Flickr's endless page

[unangelino]

<p>I thought I could tolerate all oddities of Flickr's new interface. Now I'm not so sure.</p>

<p>I was searching for images taken by an older Sigma (DP2, DP2S, DPsX) cameras and used Flickr's Camera Finder.<br>

Camera Finder seems dandy, for a while. The first issue was pretty minor. Let's say I have scrolled way down a page and then clicked on a photo I want to invite to a group. When I go back to the search results I'm nowhere near where I left off and have to re-scroll (<em>lots</em>) to finally get back to where I was. <br /><br />Eventually, I found a method of getting back <em>close</em> to the same spot in the original page, at least for a while. What I did was force Chrome to open the new image as a tab. Anyway, one of my other goals was to view the oldest photos first. Oddly, Flickr offers only the following choices: <em>relevant</em>, <em>interesting</em> and <em>recent </em>(relevant to what; interesting to whom?). Mind you, Flickr doesn't define any of those words (they sound self-explanatory until you stop to think about them) nor will they allow a search that would be the opposite of recent. Curious.</p>

<p>In the end, it's the endless page thing that is most maddening: I scrolled down, off and on, over the course of a few hours while doing the Command/Shift deal to open images in a new tab. But, what I found is that I could still never get to the <em>bottom</em> of the page. The closer I got to it, the more time Flickr took to load more photos. It was as if the all those photos had added a kind of mass to the page that made it ever more cumbersome to scroll through. If Flickr gets this bogged down by a camera search for Sigma I can only imagine how bad it would be searching for a specific Canon or Nikon.<br /><br />In the end, I got Chrome's "Kill page or wait?" notification a few times and then the page finally crashed. <br>

Very odd. I cannot imagine a single purpose served by Flickr's endless page.</p>

[MichaelChang]

<blockquote>

<p><em>"Very odd. I cannot imagine a single purpose served by Flickr's endless page."</em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>It's an alternative to how p.net serves its photos - in one shot, and not necessarily better:<br>

<a href="/photodb/folder?folder_id=595775">http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=595775</a> - CAUTION: 17,611 photos, if it comes through. </p>

[Dieter Schaefer]

<blockquote>

<p>Very odd. I cannot imagine a single purpose served by Flickr's endless page.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>It serves to annoy the user. Seems to be the purpose of about everything flickr has been rolling out this year.</p>

[wogears]

<p>I hate this new 'feature' myself, but I use a workaround. When I want to look at an image, I right-click it and choose 'Open Link in New Window'.</p>

[lex_jenkins]

<p>I don't have any gripes about most of the new Flickr - I like the look of the photo wall - but that particular endless loading feature is extremely resource intensive. It must be a nightmare on older computers and devices, or slow ISPs. Same problem with Facebook unless you use options to prevent endless page loads.</p>

[MichaelChang]

<p>I can only guess that it's a solution to the problem of ever-increasing content and a way to painlessly consume it. </p>

<p>Th URL I linked to above is a folder containing all of a member's photos, and it's just about useless as no one I know is able to see it. You might have better luck but all I've ever gotten from it is 504 Gateway Timeout error. Here's the abridged folder link:<br>

<a href="/photodb/member-photos?user_id=2138384">http://www.photo.net/photodb/member-photos?user_id=2138384</a></p>

<p>I've mentioned this problem on the site-help forum on several occasions as members' portfolio continue to grow and browsing them efficiently and painlessly becomes more of a chore; the progressive-feed of what Flickr does is a good solution, and maybe the only solution. </p>

[unangelino]

<p><em>"I can only guess that it's a solution to the problem of ever-increasing content and a way to painlessly consume it."</em></p>

I thought maybe it was a tool that would tend to discourage in-depth searches. You know, some kid with his iPad searches something, hits the endless page and scrolls for a while, but quickly loses interest and moves on. As opposed to a paginated search where the kid can get a real sense of the totality of the images then go to the beginning or the middle or wherever, kind of search engine style substituting chronology for web relevance.

