Flickr's new redesign sounds pretty cool, but I've moved over to 500px and don't see myself ever coming back. Here's why.
Oh cool, Flickr redesigned. Let's see what's new. I'll click signin.
Okay, now I'm on a generic Yahoo-branded page. So much for design. Okay, type in username and password and ignore the other crap on the page.
Mistyped my password. Okay, my bad, I'll type it in again.
Now I get a CAPTCHA that looks like it's missing CSS styles. Okay, fine, throttling me after one bad login is a bit harsh, but whatever.
Now that I've proved I'm human, I get another dialog saying I've never signed in from this machine before (that's not true, but whatever, databases are hard). It asks me a "security question" about the nickname of my first child. I don't have any children. What?
It also gives me an option to email myself a security code. K, fine. I get the email (HTML only so it looks like shit in mutt but whatever, I've accepted that because I'm using an email client almost as old as I am). I also get a "sign-in alert" email. You're not a bank flickr, for fuck's sake.
After I've sacrificed a virgin rabbit on my keyboard I'm finally logged in to Flickr, and I get this: http://i.imgur.com/5943RBo.jpg
Ouch.
A big ugly helvetica neue ultralight banner. Cool.
For the big space in the upper right: am I missing some CSS or something? Someone said it's from an ad but I turned off adblock and still don't see anything there...
What are all these black bars everywhere? Τhere are a few photos that are cropped so they fit without (much) letterboxing, so why do some photos get the bars and not others?
The right sidebar consists entirely of things I don't care about:
- Two random groups I happen to be a part of (out of the 52 total).
- Some "commons" thing.
- A giant ad for a blog post about Flickr itself.
- A list of people I definitely don't know.
Compare this to the 500px page: http://i.imgur.com/dsY0D09.jpg
No bullshit, nice big photos. Yum.
http://i.imgur.com/xAgvutD.jpg
Okay this is at least a bit better. There's not tons of whitespace and black bars and shit everywhere (notice how many photos I can see while they're still relatively big). The landscape images dominate a bit because of the aspect ratio but I can live with that since I tend to shoot vertically more anyway.
The top is okay. I guess since Twitter and Facebook have cover photos we need to have them here now too?
I still prefer 500px's version: http://i.imgur.com/muFrmkR.jpg
The square thumbnails make sure the landscape photos don't overpower the verticals, and there's a bit more room to breathe. Definitely not as big of a gap as the home page though.
I think the biggest thing is that Flickr and 500px "feel" very different to me for one big reason: 500px's upload limits.
Flickr has always let you upload tons and tons of photos. There were limits but they were pretty loose, even in the past. This encouraged people to upload a shit-ton of photos. Flickr gave us sets, tags, the organizer, and other great tools for managing these tons of photos, and it actually worked pretty well!
500px has always had a limit on the number of uploads you could make per week (for free accounts). In the past it was ten per week (now it's 20, which I think is too much, but whatever).
The effect of this limit is that people like me (who didn't want to pay for a pro account right away) only upload our best photos. So as a result, the average quality is a bit higher. This worked really well with 500px's "big" thumbnails and such.
Now Flickr seems to be trying to do the same thing (up the resolution instead of using small photos and thumbnails). But it doesn't work as well when most of the photos are snapshots from a vacation or an event. Maybe this will turn out to work, but with the new "omg a terabyte of space" it seems like they're encouraging users to "just give us all your photos, even the meh ones".
Anyway, it's cool that Flickr has actually done something new for the first time in years. I don't see myself leaving 500px any time soon, but maybe they'll continue to get better and start being competetive again.