Today brought yet another rerun of a mobile-app routine that I’d like to see closed out: I saw an update for Flickr’s Android app waiting on my Pixel 5a, I installed the update, I went out and took some photos, and I saw that Flickr still isn’t saving location data when it backs up pictures automatically.
As bugs go, this one is not too consequential. But it’s also gone unfixed since late December, when I first noticed it. Flickr’s customer support promptly responded to that tweet, asking me to send in a sample photo, and the response I got hours later let me hope for a fairly quick resolution.
“We did some testing with the image you provided, and got mixed results upon uploading to a private test account that we use for cases like this,” the rep wrote. “The issue seems specific to the app, and possibly to the new update of 4.16.6.”
But the Flickr app has since seen multiple updates–it’s now up to version 4.16.15–and I’m still seeing automatically uploaded photos stripped of their geotags. That seriously erodes Flickr’s use as an unlimited-storage image backup vault; fortunately, I mainly employ Flickr for its original purpose of photo sharing, and for that I can use the share menu in Google Photos to post pictures, GPS data intact, to Flickr.
Flickr reps have remained a pleasure to deal with over e-mail, and the most recent one added three free months to my Pro subscription, which was a nice gesture.
But I also don’t feel that I can get too mad here, given that Flickr is my only major social-media platform that isn’t the property of a tech or media conglomerate, having been rescued from Yahoo’s erratic stewardship by the privately-held photo-sharing firm SmugMug in 2018.
And not only does Flickr have the advantage of being Not Google and Not Facebook, its support for albums has no equivalent on Instagram. And its support for Creative Commons licensing (my photos are free for non-commercial use while commercial users are welcome to pay) and groups of like-minded photographers (for instance, Capital Weather) have no equivalents at either Instagram or Google Photos.
I don’t even mind having this expense of a Flickr Pro subscription, now $71.99 a year and increasingly hard to avoid, in my Web-services budget. And while I would not turn down getting a few more months free, I would just as soon see Flickr fix this bug and restore this app to complete functionality.
