What Flickr Needs

22 October 2005, 13:46

Flickr is without doubt the best 'web application' I've used. The point on which a web site becomes a web application is a little unclear to me at the moment, but we'll stick with application for the time being. It seems the gratuitous use of AJAX tech is the main driver for HTML based tools to be called web applications these days - Web 2.0 people tell me :-)

So what is so great about it huh? Well the main (and somewhat fluffy) overall reason its so good is the style is purveys. You know these guys are a class act - every part of the design and interface is almost (more on that later!) perfectly crafted. Its also rather fast, particularly on a broadband connection. I dread to think of the infrastructure these guys have in place to handle the crazy numbers of images and transactions they are dealing with. All this is for a the measly fee of $25 (£14 odd) a YEAR for the crazy 2Gb upload a month.

However all is not perfect in the land of Flickr. Regular 'Flickr Massages' occur, where the site is taken offline, presumably for database maintenance. Since being bought by the behemoth Yahoo Inc things have got better but they still happen too often. Even with some of the finest practical MySQL minds around they can't keep the app going 24/7. There are also features missing that users have been clamouring for....

Sets of sets is my pet peeve. Most people have large sets (custom groups of photos) of, in my example, photos of a particular holiday. These become unwealdingly large and pretty difficult to navigate after you have more than say 50-100 photos in them. The solution therefore is to break them up into a nested hierarchy of sets with, for example, "Thailand 2005" having subsets of "Bangkok" and "Phuket" etc. Purists argue that you can use the tagging system can be used to do this - a search for "Thailand Bangkok" solves the situation, they say. Whilst I do like the tagging system - it doesn't cut it for this task of arranging my photos, by my definition, to the potential audience. Yes people can search - but I want to build a structure that shows them through the photos as well. Stewart (Flickr co-founder) has replied to a monster thread on the Flickr forums stating that the feature is coming.

My other want of Flickr is better panoramic image handling. It seems that many cameras come with software packages that allow the stitching of multiple images to form panoramas. Some cameraphones (including all new SonyEricssons from the K700i upwards) come with panorama creation on the fly, with some very impressive results. My stitching software of choice is Autostitch, which works a treat, as you can see.

So, what can Flickr do to help? When you upload to Flickr it creates several different versions of the image in different sizes. Now, these work great when the image is a standard 4:3 photo (which 95% of photos on Flickr are, I'd imagine). However things get a bit out of shape when you stick images on there that are much, much wider than they are higher. By out of shape, I don't mean distorted (they are far too clever for that), although some images appear to be of a slightly overly optimised. The problem occurs when you get to the photo's page - the image is pretty unusable due to the weird dimensions.

Flickr used to use a flash interface on this photo page - and I propose they should bring it back, or make it optional or automatic per account, image set, or individual image. The flash app could load a slightly larger version of the image, and allow the viewer to scroll around inside it. If they think they have moved away from flash for displaying images like this, then a CSS based solution could be possible - with a horizontal scrollbar (bit of a usability no-no I know) and/or some clever image moving javascript.

Jason Cartwright RSS Feed

about

Jason is a freelance web developer based in London.

My clients include numerous startups, Google, YouTube, FHM, Nickelodeon, Volvo & the BBC.

I also co-own Ferrago Ltd, who publish videogames content to around 7m consumers monthly.

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