 

 

[chrisnielsen]

<p>I personally can't stand clicking next on the bottom of pages, it feels so archaic now, and I love continuous scrolling, I can't understand why you are all so against it.</p>

[Damon DAmato]

<p>One way to get to a more manageable, repeatable view, is to click the "Edit" button, under your name on the masthead, where it says, "Photostream Sets Favorites Edit"<br /><br />This view will give you 18 photos up, with some information like views, upload date, a delete button, and the old style page numbers at the bottom. This view is only available on accounts that you're signed in to.</p>

[Damon DAmato]

<p>By the way, the individual photo pages are being redesigned again. They are beta testing <a href=" new design</a>, which will have comments and info in view without scrolling.</p>

[parv]

Chris, my problem with scroll-less scrolling of images is that the image viewing process is simply terribly ungainly in use ...

 

- takes a lot to time to display the images out of view;

 

- old images that were visible disappear while new onces are being fetched/waiting to be displayed;

 

- have to restart the whole damn process (of image viewing) when the page scrolls up (or, to the top).

 

In comparison, Google image search provides much better experience of smooth image browsing. Old images don't disappear; new ones are displayed without noticeable delay; not taken to the up (or top of the page); don't have to give up on account of presentation as is the case with Flickr.

[danmarchant]

<p>Endless pages are a great invention. You put all your important legal notifications on pages that are linked from the bottom of your page and then sit back and laugh as people struggle to click on the links before new content loads and pushes the bottom of the page .... off the bottom of the screen again.</p>

[dcstep]

<p>I don't mind the endless page, except, like our OP, I want it to come back to the same spot if I click through to a picture and come back.</p>

<p>Another minor annoyance is the Statistics are now all screwed up. If some does a search and one of your images comes up on one of these endless pages, Flickr now counts it as a View, even if no one clicked through to your specific image. This has inflated my statistics to where they're meaningless.</p>

<p>Flickr users should try the new beta view. It's got several problems and we need to see them and comment and object. For example, they add hashtag to all your Tags, trying to make Tweeting easier, but messing up file management. A week or two ago, when I last tried it, I couldn't find the HTML and BBCodes for posting to forums. There's discussion topics where you can comment.</p>

[unangelino]

<p>@ Chris<br>

<em> </em><br>

<em>"I personally can't stand clicking next on the bottom of pages, it feels so archaic now, and I love continuous scrolling, I can't understand why you are all so against it."</em><br>

<br>

Conceptually, I have no problem with it. However, as faultily implemented by Flickr it prevents me from searching photos in the way I want or even to know when, or if, I have seen all the relevant photos.<br>

</p>

[Damon DAmato]

<p>Sometimes, I'm not sure why I bother to post.</p>

[lex_jenkins]

<blockquote>

<p>"Sometimes, I'm not sure why I bother to post."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I know wut ya mean. But thanks, those tips did help. I'm checking out the beta now.</p>

[chris_waller]

<p>I've stopped using Flickr. It was OK previously but now it's awful.</p>

[parv]

Damon, the link to a photo URL to supposedly show beta design did not offer me anything different.

 

I did find, however, via search that did showed & noted the changes....

 

http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/14/flickr-new-photo-experience-preview/

 

See also (also found via search) ...

 

http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157636412949175/

 

... that leads to ...

 

http://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/224533-flickr-photopage-beta

[lex_jenkins]

<p>To see the effects of the beta you need to be logged into Flickr.</p>

<p>I tried it. Seems okay. But I didn't have any serious complaints about the revision earlier this year, although the page loading does seem slower now. It would have annoyed me a couple of years ago but since then I've upgraded my PC and DSL speed a bit so it doesn't seem too painful.</p>

<p>I never cared for the old Flickr photo stream look. It may have been less resource intensive but looked like an unfinished project, especially compared with some Tumblr, Pinterest and other image-heavy sites. The new wall o' photos actually looks pretty cool - I spend more time now browsing other members' Flickr pages.</p>

[GBarrington]

<p>I think it is a new paradigm in displaying photos in the sense that both the viewer and the poster need to re-think what they are doing. Flickr needs to work on this a bit, but so does the presenter and the viewer, I think.<br>

That "endless page needs to be a sampler, an overview of the sort of work you are doing. But the meat of your presentation, the place where you SHOW your work in context needs to be presented in sets. I"m beginning to think that every photo should be in a set of some sort.<br>

What I'd like to see is some sort of method where the viewer can easily see some facts regarding the photo such as what sets and groups it is in. From there, the viewer could then select the set or group of his or her choice.</p>