Flickr Angst

Why is it that every time an online service tries to make an “improvement”,  they make their service worse? Case in point: Flickr. I’ve used Flickr for years store my photos and then use their handy dandy embed code to embed photos here on my blog. In fact, Flickr is one of the few online services for which I actually have a Pro account, because I like Flickr and felt it was worth paying to get the unlimited amount of uploads. Recently they changed their site so it looks slick, but seems way slower to navigate through and this morning while I was composing my blog posting about wine, I discovered that they fucked up the embed codes!

Prior to this, when there was photo that I wanted to embed in my blog, I just grabbed the embed code from the photo’s page on Flickr, entered it into blog posting in the Text edit mode and viola! – my photo would be in my posting. When you switch to the Visual edit tab, you could see the photo and it would show up in the posting and it would be hyperlinked to the photo page on Flickr and all would be right with the world.

But now, when you use the embed code and then look at the Visual tab in WordPress, you see this instead of seeing the photo:

If you “Preview” your blog posting, you just see an empty space where the photo is supposed to be. That is also what happens when you embed a video from YouTube – a yellow box in the Visual tab and a blank space in the Preview. So I posted my posting and discovered why this was happening. First, you notice right away that there’s a big Flickr logo stamped across the photo:

(I had to take a different photo to create that screen shot, because I fixed the one on the wine posting before I thought of writing this posting).

Then I noticed that there were little left and right arrows on the photo – you can’t see them in the above photo – I think perhaps they only show up when you mouse over the photo, but when you click them, you flick through the photostream from which the photo came.

So the embed code now results in not your photo being embedded, but rather it’s more like having a little mini slideshow embedded. Which is totally not what I want -I just want the photo.

So I figured that I was now going to have to grab the photo’s URL and then use that to put the photo in my blog posting and then hyperlink it myself… but now, after writing out that ranty email, I just noticed when I was inserting the above two photos the long way, that they actually have checkboxes for three different options to embed the photo: embed, HTML, and BBCode. So it turns out that “embed”, which they set as the default option, embeds the little slideshow, but “HTML” gives you the code to embed just the photo. So now I’m slightly less annoyed at Flickr. I’m annoyed that they changed their stuff to trick me into thinking that I couldn’t easily get the code to embed photos, which prompted me to write this long, ranty email which I’m far too invested in now to just delete, and I’m annoyed that I will now take me one extra click to get the right embed code. But I guess at least I don’t have to insert the photo manually like I thought I was going to have to. Hooray?

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Category: Geekery | rants
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