#GOOGLE PHOTOS BREAKS FLICKR UPLOADR SOFTWARE#

This allows me the highest quality search results and gets rid of all the noisy, watermarked, junky, inaccurate images that oftentimes come up a broader search of everybody’s photos. When I’m interested in photos of a particular subject, location, event, etc., I always do searches filtered by my contacts. Over the past 10 years I’ve carefully and methodically built a very large number of contacts whose photography I like and want to see more of. While search looks cleaner and I do like the new view of smaller thumbnails that allow me to browse search results quickly, I’ve lost one of the most important functions of search, which is to search by my contacts.

Unfortunately my initial enthusiasm for search has been fading fast the past two weeks.

By creating an setting to opt out this would be an immediate way to deflect the criticism from the vocal power users that dislike it. If autotagging is on by default 99.9% of Flick users will still be using it. I do think Flickr should offer a setting to opt out of autotagging and I’m guessing they probably will eventually. As Yahoo thinks about monetizing Flickr in a more meaningful way, the better organized their library the more successfully they might be able to do this. Flickr is probably the most potentially disruptive site out there to this industry. Stock photography is a multi-billion dollar business. There is also part of me that wonders if Flickr’s autotagging efforts are not part of a longer-term effort to better organize this content in order to eventually partner with their community in a more significant way with stock photography. Longer-term I think we will all benefit from having more accurate and complete search available through Flickr. I’m sure they will work on their algorithm to get it more and more accurate, but part of that accuracy involves getting feedback from their community when inaccuracies arise. The people who work there are a very well meaning and forward thinking group. Flickr and Yahoo are not racist (neither is Google). Personally, I’m more optimistic about Flickr using image search technology going forward and hope that the bad PR doesn’t set their efforts back there. We also saw Google called racist this week because the White House was associated with a search for a derogatory racial term. CNN reported that “ Flickr’s new auto-tags are racist and offensive.” This is bad because most of the general public make assumptions based on headlines without thinking deeper about the issues at hand and most are not intimately involved with the inner mechanics of Flickr. This week you saw news outlets like the Daily Mail come out with stories highlighting that Flickr was tagging concentration camps jungle gyms and black people apes. The more sensational the press can spin a story, the more clicks they end up getting.

#GOOGLE PHOTOS BREAKS FLICKR UPLOADR SOFTWARE#

On the other hand, many people have spent hundreds of hours organizing their tags on their Flickr photos and have a certain sort of emotional connection around tagging as it relates to their photos, which are very personal.Īny time you try to use image recognition software to recognize things you will get false positives. The “who moved my cheese” crowd is strong and vocal at Flickr, so it’s easy to dismiss at least some of the initial criticism from the community as typical and predictable. On the one hand, every time Flickr makes any change whatsoever a certain segment of the community will vocally oppose it no matter what the change is.

Google photos breaks flickr uploadr