Since Flickr is just about my favorite web service and I use it a lot, it should come as no surprise that I also like to complain about it. Well, not so much about the service itself, just the lack of a few features and some of the more inexplicable things they’ve done. Some of my previous gripes (like black thumbnails) have actually been fixed. Others, like the stupefyingly bad SafeSearch feature are alive and well.

So here’s my current list of annoyances about my favorite web service:

• Flickr Uploadr 3.0 is a very buggy piece of software. In fact, it’s so bad it probably should never have been released. In particular, it should not have been released just before a big holiday when development teams would not be on hand to fix it. I’ve downgraded to Uploadr 2.5. It might be clunky, but at least it uploads your pictures.
• There is still no way to hide non-public images from yourself so that you could navigate the photostream the way other people see it. About 3000 pictures in my account are private, being either high-res backups or of a personal nature (not that personal, though…) Wading through them often becomes a chore, since I typically upload batches of 30-100 images for backup at a time. I’m almost considering opening a separate Flickr account just for backups, but that would become frustrating quite quickly.
• When you add photos to an existing set using the Organizr, the sets are listed in the order you’ve arranged them in for viewers. When you have 50 sets, it gets annoying to find one that might be number 20 on the list. The option to switch to alphabetical listing would have been very useful.
• The SafeSearch / NIPSA issue is still around, although Flickr seems less aggressive about enforcing it at the moment

On a more positive note, the new Flickr stats work just fine. I’ve been able to observe some interesting trends in how my photos are being viewed, including a better idea of what constitutes my “greatest hits” on Flickr. Great work indeed.