New Flickr photo page tweak

DazJW

DazJW

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A small modification to the photo page layout has just gone live on Flickr which makes the images bigger.

Trouble is:
It displays a soft version of the image as if there isn't a properly resized version at that size,
There's a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the page for no apparent reason,
You have to scroll down to see a portrait layout image.

This is happening for me on a 1280x1024 monitor (which I know is a bit low these days but it displays every other site I've tried fine) with Firefox. It also seems to be happening for a fair few other people judging by their help forum thread on the update.

A Flickr staff member responded with this on their help forum regarding the portrait orientation issue:
"I hear you about the portrait photos, and I agree that it would be nice to see more of those photos. But scaling them so that they are entirely visible results in tiny photos. In the end, we decided that having some of the photo cut off is the best of the two options; this is just a result of the fact that computer monitors are much wider then they are tall."
(my emphasis)

Which seems an odd decision for a photo sharing site.
 
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Where is this new look? I know they re-jigged the 'contacts' section page a while back but can't see any other changes.....
 
I'm not seeing the changes here. I use a custom CSS page though so that may be why.
 
Anyone know the dimensions they are using now?

They do look a bit softer now :( but they have also added the basic exif info under the image :)

If you click on the image it still goes back to the black screen with the old size too.
 
PaulF said:
Anyone know the dimensions they are using now?
Click to expand...

They're aren't using dimensions, they're being dynamically resized. That's why the images are soft.
If you resize your screen down it sometimes changes to using the 640px version, if you resize it up it'll show the 1024px version but between those it's a dynamic resize.
 
DazJW said:
They're aren't using dimensions, they're being dynamically resized. That's why the images are soft.
If you resize your screen down it sometimes changes to using the 640px version, if you resize it up it'll show the 1024px version but between those it's a dynamic resize.
Click to expand...

Well that's just a daft way to do things on an image sharing site :thumbsdown:

I'd rather they just displayed the images at a set dimension so they'll look as intended not have a user uncontrollable feature that softens everything :bang:
 
Has this been rolled out to everyone? I still haven't seen the new upload interface on my account.
 
DazJW said:
You have to scroll down to see a portrait layout image.
Click to expand...

Even using firefox's full screen mode on a 1920 x 1200 screen I have to scroll down to view a portrait oriented photo.
It's quite a jump from the 640 pixel image they used to display.
 
I can see why they're doing it, but it isn't really ideal. Unless you are uploading images at the size you want them displayed and have sharpened them accordingly, they won't be perfect on a service like Flickr anyway.
 
They've been fiddling with it so portrait images fit on the screen now and they've done something that has slightly improved the softness issue. It seems uploading at 1024px like I do makes the problem worse for monitors of my resolution because it's downsizing it a little bit and that's making it soft, whereas uploading a high resolution image gives it more information to work with and it doesn't end up looking as bad.

A workaround would be to upload at 640px as that seems to be the smallest size you can make it display but that doesn't help for photos that are already uploaded unless you're "Pro" and can use the replace image function, which I'm not any more so I can't.

It sounds like the layout is having a lot of position issues on different people's monitors.

Craikeybaby said:
Unless you are uploading images at the size you want them displayed and have sharpened them accordingly, they won't be perfect on a service like Flickr anyway.
Click to expand...
That's what I was doing and their own resizes of what I uploaded were good enough, but now it's doing it dynamically at sizes between their old image sizes it looks naff.
 
Just had a look at Flickr and the pictures now show at a decent 1024px size instead of a lame 800px size.

They don't seem to sharpen the 1024px size as aggressively as the 800px size which I also like as I don't think a website should apply sharpening to images as that should be decided by the user.
 
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