Usually I publish photographs to Flickr twice a day, in the morning and in the evening — random batch of 16 photos in the a.m. and in the p.m. This morning I cannot upload a single photo. For the entire weekend I have not been able to batch upload to Flickr at all and have resorted to uploading photos one by one by one with consistent upload failure with each new attempt.
If this were happening at Facebook, it would be the top story on Techmeme — but because it’s just Yahoo and Flickr, it doesn’t get that sort of attention.
It’s not just me that this is happening to. The Flickr Help Forum has been littered with threads all weekend long where users are angry about not being able to upload photos to the site.
Cannot Upload Any Photos!
Video upload problems
Consistent upload failures and disconnect errors
Very slow upload speed
Uploadr gives error when attempting to Sign in
UPLOAD Servers speed DOWN to 3 %(max)
Can’t Upload Photos with Mac Yosemite
Upload Problems
Uploading not possible at 2/3 it stops
[BUG] Upload speed
Can’t upload
These are all Flickr discussions in their help forum active over the course of the last 3 hours. If you go back further, you will find that for the entire weekend a large chunk of Flickr users have been able to upload images reliably to Flickr.
While being unable to upload photos to a photo sharing site is a problem, to me the bigger problem is that at a company with Yahoo’s resources not a single Flickr staffer seems to be assigned to review their active and public help forum.
While I get that Flickr staffers deserve a weekend off like everyone else, someone at Flickr should be assigned to the company’s very public help forum 24/7. An acknowledgement from staff that they are aware of the problem and working on it goes a long way — but to leave frustrated users twisting in the wind all weekend long just makes a bad situation that much worse.
This uploading problem is a bad technical problem to deal with I’m sure, but basic customer service should be something that Flickr is capable of given the deep resources of Yahoo behind them. Flickr/Yahoo can and should do better.
The only thing that in any way resembles any source of staff involvement comes from one of the help forum threads where a Flickr staffer who goes by the name “Alex” reportedly claims in response to a service inquiry that everything is fine on his end and that he’s able to upload 100 photos in under 5 seconds.
Even when Flickr was at it’s peak, you cannot upload 100 photos in under 5 seconds. No service on the internet would do such a feat, not Google, not Facebook, nor any other site. The fact that this is allowed to stand as the closest thing to staff response is unfortunate.
Flickr just rolled out a wonderful new version of Flickr this past week. Especially the weekend after a major new effort such as this, Flickr/Yahoo should be watching things closer and be much more responsive to their users. Hopefully Flickr doesn’t now let an entire Monday go by without acknowledging such a disruption to their service.
Thomas Hawk Digital Connection
