there's been a lot of chatter online about flickr in recent days. with their new 3,000 contact limit, 75 tag maximum and the mandatory merging of your yahoo! id with your flickr account. as with most change, i've yet to hear anything positive about these upcoming developments. just today, i read a blog post by Kara at Colors...Pretty which really summed up the whole flickr user experience for me. a quote:
Definition: The version of reality where you rock at taking photos.
i'd like to add a little something to that definition:
Definition: The version of reality where you rock at taking photos and we make it that way so you don't ever want to leave us... even when we do bad things.
don't get me wrong, i love flickr. it's introduced me to so many things: new friends, new (old) cameras, new techniques, new talent. but, i'm neither a flickr fangirl nor a staunch anti-change protestor. i don't really care if i have to merge my yahoo! id or people could put santa hats on my photos over christmas. i appreciate the site and community around it for what it is: a place to pimp my photos and get my ego stroked by random strangers.
all i do have to complain about is the lack of an archive/download feature. if my hard drive crashes, at the very least, i want to be able to reinstate the photos i've uploaded over the past two years.
love it or loathe it, flickr is good. it's fun and it works 99% of the time. that's a more than you can say for a lot of online services. including this blog.
*stands up and applauds wildly*
exactly. the new changes are just not a big deal.
I have mixed emotions. I don't use Yahoo for anything, and having to sign up for a Yahoo account to log in to Flickr kind of bugs me. I'm an anti-social bastard, so the social aspects don't offer me that much, either. About the only benefits I get are some of the associated services (Moo cards), and a quick way of getting photos on-line for my family without farting around with my own galleries.
Maybe I would feel differently if my photos didn't suck so much. C'est la vie.
Then again, Blogger forcing me to change to their new system doesn't sit well, either. I guess my curmudgeonliness is asserting itself.