On Flickr 5.0 ( Well done You’ve Wrecked It)
I once watched a man in a Hoxton pub dismantle a perfectly functional fruit machine with a screwdriver, on the grounds that he could "improve the payout." When he'd finished, the machine took your money, flashed its lights in a manner suggesting imminent electrical fire, and dispensed nothing whatsoever. He stood back, wiped his hands on his trousers, and declared it "basically better." I hadn't thought of him in thirty years, but he came vividly to mind last week when Flickr — a photo-sharing service so venerable it predates the iPhone, YouTube, and most of its users' second wives/mortgauges — pushed version 5.0 of its app onto my iPad with all the tender consultation of an elizabethan press gang.
The old app, let us be clear, was no oil painting. It was the digital equivalent of a provincial museum: dusty, faintly municipal, but you knew where everything was and the exhibits stayed on the walls. The new one has been "completely rebuilt," a phrase that in software, as in cosmetic surgery, should make you reach immediately for your coat/ barrister's card. Open a photograph and zoom in — the one thing, you'd imagine, a photography app might be expected to manage — and you are presented with a smear of pixels so degraded it resembles a police e-fit of a suspect glimpsed through a shower door or stitched up by the West Midlands Serious Tippex Squad. Nineteen years of Cartier-Bresson aspirations, rendered as teletext.
Scroll through the work of the photographers you follow and you'll find their names have been relocated to beneath the pictures, so that attribution now arrives like a punchline delivered ten minutes after the joke, by which time you've moved on, lost interest, or died. Auto-upload, meanwhile, has become a sort of devotional exercise: you may request it, you may pray for it, but the app will decide in its own sweet time whether your photographs are worthy of the cloud, like a bouncer at a nightclub nobody wanted to enter in the first place. On Android the upload counter reportedly runs backwards, which at least has the virtue of honesty — this is a product actively regressing before your eyes.
The truly exquisite touch, though — the maraschino cherry atop this knickerbocker glory of incompetence — is that there is no going back. Once updated, the old app ceases to exist, vaporised like a disgraced Politburo member from a May Day photograph. Flickr's help pages announce this with the breezy finality of a hospital administrator explaining that your ward has been converted into a car park, but the good news is there's a suggestion box. "We're continuing to roll out updates and improvements gradually," they chirp, which translates from the corporate as: we have shipped you half a product and you, the paying customer of two decades' standing, are now the quality assurance department. Unpaid. Unconsulted. Unamused.
And here's the thing: they'll probably fix most of it, in dribs and drabs, over the coming weeks, and in six months this will all read like hysteria over nothing — which is precisely the cynical arithmetic these companies rely upon. Break it, ship it, patch it, wait for the anger to fade like a Polaroid left on a windowsill. But some of us remember when Flickr was the great cathedral of amateur photography, and we notice when the new management rips out the pews and installs a cock pit. Version 5.0 isn't an update; it's a hostage situation with a loyalty scheme. Somewhere in Hoxton, a man with a screwdriver is nodding in professional approval
