{"id":306,"date":"2006-12-10T11:51:04","date_gmt":"2006-12-10T02:51:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2006-12-10\/306"},"modified":"2006-12-10T11:51:04","modified_gmt":"2006-12-10T02:51:04","slug":"yahoo-photos-really-sucks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2006-12-10\/306","title":{"rendered":"Yahoo! Photos Really Sucks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n

My sister keeps her photos on Yahoo!\nPhotos<\/a>. This is unfortunate, because it's a bad<\/span> photos service.<\/p>\n\n

I don't know when Yahoo! lost its way (although my first guess would be\nwhen they got rid of me *<\/a><\/sup>\n \ud83d\ude42<\/b>, but they seem to spend their time now making things\n“flashy” instead of the “useful” and\n“intuitive” of the old days. Most recently, this manifested\nitself with a big screwup<\/a> of their TV-listing sit.<\/p>\n\n

With the current version of Y! Photos that debuted during the summer,\nthey have perhaps added useful features, but in the process, made the site\nreally inconvenient for its most basic use: it's difficult to view photos<\/b>.<\/p>\n\n

    \n

  1. When I click on an album, it shows an empty-album page for six seconds<\/i> before populating the page with the pictures in the album. It's not showing<\/span> an empty page, mind you, which would be a clear<\/span> indication that something's not done yet, but rather a page<\/span> showing an\n album containing no photos.<\/p>\n\n

    Six seconds is a long time if you count it out — long enough\n to recognize that the album is empty and that you must have clicked on the wrong thing, and hit the back button. The first<\/span> time I used<\/span> it, it took me a while<\/span> before I figured<\/span> out\n what was going on. I thought<\/span> my sister simply had no photos.<\/p>\n\n

    (I should point out that I have 100<\/b> megabit fiber service at home; my ping time to Yahoo! image servers is 200ms.)<\/p>\n\n<\/li>\n\n

  2. When viewing a page of thumbnails (which are miniscule!<\/i>), images that are “below the fold” (not visible on the screen until you scroll down)\n aren't loaded until you actually do scroll down. So, that means that you're guaranteed to have to wait again<\/i> for images to load. It would<\/span> make\n much more sense to let those images load while you're viewing the\n above-the-fold images.<\/p>\n\n

    The only reason I can think of that they would have done this is to try to reduce the load on their servers\/bandwidth. If someone<\/span> views the top of\n a page<\/span> of thumbnails but never bothers scrolling down to see more, those below-the-fold thumbnails won't have been fetched from Yahoo's servers. And even if<\/span>\n someone does scroll down, waiting until they do scroll before fetching the images reduces the “burstiness” of the thumbnail accesses.<\/p>\n\n

    I can understand the service\/cost tradeoff in this decision,\n except for two things: it really<\/i> degrades the service, and worst of\n all, they bypass the browser image cache<\/b>. This means that every\n time<\/b> I view<\/span> her gallery to see whether there are more pictures, my\n computer has to re-fetch the thumbnails from Yahoo!'s servers. They'd gain\n MUCH<\/b> more efficiency by leaving “it works well” alone and allowing my\n browser to cache the thumbnails: the next time I view<\/span> the page, I'd have to<\/span>\n fetch only the new thumbnails.<\/p>

    This is nothing more than the\n dumb result of someone playing with new scripting toys and deciding that\n “cool” is somehow better than “useful.”<\/p><\/li>\n\n

  3. When viewing a page of thumbnails, we all know that to view a larger<\/span> version of the picture, you click on it. It's been this<\/span> way since the Beginning of Time,\n and for a good<\/span> reason. That every picture web site ever built does it this way is also a strong<\/span> recommendation to continue doing it this way. However, clicking on\n a thumbnail<\/span> in Yahoo! Photos does..... nothing. Nothing.<\/p>

    (For the record, if you want to view an image, you must double click on it.)<\/p><\/li>\n\n

  4. After double-clicking on an image to see a larger<\/span> version,\n hitting the back button results in.... another six-second wait as all the\n thumbnails are again downloaded from Yahoo!.<\/p>\n\n

    Every. Time. Every. Picture.<\/p>\n\n

    Something is very sick at Yahoo for this to be considered an improvement over the old site.<\/p>\n <\/li>\n\n\n

  5. Yahoo! Photos has no RSS feed. If this were<\/span> 1997 I'd understand, but it's beyond comprehension in 2006 how a major<\/span> player like Yahoo! can offer a service<\/span>\n like this without RSS support. Yahoo!, what are you\n thinking?<\/p>

    This bring us back to why they do the stupid thumbnail\n loading: to save load\/bandwidth on their image servers. Well, if I\n have<\/span> to view the thumbnail gallery just to find out whether there's\n anything new, that's a lot<\/span> of load on your servers. Simple RSS support to\n indicate whether there's anything new would mean I'd actually view the\n gallery only when there is<\/b> something new.<\/p><\/li>\n\n

  6. They remove the “.jpg” (or whatever) file-ending on images they serve, which makes right-click-and-save less convenient. It's possible<\/span> that they did this on purpose, just to make something they somehow deem undesirable less convenient, but the rest of the site makes me inclined\n to believe that they just didn't think things through.<\/p><\/li>\n\n

  7. The “larger version” they show upon double-clicking isn't really\n all that large for my tastes, but that's fine. I should<\/span> be able to click on\n the photo for yet a larger<\/span> version, or click on the “other sizes” link, or\n something? Yes? No.<\/p>\n

    Something that should be so simple is now difficult: I have<\/span> to click on the “Download” tab (which doesn't even look like a link<\/span>), select a larger<\/span> size,\n download to my computer, then view. I don't<\/span> want to save a copy.<\/span>.. I just want<\/span> to see the thing! Geez.<\/p><\/li>\n\n\n

  8. They are completely clueless about how to handle digital-image\n colors. Their resized versions strip all color-space information, thereby\n guaranteeing\n that at least some users will see the wrong colors. Guaranteeing.<\/p>\n\n

    In their defense, I should<\/span> point out that pretty much every\n other online photo site is similarly clueless, including Flickr<\/strike> and Google, and even\n ones targeting the professional photographer like PBase. [UPDATE<\/b>: Flickr does not strip profiles!]<\/p>\n

    They should all read this Introduction to Digital-Image Color Spaces<\/a>.<\/p><\/li>\n\n <\/ol>\n\n

    Maybe the thinking that has gone into this product explains why Yahoo's\nstock is doing so poorly in absolute terms, and even worse when compared to\nothers in the industry. Sigh. My future<\/span> retirement is sitting in Yahoo\nstock.... maybe I<\/i> am the stupid one.\n <\/p>\n\n\n

    *<\/a><\/td>I was<\/span> one of the first Yahoo!\nemployees (#192) and happily toiled there for eight years until HR cut me\nlose because they didn't like that I telecommuted<\/span> from\nKyoto.<\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    My sister keeps her photos on Yahoo! Photos. This is unfortunate, because it's a bad photos service.<\/p>

    I don't know when Yahoo! lost its way (although my first guess would be when they got rid of me *  \ud83d\ude42<\/b>, but they seem to spend their time now making things \"flashy\" instead of the \"useful\" and \"intuitive\" of the old days. Most recently, this manifested itself with a big screwup of their TV-listing sit.<\/p>

    With the current version of Y! Photos that debuted during the summer, they have perhaps added useful features, but in the process, made the site really inconvenient [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}