I’m doing my best to reserve judgement on the Flickr redesign, but now that I’ve had the time for a good look around, and more information on the future of the site is emerging, I’m shifting towards really disliking it.
The entire interface seems to have been shifted towards “look at all the pretty pictures!” while making it a pain in the arse to see any of the meta-information – titles, descriptions, dates, locations, etc – that might have been entered about said pretty pictures.
Now, I don’t use Flickr to show off pretty pictures, I use it to store and annotate photographs of things that I find interesting, and other people might find interesting too. Without the context of the meta-information, a lot of my photos are pointless, so the redesign has made the site a hell of lot less useful for me.
I’m not making any rash decisions yet, but I’ll be watching Flickr very carefully over the next couple of months to see if things improve. If not, I may well cancel my pro account, pull all my stuff down and find somewhere else to keep it.
