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by inferiorhuman 2369 days ago
Fuck em. Both Yahoo! and SmugMug have beaten the dead horse that is Flickr more than enough. I've moved on (and self-host these days) and I'm not looking back even if there were some inkling that Flickr was better at image hosting than I am.

For me, Flickr became less and less usable with every UI update. Back when Sonic was charging beaucoup bucks for 3Mbit DSL in San Francisco this was a big usability problem. The social stuff was neglected (SNR on the groups became abysmal). For a while I had a "pro" account. At some point they marked my account adult only with no explanation so I made another (free accout) and moved on. Then Yahoo! migrated everyone to Yahoo! logins and my Flickr accounts kind of operated in some odd grey area and I just use Flickr for free photo storage.

And then came SmugMug. My last public Flickr post was a screenshot of what SmugMug did to the Flickr mobile app — they'd just pushed some notification about the SmugMug buyout and all of the "excitement" clobbered the navigation links[1].

I tried in vain to migrate my Flickr account. The mobile app worked but wouldn't let me reset my password. The desktop site would send reset messages to my email address, but the auth infra thought I shouldn't be allowed to reset my password from that email address. Obviously the SmugMug guy who was posting on HN never got back to me. Neither dud Flickr/SmugMug support.

So I went back to self-hosting. And it worked. I didn't even have to beg support for access to anything. And now SmugMug wants more money? Sorry guys, you've had many chances.

1: https://live.staticflickr.com/979/41376824904_bba1b08851_o.p...
1 comments
jazoom 2368 days ago
May I ask what software you use for self-hosting?
link
inferiorhuman 2367 days ago
May I ask what software you use for self-hosting?

It's just a home grown thing. I'm not trying to compete with all the social crap that Flickr used to do well. These days I'm leaning towards making it more of a static site generator type thing. Image processing is done with a combination of imagemagick and exiftool.

Initially it started out as an Elixir+Phoenix app with an eye towards setting up some image processing as a set of background services taking the form of Elixir apps. Elixir and Phoenix were pretty painful so it's since been rewritten in Rust+Rocket.

link