Flickr invites are teh suck

Filed under Intertubes, Photography on October 22nd, 2007

You are an aspiring (or accomplished) photographer. You study the masters of your art. You treasure the tools of your trade, from the lowly compact camera to your esteemed Leica. You spend your days on photographic field trips or in your personal studio. Finally, you capture a true moment of photographic beauty. Something worthy of Ansel Adams, Henry Cartier-Bresson or Ernst Haas.

Then you decide to post your masterpiece on Flickr. In a few days your picture will be drowned by a deluge of tacky, cheesy, awful graphical abominations, known as “Flickr Invites”. In case you never been to Flickr, those are little logos or badges, informing you that your image won some made-up award (say, “Dark Master Vomitron’s Cool Picture Award”) and inviting you to some obscure group (say, “Picturemeister’s Totally Worthy Image Bunker”).

When I say those invites are tacky, I mean it. Drive-a-nail-through-your-eyes-to-stop-the-pain tacky. MySpace tacky. Soon, the flickr page with your masterpiece ends up resembling a “FREE Web GIF” gallery from 1997 (although, the blink tag is mercifully missing).

Here are some random examples:

Did I mention that the guy in the last picture is animated? Classy!

How about a solution, dear Flickr?

It’s really not that difficult to fix this mess. How about letting us disable images in comments? Or even better: why not provide a proper “I dig this photo” and “I invite you to my group” functionality instead of the mess we have? Then invites could be shown (optionally) on a different section of the page.

My eyes! The googles, they do nothing

Here’s the worst badge I’ve seen. Proceed with caution.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 12:26 pm.
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