My friend (and Tack Sharp co-host) James Duncan Davidson offers his thoughts on Flickr’s disappointing practice of stripping IPTC and EXIF data (containing the creator, copyright, title, and other information) from the photos we upload.
Why is stripping this information bad? Duncan’s take:
If somebody were to get ahold of this image of a cute kid that was downloaded from Flickr, they’d have no idea when it was taken, who took it, or what the kids name was […] the experience will be similar to our experience going through dusty photographs with no dates written on the back.
He continues:
It’s not a software tool’s place to mandate a privacy decision for those that might want it at the expense of all, at least in my opinion.
I couldn’t agree more, and to be honest, as I grow as a photographer and want to share more of my work, I find myself asking questions like this more and more often. I like Flickr a lot, especially the community aspects of it, and the friends I have there. I’ve uploaded thousands of photos over the years, tagging them as I go, and have a lot of time invested there.
Where do you post your pictures online? Have any of you “left” Flickr for another photo sharing website? Does that site offer the same kind of privacy and sharing options (or superior ones)? Does it make uploading easy?
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Ben Reubenstein
16 January 2009 at 10:37 am
My wife used to only use Flickr, but the family complained that it was too difficult to navigate and purchasing multiple prints was tedious. Now the photos go to Flickr AND Picasa.
Steve
16 January 2009 at 10:41 am
I’m a big fan of SmugMug. I don’t think they have as strong of a community but perhaps that will grow as people become increasingly dissatisfied with Flickr? I haven’t checked to see whether they have the same “problems” with EXIF data that Duncan pointed out in his post.
Erik Vorhes
16 January 2009 at 10:42 am
What if:
The user can choose to keep that data in the photo.
* If the user chooses not to keep it, Flickr stores that information in a database but strips it from the photo.
* Then, if the user later decides, “Oops! I wish I had that info at hand,” it would be available through their user interface and could be added back to the image on download, through some server-side processing.
Is that kind of thing possible? Would the potential for massive server load be a problem?
Neill Harmer
16 January 2009 at 10:46 am
Has Flickr given reason why they strip that info?
Ben Jarret
16 January 2009 at 10:46 am
It’s not really for professionals, and more for families, but we use http://photatobug.com to share our photosets with our friends and family.
Andy Michaels
16 January 2009 at 10:47 am
I’ve been looking at Picasaweb. I guess I just accepted that Flickr was not so intuitive to navigate, but a friend of mine recently joined and said he didn’t like the interface much. Picasa has far superior privacy control (IMO), along the lines of google apps. This makes it easy to appease those parents who do not want their kids’ pics in the public eye.
The google-supported iPhoto plugin is a boon, making it more effortless than the flickr uploader (yes, I know there’s a 3rd party Flickr exporter for iPhoto, but the picasa one is dead simple)
However, Picasaweb doesn’t seem to have the community features I like, so I’m using both. Flickr for non-kid photos and Picasaweb for stuff that needs privacy controls.
Did I just kill my cred by admitting that I use iPhoto? Oh well.
Chris Vannoy
16 January 2009 at 10:48 am
One thought from personal experience handling photo uploads on why they’re stripping the metadata: It adds a significant overhead on image sizes.
For the photo app I’ve built at work, stripping the metadata turned 40k 100x100 thumbs into nice, lean 4k images.
The amount of data crammed in there is not insignificant from a bandwidth perspective.
That said, I’d hope they’d leave the metadata in the *original* images they keep.
Tim
16 January 2009 at 10:57 am
Flickr annoys me far more than it pleases me; if it’s not technical issues like this then it’s those horrible ‘awards’ that people leave in the comments! I’m far happier since I set up my own Pixelpost site.
Tim Welch
16 January 2009 at 11:00 am
It seems that professionals have tended to like the look and feel of smugmug over flickr. Flickr has the community.
But I have been seeing more and more complaints about photos being stolen. One photographer complained that ad and marketing people were using Flickr like a free stock photo gallery.
The community thing has its weird angles, like the fetish groups co opting photos and twisting them into fantasy and swinger groups making it a huge source of amateur porn.
Stephen Fleming
16 January 2009 at 11:09 am
Like Steve above (no relation), I’m a big fan of SmugMug. it’s not free, but you get what you pay for. EXCELLENT service.
Rob
16 January 2009 at 11:12 am
I wouldn’t say I’ve left Flickr but now that I look back I’ve gone from uploading hundreds of pictures of 2007 to dozens in 2008. Partially a decision that it’s not worth dealing with the interface plus privacy concerns for leaving off the family photos, but I doubt I’d have even done that much without the iPhoto plugin and ability to email mobile photos to my account from my phone.
I still believe Flickr is ahead of the curve given it’s design because while cumbersome for active users it at least stays out of the way for casual browsers. It’s in bad need of a refresh because it’s already made ample room for a new contender.
Mingo Hagen
16 January 2009 at 11:16 am
Well, I for one love the Flickr interface and community and can’t envision myself ever leaving it (bold statement). I do second Tim’s complaint about the Awards.
Ricky
16 January 2009 at 11:19 am
Behance Network have a Photo site http://www.photographyserved.com/
Raphael Campardou
16 January 2009 at 11:20 am
Vimeo is to YouTube what [FILL IN THE BLANK HERE] is to Flickr.
SmugMug would be the closest, but not there yet.
I can’t tell what’s missing (or maybe what’s to remove).
Chris
16 January 2009 at 12:27 pm
I’ll be in the minority here but I’m satisfied with my Mobile Me Web Gallery. It’s just so integrated with everything on my Mac. iPhoto, Aperture, iMovie, and my iPhone. Everything just works. Friends and family seem to navigate it with no problems. Never had to teach someone how to browse my photos.
