Venture Geek

I have been a Flickr user for a while, but I really started using it heavily in the last few months to put up pictures of my kid. When he was born a year ago I was just using my .Mac account using the “Homepage” feature that integrated very nicely with iPhoto. “Homepage” was really not that nice a feature — it was extremely unflexible, had very limited choices for visual templates, and didn’t allow full-size photos to be uploaded. But, it was dead easy — you just choose an album in iPhoto, click the Homepage button, choose a template, and you were done. Even for someone like me, who has the technical skills to build my own photo publishing system or to install Gallery (both of which I have done — neither of which is as efficient as just clicking “Go” to get some photos up for the grandparents to see).

In their infinite wisdom, Apple decided that when they launched iWeb as part of iLife that they would get rid of the Homepage integration in iPhoto and replace it with iWeb integration. iWeb, though, is more complicated — not that it’s complicated as a way to make web pages, generally (my Mom uses it!), but it added extra steps to just get photos up on the web. Add to that complication the fact that Apple provided no way at all to import your previous “Homepage” pages into iWeb (which is an issue because you want people to click around the auto-generated navigation of all your “Homepage” pages) and I was ready to look elsewhere.

I had played with Flickr in its early days, and there are some nice 3rd party tools integrating Flickr with iPhoto, so I decided that was where I’d look. Flickr also has the nice feature of storing full-resolution photos, which is nice for people who want to make prints. And here is where they start to blow it.

My wife was looking at pictures on my account this morning to send some prints to people. She couldn’t see the button to make prints, which was frustrating for her. No problem — I just went into the options for my account to let anyone make prints. But, that’s not actually an option. The most lenient option is to allow any Flickr user to make prints. On face, that’s not a big deal, but then I went back to see what it means to become a Flickr user — what it really means is getting a Yahoo account. And this is where they are blowing it. You see, in order to become a Yahoo user you have to fill out a lengthy form which requires that you share, among other things, your gender, your birthday, and your zip code. It also tries to get you a Yahoo email account by default. I fill in such forms all the time, as a person who basically lives on the web. But, when I think about my relatives having to go through that just to order some prints of photos, I picture a lot of them basically saying, “fuck it”. Not to mention that most of them wouldn’t even know they had to do it in the first place to make prints (that’s something I have to figure out and tell them myself). Why, oh why, would Yahoo want to put barriers up to monetizing Flickr? I would have thought ordering prints wasn’t a “premium service” that warrants people giving up their information goods just to get in the door. I wouldn’t have thought that making prints was something that Yahoo would want to make a complicated process for the uninitiated. But, they did. No wonder PhotoBucket has been getting all the press lately.