flickr
One aspect of the system that surprised me recently was that I came across the 'dark side' of this application. I was browsing through some shots of London and noticed a comment with an animated .gif on it, which had a lady showing her breasts in the animation.
I was really surprised by the fact this lady's profile was allowed through and was not removed from the system. I decided to investigate, clicked through to her page and realised that most of her pictures were also naughty by nature as well as all the people's who were commenting, who also posted various bits of pornography onto their pages.
I was really gobsmacked by the fact that first of all this lady's picture appeared on a totally innocent part of the system (something that my son could have been viewing for example) and that the only block that was preventing me from viewing other pornographic material on Flickr was a little warning message saying that the material I was about to view is away from the 'safe' viewing, offering me a link to 'take me back to the kittens'.
I found this very disappointing and pretty hard to grasp and could not avoid to write about it in this article, so it is a pointer for all those who are thinking that Flickr is totally innocent to remind them that it also has a darker and more inappropriate side to it.
This brings about that age old social software debate of who should police web sites like these and what should really be allowed to go on-line. In my opinion this aspect of Flickr is completely inappropriate and devalues the Flickr brand.
The main reasoning behind my argument is that material which I encounter on Flickr could be inappropriate and simply may not know if and when I might encounter it.
