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?

 

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.

Could you please stop upgrading me in the wrong direction?

It keeps on happening; I go into an online service that I've had wrestled into a functional position (sorry no time to get anything beyond the first working position) and it's had the i-pad nanny makeover. You know the look I mean. Big dumb buttons that can be stabbed by an inattentive finger. Data visualisations that explain the exact knowledge that somebody thinks you want to know in graphs with rounded corners and kinder-executive tones. More options on things that don't matter, often including the menace that is draggable modules, because the certainty of having something in same place on the page after you were interrupted by a phonecall is so last century.

In some ways its nice. We can feel the old programmes (web based, Java, etc.) crumbling. But like employees who had found the exact ways to keep our rooms at a perfect ambient temperature despite the sticking windows and leaky radiators, when we're sent to the new building with its automatic temperature controls and self-opening windows it doesn't feel like an upgrade. It feels like being asked to spend the rest of your life being uncomfortably hot and not being able to fix it. 

Three months later you have the trick of finessing the automatic windows and know the bits of the office where nobody sits without a coat on, and it is better than the old place, with its broken door and the wasps in the roof. But those three months didn't seem like an upgrade, and you weren't especially excited by all the new things you had to learn. The gain was too marginal; the learning scale too steep.

It is increasingly the case that upgrades and redesigns are actually transitions. They come online because the old item is too damaged, can't cope with modern hackspam, relied on something that's been lost in another upgrade on another system, had one fix too many on top of all of the other fixes.  The sites and systems are seldom honest about this; amazing redesigns and fantastic upgrades and new features!!! interrupt me so regularly now I feel little more than a small stab of annoyance when invited to view a five page introduction to the obvious way to use the new page. When asked to trawl through five videos in order to try and find out where a useful function has gone when the answer is it's not possible to implement under the new system - well, that's a bit more than a stab.

Not that there's much that can be done about all this. I'm absolutely aware that the developers have no time for anything beyind the first working position either. 

Solution du jour for viewing notes data in Flickr

So here I am, faced with the awkward discovery that I left my instructions for making home-made wine in notes on a photograph in my Flickrstream. "Well, where's the problem with that?" you might ask. Hmmm. Well, if I can get this right, the flapping back and forth caused by Flickr's incredibly successful and/or famously distastrous redesign  and the various redesigns of the redesign means that a few of the features - most notably, notes - have been left behind for "technical reasons".

I've always been a big notes user on Flickr. In addition to the winemaking diorama (below) I've also used them creatively with friends (that mass of chicks all have "secret thoughts" penned by friends), to identify products (all those small press comics are labelled with creator and source) and of course for the flickr groups What's in your bag? and What's in my fridge?, among others. You can't see any of that, of course, you'll just have to take my word for it.




But of course it isn't until you go and try and find if there's any way to turn a thing back on that you discover that other people felt very differently. "Graffiti on photos!!!!" and "Runs the purity!!!" and "Hate the way strangers can comment literally ON my photo" and my personal favourite, "A great picture of a butterfly's eye does not need a rectangle drawn around the eye and the comment "great eye" added. Fair enough. Looks like there was, once again, a whole pile of shriekyweb going on that was pretty much invisible from my calm, early adopter*, civilized corner.

Still. I'd already made notes re-appear once (I needed them to label some flowers) using the recommended-on-help-forum hack of viewing the site in French (which I can read, though I talk it very badly) which meant an older style sheet, notes still show, blah-de-blah, worked for a few months, but at some point it had stopped working, and I'd switched back to English till the next time I needed the notes.

That day was today, and at first I was wondering if the data I'd entered was even still accessible anymore. It is, and thanks to Elmophoto,  I have a new trick -- switch to viewing the site in an obsolete browser (you don't actually need an obsolete browser, that link there sets you up with a plug-in that will allow your modern browser to pretend it's an obsolete browser for a single site) and ta-da! The information reappears. That seems to be working for now, though of course no-one else will see the notes, unless they install the same plug-in, ugh, of course.

Funny thing, notes was (and is still, I think) unique to Flickr. But instead of a USP, it seems to be being treated like a random annoyance - a relic of the web before. Like me, I suppose.

*I wasn't a tester, but I was a sufficiently early adopter that I remember the site before anyone had paid for advertising and it was all just random hamster-related google ads.