As I mentioned in the Morning Reboot, Flickr sent out some emails last night encouraging users who haven???t yet switched over to a Yahoo ID to do so. The official deadline isn???t until March 15th, but clearly Flickr would like to expedite the transition.
Some users reported losing contacts and tags when they switched – Yahoo has imposed limitations on the amount of each. But as
it turns out, this isn???t limited to old school Flickr users. If you do
have more than 3,000 contacts or have photos with more than 75 tags,
you???re going to lose some data in the transition. Even if you???re a more
recent member, those limits still apply to you. Also, some users are reporting that Flickr usernames which conflict with existing Yahoo usernames aren't porting over.
The change applies only to those of us who signed up with Flickr prior to the Yahoo acquisition in 2005.
As one who falls in that group, I decided the go ahead and migrate my
account last night. My experience was seamless, but here are two caveats:
one, my username is a made up word, so there wasn't a name
conflict when changing to Yahoo, and two, I don???t have more than 3,000
contacts nor do I have any photos with more than 75 tags.
If you do end up with a different username you will have to update
any outside tools that store your Flickr username or password.
Because you must be logged in to read the official Flickr announcement, I???ll reprint it in its entirety:
This isn???t the first time a company has tried to pass off an artificial limitation as a ???feature,??? but it???s the first time Flickr has and it???s drawing fire from users. I sympathize with those that say, ???who cares, those limits are plenty high enough,??? but the change is still a bad move on Flickr???s part.
The logic that restrictions will make ???pages load faster across the site for everyone,??? doesn???t wash for me. If your site is having performance issues, it???s time to look at your code base, not penalize users. If Flickr is in fact being honest with this logic, it doesn???t bode well for the future.
Obviously, I don???t know anything about Flickr???s code base, but generally speaking if one user with 500 tags on a photo slows a system down, 500 users with one tag are also going to slow the same system down. In other words, the problem is the system and not the user, and passing the problem along to the user is just plain wrong.
Consider this offer: I have an incredibly fast photo sharing site on my laptop here at home. It smokes anything Flickr has got, but to get this incredibly blazing fast site and make it work for everyone, you???re limited to one photo. Obviously no one would join my site, but the truth is Flickr???s new restrictions differ only in terms of scale, not concept.
So perhaps the limits aren???t so bad because they???re fairly high, but the logic behind them doesn???t make sense. Bad Flickr, no donut.
