10 things I hate about Flickr (and its users)
- At June 28, 2008
- By Neil Creek
- In Features, Top Posts
111

Flickr has changed the way I share photos online, and has made building my blog and the community around it that much easier. But there are some things about Flickr, and the people that use it, that really get on my nerves. I want to get these off my chest, but don’t be to offended if I pick on your way of doing things, it’s not personal :)
Poetry in photo descriptions
If I like your photo, I want to know more about it. I don’t want to read death metal lyrics or emo goth poetry. It’s pretentious, it’s lazy, and it’s unfortunately become cliche. Please do us a favour and tell us your thoughts about your photo. They’ll be more personal and more relevant.
One or two word comments
On the flip side, a little more thought about comments on others’ photos would really be appreciated as well. Frankly, I don’t care if you think my photo’s “Awesome!”, I care even less if you think it’s a “Cool photo”. I’ve put a lot of work into it, I’d genuinely like to know what you think of it and why. If you’re going to comment, why not take the extra 30 seconds, engage your brain, and say something insightful.
Space separated tags
As far as I know, the standard way of delineating keywords (what your parents called “tags”) in all metadata is with commas. So why did Flickr have to use spaces, and quotes around tag strings? Now whenever I want to transfer keywords from one app to another, I have to strip out the commas and add quotes. And I’ve lost count how many times I’ve had to re-enter Flickr tags when I forget not to use commas.
Overdone HDR
Yes, it’s amazing what you can do with processing software these days. Yes, it’s cool to see detail in the sky and in the shade. Yes, HDR has a place in artistic photography. But for goodness sake, please stop with the over-saturated, flat, dirty, haloed, massively compressed dynamic range novelty photos you can’t seem to get enough of. Very rarely is the HDR “effect” a successful artistic statement in itself. Good HDR is usually invisible. Subtlety is your friend.
Disrespectful comments on artistic nudes
The human body is the most beautiful thing in this world, and a truly skillful photographer can capture that in a photo. It takes talent, technical mastery and an understanding of beauty to make an artistic nude photo. It also takes courage, patience and great communication for a model to make it work, in partnership with the photographer. So please! Show some damn respect! No one wants to know what you want to do to the model. And what on Earth do you think sharing your lustful thoughts will get you anyway? It’s not like the model’s going to call you because you demeaned and degraded her with your filthy fantasies. For goodness sake, grow up!
Gaudy large banners and “awards”
How wonderful, fifteen users loved my photo so much they awarded it the “Most Awesometastic Flickr Masterpiece Photo Award”, complete with a giant sparkling, shiny, flashing banner. And yet they didn’t say anything about the photo? Really, I don’t give a damn about your invented ‘awards’, and I really hate the comments on my photo getting clogged up with huge icons that look like they were stolen from a circa 1998 web site. Martin Gommel, a friend and much respected photographer says it best: “Please do not add any badges, banners or awards. I know that finding the right words isn’t easy, just try it, I believe in you ;)”
Comments that are only group invites
I have a little more patience with group invites on my photos, IF they are: relevant, subtle and accompanied by a personal, considered comment on the photo. But if you want to spam your group by copy/pasting an ad, especially one with a banner, without adding anything thoughtful to the comments, then you can be sure I’ll ignore the invite, and probably avoid your group in the future. The same goes if you pollute the comments on others’ photos. You’re only advertising your group as something I want to avoid.
Vignette
Almost as bad as overdone HDR, this cliche post-processing trick is a fad that needs to die. I hope you realise that vignette was originally a defect in cameras, and we can be grateful we don’t have to suffer it willingly now. Like HDR, it can be done well. Skillfully applied, vignette can evoke a certain mood, closeness, or age, and can direct the eye into the composition. Unfortunately it’s rarely done skillfully. I swear some people run ALL their photos through a Photoshop vignette action before uploading. By the way, if your photos have vignette because you’re experimenting with older cameras that generate their own vignette – Awesome! You rock :)
Culling? What’s that?
Just because you can take hundreds of photos of the same thing, doesn’t mean you have to share it with the world. That gorgeous photo of a bowl of strawberries, doesn’t look so gorgeous after the tenth nearly identical photo. I take as many photos as anyone, maybe more, but the idea behind that is to cull all but the very best. It’s one of the secrets to looking like a good photographer. If you upload them all, you’re letting the secret out, and everyone will know you just got lucky with one of the shots. That is, if they’re not bored to tears and leave before they get to that one great shot in twenty.
No reply notification on comments or discussion
This is without a doubt, my biggest Flickr peeve. The thing that makes Flickr so attractive, and so successful, is the incredible community that has built up around it. Flickr have done a lot of great things to encourage the free exchange of ideas and images, like groups, maps, discussion boards, photo pools etc. But when it comes to communicating between users, they’ve really dropped the ball.
When I make a comment on someones photo, sometimes I’ll ask a question, or I’d like to see what others have to say. But what if I forget to check it later? Well tough luck, I’ll never know. This is a problem with one photo, but I comment on hundreds! There’s no way I’ll ever be able to follow up on all the comments I’ve made. Yes, I’m aware of the “Comments you’ve made” feature, but it’s clunky at best. This problem is even worse in group discussions. With no reply notification, no one knows when a thread has been updated, and very quickly, a discussion group can end up looking like a ghost town.
