I have been using Flickr stream to enhance my layout. So much that it complemented this site’s layout in its appearence. Thanks to unabashed exhibitionists and online voyeurs, Flickr is now getting blocked at a lot of places, both geographically and locally.

How the block is hurting directly:

• My layout looks borked, when it fails to show-up the Flickr stream column.
• It reduces my time spent on Flickr, so I can’t annotate my project pictures in detail.

I am not so much worried about my layout being broken, I can always fix its visual appearence with an alternate layout. It is the other one that worries me the most. The most important feature in Flickr (in my opinion) is the ability to annotate. This has the power to educate: draw, label, add notes, explain. Every other feature of Flickr is secondary to me.

I haven’t come across any image gallery (desktop) software that can do this. Only Flickr does. And with Flickr getting blocked at workplace, it is not helping. My uploads to Flickr have dropped drastically because of this.

A while ago, I wrote to Picasa team for an annotation feature request. But, looks like it’s a low priority for Google, and probably people are not requesting this feature enough. Captions and tags are not enough. The ability to add annotation (notes) directly on a picture without modifying the image is a huge usability feature, that I cannot stress enough.

I wish I had a (desktop) software that allowed me to do what I can in Flickr (annotate, add notes, tags) and which does not require my administrator’s permission to access a website to do my work.

If Flickr continues to be blocked, I cannot use its service, as I had initially intended for. And I will be forced to discontinue my subscription.

This may sound pessimistic, but I am beginning to see the downside of web based services (when compared with desktop applications), at least from this angle of view.

Related posts

Following list is auto-generated, based on this post's context as possibly related. You may, however, occasionally find some in this list unrelated, but nevertheless, we sincerely hope that you'll enjoy them too.

• A different approach to 3D
• Sickness snowball
• Flickr is 1.618 compliant
• I’m a Flickr pro
• Flickr the stream
• Sickness
• Blockquotes in feed
• Make the web a better place
• Flickr free
• My bike