Flickr’s learning curve can be steep for some. I helped a lady who had her photo’s on Yahoo. She was being forced by Yahoo to move them to Flickr or Photo Bucket. I told her Flickr would be the better choice by far. It took her a long time to get used to Flickr.
I wonder since Yahoo is running the show now that continuous development has slowed to crawl. Maybe Yahoo’s new CEO will help?
Justin
16 January 2009 at 12:29 pm
I use Flickr more often than not as a repository and online backup of my images. I then use various widgets and PHP that makes use of the Flickr API, to ‘pull in’ and display my images elsewhere.
I agree the EXIF issue is a problem to me, as the more data I can save, and draw from, the more details I can use to automatically sort and display elsewhere.
I too would be interested in alternatives. Nothing listed here so far, has as much open-source development associated with it :(
Nigel
16 January 2009 at 2:52 pm
Interesting to see how many people don’t like flickr’s interface. All this time I thought I was the only one.
I’m in the process of setting up my own wordpress-hosted photo site. I may end up duplicate posting to flickr and/or picasaweb, but I want my main repository to be under my control.
Bryan
16 January 2009 at 3:07 pm
For sharing photos with friends and family, I find that most people don’t want to leave the blog where I post about the kids…
I use both Flickr and a Mobile Me gallery but most folks don’t even bother. I’m thinking about just displaying images in a js lightbox in each post. It’s not great for future searching, but at least my readers will look at the photos.
I agree with those above who say the Flickr interface sucks.
Stuart Dootson
16 January 2009 at 3:47 pm
I use and like Flickr. I upload from iPhoto (not 09!), which makes things easy enough. I don’t have any real issues with the interface - I find it easy enough to edit and geo-tag my photos.
Sam Souder
16 January 2009 at 4:35 pm
I just looked into SmugMug to find out about the EXIF issue with them. Besides having a very unprofessional looking logo and site (compared to Flickr), they employ cheesy ‘security’ things like attempting to block right clicking on images and putting transparent images over the actual images to make it ‘secure’. You are easily able to steal images on SmugMug, just the same as Flickr, and upon inspection, all the images had zero EXIF data embedded in them, even the larger sizes.
I recognize that Yahoo would have to be willing to use more bandwidth and storage to keep EXIF data around in all sizes of images. But I figure worst case, this is something they can upsell with paid plans? I do think it would be jerkish of them to make you pay to keep your data intact, but it would solve the problem.
So, in short, SmugMug has the same deficiencies in terms of EXIF data embedding and tops it off with a dose of stinky web ‘security’ and non-professional looks.
Nathan L. Walls
16 January 2009 at 6:19 pm
I’m on Flickr and Duncan’s EXIF issues stipulated, I’m not planning on going anywhere.
I don’t by it’s a storage issue. EXIF/IPTC data as fielded text data, embedded in binary data isn’t going to move the storage requirements significantly. Besides, they store EXIF data for display on photo pages.
I’ll also stipulate, crappy images in comments (occasionally)
But, it works for what I need and fits my workflow.
Natalie Jost
17 January 2009 at 11:39 am
I think I have somewhere around 12k photos on flickr so I’m not going anywhere quickly. The main reasons I use it now is 1) it’s the fastest way to resize an image without opening photoshop and 2) it’s the easiest way to share a photo with friends without having to post a link to everywhere around the internet to let people know about it.
I’ve used picasa for family since it first came out about 6 years ago but drifted away from it a little because it just didn’t seem to keep track of my images the way I wanted, but it has improved a lot, so I’m gradually going back to it. I do like having my collective Google assets together since I use Gmail and Reader.
Ian
18 January 2009 at 4:52 am
SmugMug do preserve the meta data for original photos if you tell them to in the options (and the data is there in the first place).
I did use Flickr at first but it never really clicked as a place to store my photos. Switched to SmugMug and never looked back, it just seems to fit. Theres an active community at Dgrin, good privacy controls and the photos resize to fit the display. Admittedly there aren’t as many community features like Flickr, but there are some. You can add photos to what would be like a pool in Flickr but its called something else on SmugMug but I can’t remember what.
Something I never got on Flickr was photostreams. I get the concept of them but I never really found them to be of use to me.
Chris Hester
19 January 2009 at 9:04 am
1. Hey Dan, On Firefox 3/Mac it says “Your comment was created successfully” at the top of the comments before I have entered one.
2. I think Flickr’s interface is simple and fine. It works intuitively and is fun to explore. However it can certainly be improved in a few areas, but I don’t think it sucks.
3. In the comments to the article linked at the start, Richard Flynn says it right: “The EXIF and IPTC data is kept intact for ‘Original’-size photos on Flickr, just as you’d expect: it’s all just stripped away when the images are resized to the smaller dimensions used on the site.”
The article’s point about the data being lost is mute if the user bothers to save the largest size available (as I always do if I want to keep a photo).
Khurt
22 January 2009 at 9:52 am
I am quite sure I don’t understand the privacy concerns people are raising ( without specificity ) about Flickr. You have options to “private”, share with family and friend, family only,friends only,your contacts or the whole community. With PicasaWeb gives you “public” and “unlisted”. For PicasaWeb “unlisted” does not guarantee privacy as “Anyone that has the exact web address will be able to see your unlisted album.”
While for Flickr: “changing the privacy level of any photo (“public”—> “friends”, or “friends”—> “family”) will change the image file name. This ensures that any photo truly becomes private.”
As for people who prefer SmugMug because “you get what you pay for”, neither PicasaWeb nor Flickr is free for serious use. The limited accounts on Flickr and PicasaWeb are ... well limited.
Links:
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=39551
http://www.flickr.com/help/privacy/