Recent signs indicate that Flickr’s parent company Yahoo are serious about turning around Flickr’s poor performance.With the hiring Jeff Bargmann, the brains behind PhotoDrive and other photographer friendly apps, to improve organization and interaction Yahoo looks committed to injecting Fickr with fresh talent and resources. Bargmann’s hiring sent a clear message about Yahoo wanting to win back the hearts of fans, who have recently been vocal in their disapproval of the site.
Despite changing, and then re-changing Flickr’s format the updates failed to provide a good functional and aesthetically pleasing service. The promise of more free storage space might have acted in the short term to appease users, and stop photo lovers defecting to other similar services but long term serious change is needed. This week showed the first indication of that as Flickr reverted back towards its old interface, with the photo info being moved from beside the picture to below the picture.
Whether this change is related to the hiring of Bargmann, or already planned in advance is unclear, but it shows Flickr has been listening to its users. The small change has generally won the support of the all important Reddit community but some call for Flickr to go further:
I just got used to the new info-on-the-side layout and am mad they changed it yet again.