ARgh, and they still haven't released the Android app (and apparently the iOS app) in Japan.
It's available in Peru, it's available in Ukraine—but not Japan (which is much larger, richer, and almost certainly has more photographers than those two countries), and this has been the situation for ages.
WTF, Flickr...
[And unfortunately Flickr has always had a very annoying habit of completely stonewalling on such issues.]
Maybe they simply don't consider it profitable enough?
Flickr's done a remarkably bad job with taking advantage of the exploding popularity of mobile photography. The iPhone is the most-used camera on Flickr, yet their iOS app is mediocre. Instagram ate their lunch and they don't even seem to care.
Is there an official Flickr App for Android? Seems an odd oversight if there isn't, since they apparently have one for iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone 7.
They do appear to detect Android and offer Flash based uploading, but that won't work with the inbuilt "intent" system i.e. I choose a picture from the gallery and select share and I get lots of options, both built in and 3rd party (Picasa, email, bluetooth, dropbox, twitter, Whatsapp).
It almost seems as though Yahoo are determined to make Flickr fail at the moment. I'm a paid pro member and I've been wondering why now for a while...
Photographic content publishing on the internet has moved on a huge amount in the last couple of years, yet I see Flickr have done nearly nothing during that period. They need to start looking at what the competition is doing (instagram, etc.) and seriously picking the game up, especially for paid up members.
I'm still in shock they haven't made a proper iPad application, your stuck with the crappy iPhone app which needs a major overhaul anyway. The Android version is equally awful, the web version on phones/tablets renders equally as badly as on a browser (confusing/boring layout). When I login and look through the top nav, there's over 40 choices from it. Does it really need to be that complicated?
Very excited for this. It's quite disappointing to see the one/only popular photo sharing app (instagram) work so hard to restrict usage to phone apps.
Sometimes you want to share photos from a non-phone camera, or look at photos on your computer screen.
What? Since when has this existed? Lovely to learn of this the day after my 2-year Flickr Pro account expired.
Seems like it's been out for over a year. And I never found it before I gave up looking. Too little, too late, I guess. For Mayer's era's sake, I hope that's not the rest of Yahoo's fate.
Flickr is still the best and largest community of amateur photographers on the web. It's not shiny anymore and Yahoo is letting it stagnate, but the community is still there nonetheless.
What I don't get is that people already upload tons of shitty photos on Facebook. What Facebook misses here is quality of the uploaded content. The signal to noise ratio is awful. That's exactly what Flickr has and Instagram doesn't.
That's why I don't get this acquisition. What does Instagram have that Facebook doesn't?
My first thought was the native mobile app, which is indeed cool. But I never used it, simply because my Android phone came with built-in integration with Facebook and Google's Picassa, making sharing easy. And I also need a centralized repository of photos from multiple sources, not just from my phone, which means I need lots of storage and good management tools. And if I want to retouch my photos, I like to do that from the comfort of a laptop or a tablet, because the display of a phone is too tiny, even for playing around with stupid effects.
I don't get how a pro photo app is supposed to be mobile-only and subscription-gated. One of the greatest things about flickr is that I can embed it almost anywhere, even hotlinking on my blog or on forums, and anyone, anywhere can see it on any device. (And if I pay, they can see a 6k version, served on the web, not through a download link.) I am really, really into photography but I do not have any interest in viewing image galleries on my phone when I have a 27" iMac 5k and Flickr shows me over a decade of photos collected from every type of photography enthusiast.
It's available in Peru, it's available in Ukraine—but not Japan (which is much larger, richer, and almost certainly has more photographers than those two countries), and this has been the situation for ages.
WTF, Flickr...
[And unfortunately Flickr has always had a very annoying habit of completely stonewalling on such issues.]
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