There’s a critical mass for a community (for example a Flickr group) to be successful. That critical mass can be achieved a LOT sooner if the community members are able to easily and quickly respond to new discussion amongst members. Forum software developers know this, and subscriptions and notifications are essential included features even on the most basic software packages. There’s even a comment notification plugin for wordpress.
Flickr would do well to encourage the development of communities by enabling reply notification. If they did, you would surely see a rapid snowball effect as people spend more time replying to comments and discussions, which in turn would bring more people online to reply to those, and while they’re there, reply to others that they have yet to participate in. This positive feedback loop would result in a rapid growth of traffic, and a greater “pull” for new people to sign up, so they can participate. Surely Flickr wants more members and more active members?
From a purely selfish perspective, I want to know when people reply to my comments, and as the admin of the group Learning Photography with Neil Creek, I want to reach critical mass sooner rather than later.
Come on Flickr, pull your finger out.
It’s not all bad of course. You can read my post about the “10 things I love about Flickr (and its users)“.

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Thomas
Great post, I’m pretty new to HDR never realized it’s potential before and i tryed to use it in a particular scene when I toured the new Yankee stadium. I was standing in the dugout and it was cold and overly bright day. Not only was the sky blown out in one of my shots, the seating was too. I decided this minght be a good time to test the capability of shooting HDR. I don’t think it was a well composed shot, but i was wondering if you thought it was a decent HDR or is it over saturated?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tscibilia/4231153527/
Neil Creek
Thanks for your comment. My thoughts on your image are only my subjective opinion, please feel free to ignore :) You have done a good job with the tone mapping. I don’t see any halos, and the contrast is still reasonable, though perhaps a little bit flat. I personally find the colours over-saturated, but you may like it that way. You’re off to a great start with HDR! Keep shooting and practicing and you’ll refine your technique.
hermit harry
Flickr is on a destructie rampage.They are deleting accounts left and right without ever telling anyone they delete why they were ousted. We send emails to Yahoo asking for explanations and never get a response. And of course Flickr doesn’t mind deleting an pro account where someone has paid $25 a year for unlimited postings.
If any other business ran the way Flickr is run they would be out of business by now. My advice, never, ever get a pro account with these bastards.
Sheldon Levy
The comment box, like favorites let’s me know who’s looking and who’s taken the time to look. I don’t need the feedback in order to continue making pictures and I’m not looking for someone to tell me how great I am. I simply post a picture I like to give people an opportunity to see my work. If you want critiques, ask. If you don’t want banners, then tell people so. Don’t like HDR. Don’t look. What I’m looking for on Flickr is to be challenged and encouraged. You want to talk to someone about their work or delve deeper, send them an e-mail.Look at some of the comments above mine. “Outstanding”, “keep up the good work”, etc.
Make some real friends on Flickr. Take a trip and meet a Flickr contact in another city and spend the day shooting with them. There are hundreds if not thousands of Flickr photographers to learn from. Each with a unique vision. And many who share and give beyond politeness.
My question to you. What do you like about Flickr. How does your stream make Flickr a better place to be.
Sam
Hi, great article. HDR when done right you do not notice at all but what I have seen on Flickr are mostly over saturated, look unnatural, the contract levels are way over the top, HDR’s which look more like paintings that photo’s. What this means is that you are essentially removing the photo and replacing with a hand crafted painting.
Karie
I just joined Flickr recently during a photo contest in Chicago. It seemed like a good way to see what other local artisans were doing. Today I uploaded one picture. Just one…to see how it worked. And then I went back to surfing and found your blog. Thank you for sharing! It was very helpful.
aeo
Hey Neil ! Couldn’t have done a better list ^^
What software do you use to develop your pictures ? If you were to use Lightroom, look for the uploader plugin from Jeffrey, it does all the work for you with keywords !
I’m new to flickr and I think I’ll look for a forum, seems better for thorough critics !
Jim Bustovsky
You’re real flickr-hater! ;)
I think you should use thesaurus dictionary to change some words. It will be your non-hating special writing style, Neil!
Big J in Florida
I enjoyed reading your article but do not agree with some of your criticisms. Photography has a diverse range of artistic movements, and consequently, followers with widely varied interests. As the capabilities of technology increase, so do the interests of photographers and the variability of their output from traditional realism. The scope of consumer interests and the demands for non-traditional photography are growing.
If you view digital photography as strictly a tool for realistically documenting little slices of life, then all of your comments are dead on. If you have a broader view of photography, then your thoughts on vignette and HDR may not ring true. Photography has both producers and consumers who appreciate realism, impressionism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, and so on. Images with extremely high saturation, the use of special artistic filters, color manipulation, contrast variability may look like nothing that is naturally observed in the world around us, but they are not intended to appear as such.
In art, there was a time when the romantics criticized the realists, the realists criticized the impressionists, the impressionist criticized the cubists, and so forth. The classical music lovers often criticize the jazz players, the jazz lovers criticize the rockers, and so forth. Sometimes I wonder if that’s where we’re at with photography.
Joe
I hate that they offer pro accounts for $24.99 year for unlimited postings, and then once they have your money, on a whim they delete you. I really don’t know why anyone wastes their money with these crooks
André
I’m absolutely on your side. It’s just like you wrote down my own thoughts. I love flickr and the possibilities it gives me for sharing my photos and virtually talking about photography with kindred spirits.
But one point you mentioned is way overvalued, I think. I don’t post what I think about my photos because I want them to speak for themselves. If someone is really interested in my thoughts about an image, he can ask me in a comment or message. It’s as simple as that.