Sunday, July 26, 2015

Flickr of Doubt

If you are smartphone or tablet user, are your apps set to update automatically or manually? Do you read the details of updated features in apps?

I manually update my apps (to try and preserve battery power) but I don't read what updates have been made to the apps I have purchased. So I tend to stumble across new features when I use the app for the first time after it has been updated.

A recent update for Flickr (a website where we store some of our photos and videos) was to automatically upload photos from our smartphones and tablets into Flickr. All of sudden all the images we took on our mobile devices were uploaded into Flickr.

The photos were uploaded into a Flickr album from which we could review the photos and transfer them to another album to be viewed by friends and family, or the public. We had tons of photos. Every app we used to enhance a photo could create a copy of the photo in our mobile devices' camera rolls so there were multiple copies of photos loaded. We quickly turned off the function to automatically upload photos and deleted unwanted photos from Flickr.

A couple of weeks ago I was using Flickr on my tablet and saw a menu option labelled Camera Roll.

I assumed that Camera Roll related to photos uploaded from my smartphone or tablet and, as these were photos I no longer wanted on my tablet, I started to delete them. It was only when I realised that some of the photos were from last year that it dawned on me that I was deleting photos from Flickr itself!

I discovered that the camera roll option was just another way to view photos on Flickr where all the photos were categorised by date. To me a camera roll does not make sense when you are viewing photos on a desktop so my first instinct was that these were photos on my mobile device (which I used as a camera). The result? About 18 months of photos were deleted and some of our recent blog posts now have broken links.

It took me a couple of hours but, luckily, I was able to find alternative sources for the photos and reload them into Flickr.

So, next step is to determine what links are broken and re-link all the missing photos. I think this will take me another couple of hours, which is delaying some of my planned posts (like snapshots from our Melbourne trip earlier this year). I know, First World Problem, but nonetheless frustrating!

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