Flickr Unveils New Embed Feature, Brace Yourself for Photographer Outrage
Yesterday night, Yahoo! took yet another step forward in the Flickr renaissance, although we doubt all photographers will see it this way. In a bid to make the service more share-friendly, Yahoo! has introduced new, cleaner embedding capability to the photo sharing site.
The purpose of the new embeds is to “make it even easier to add full-bleed Flickr photos and videos onto your personal websites, blogs and articles,” while also making sure that proper attribution is given each and every time.
If you allow embeds (they are automatically enabled for everything but private photos, but you can go into settings and toggle the ability on or off) users will be able to pull an iframe code by clicking on the embed brackets under the share button.
Once inserted, that code will pop up a photo that looks something like this:
As you can see, the benefits are that the new iframe embeds, unlike the standard HTML version, feature proper attribution every time. They also link back to the original author and photo, and even allow you to browse through the photostream, set or group that the photo was pulled from. The photos can be viewed in glorious full screen as well, and Flickr promises never to compress or resize your images.
Plus, Flickr is hoping to sweeten the deal for photographers by keeping track of viewing statistics even when the photo is being shared elsewhere, so you can get a sense of how popular your photos really are, not just how many people visited the pic on Flickr itself.
The one down side, and it’s something that has been mentioned by more than one person, is that Flickr is also plastering a nice, big logo of their own in the bottom right hand side of all of your photos.
So, in addition to the standard complaints from those who fear change, and the complaints from those who will ignore the bit about how you can turn embedding off and, therefore, will complain that this will increase use without permission, there will also probably be a big uproar regarding what is basically an unwanted Flickr watermark being added to any photo you embed.
Fortunately, you can do something to help make sure Flickr knows what is and isn’t okay about this. As with all of the site’s updates, Flickr is asking for feedback (hopefully constructive in nature) so that everyone is happy with the final results.
So, in addition to dropping us a line in the comments, don’t forget to head over to Flickr Ideas and offer your feedback to help make the experience more pleasant for all the users involved.
(via Flickr Blog)
