Thursday, September 17, 2015

let me remove the improvements you have included as standard

I use a popular image hosting site (in fact, I use several, but there's one in particular that I adopted early and have stuck with since) many of whose best features have eroded over the years (alas, the notes function) but from time to time it adds another little thing. Sometimes these are great -- smart auto-tagging and the magic view (where the site sorts your photos into plants, people, animals, with only the occasional hilarious mistake) have been pleasant surprises this year.

But there have also been unpleasant surprises, the most unpleasant of which has been streamlining the embed code generator. It's had the noddy and big-buttons makeover which characterises the tablet-focussed web, accompanied by its usual reduction of options. So now, instead of asking you if you want their code snippet to top and tail your image with a bunch of text, it just does it, automagically.

This is quite tiresome, especially at small sizes, where the code top-and-tail can almost double the height of the image. I appreciate that they're just dying to say "hosted on Flickr" right where you can see it, but really when that information is a hover or a click away, is it really needed?

my minecraft home  irrational kitten fox tiara

Naturally, given that if you're embedding you're often in code view anyway, stripping this additional bobbins out is a moment's work. But I'm old enough to be in the count-down to arthritis, and every click counts.

Edited to add: The code no longer seems to be loading effectively (I suspect to no-one's great sorrow) but it added almost a centimetre of logoed and betexted space above and below the image.

2 comments:

Groc said...

I miss the notes. The notes where a thing. A great thing. Noone else does notes. Grrrr.

cleanskies said...

Me too. For a while there was a trick where you could force the site to load using the French style sheet, which still had comments and notes, but I've not made that work recently. The last time I went looking for a solution, I discovered that a bunch of users had run a concerted campaign against notes, because people would eave notes on their (or other people's) pictures that would annoy them -- but I think the real problem was that comment spam was pouring in through it and they couldn't figure out an off that would work.