Apple has long been associated with the saying “it just works”. Well, sometimes it apparently works a little too well, to the point of allowing users to delete their entire Flickr libraries in one fell swoop without really meaning to. Oops.
The problem stems from the way Apple’s popular iPhoto software is integrated with Flickr. Recent versions of iPhoto allow users to sync specified albums with Flickr, which means they can automatically upload new photos as soon as they import them into iPhoto from their cameras, and change their captions for both at once. The problem is that iPhoto treats this syncing very literally: if you delete a photo from one of these albums on iPhoto, it doesn’t just remove it from the Set on Flickr — it actually deletes the photo from your Flickr account entirely.
iPhoto apparently informs users that when they stop sharing a photo album between iPhoto and Flickr, “The album no longer appears on Flickr, but the photos remain in your [iPhoto] library.” The wording is both ambiguous (Apple could just mean it’s deleting the photos from the Flickr set) and not nearly strong enough to suggest that it’s actually deleting data. And plenty of people have made that mistake.
Over the last several weeks this has led to a number of threads in Flickr’s help forum where some users are up in arms after accidentally deleting hundreds of photos at once.
Fortunately, Flickr is taking notice. A Flickr engineer has tweeted about how bad the design is, and a staff member in one of the threads wrote that Flickr was discussing the matter internally, and later followed up to say that they were discussing the issue with Apple. Hopefully this will be resolved shortly.
It’s worth pointing out that this is probably exactly how Apple designed the syncing functionality to work in the first place. After all, syncing with Apple devices and MobileMe works the same way: delete something on your computer, and it deletes it elsewhere. But there’s no way anyone should be able to delete hundreds of photos at once without knowing full well what they’re about to do. Apple (and Flickr, for that matter) have failed to to made it abundantly clear to users just what photo syncing really means, and that’s just bad design.
Photo via Flickr.
It’s very unfortunate for people to lose their data like that. Having said this; being an ‘Apple hater’ I am actually a little bit happy that every few weeks Apple does one more stupid thing to piss off its customers.
I am just waiting for someone to make a new round of Mac vs PC commercials… I can see it now:
Fade from black:
Mac: Hello I’m a Mac
PC: And I’m a PC
Mac: I think my users are so stupid that I will take full control of all of their media.
PC: Well, I have that as well, it’s called a Zune player.
Mac: Zune? Haha, no! I now allow users to upload their data to my shiny new Iphone. Then automatically delete this content from the original online-source, hard-drive, back-up drive and even brain memory if the user no longer feels like he wants to have it on their phone.
PC: ????
Fade to black – show Apple logo
Right.They need stupid haters.Thats is the reson they are making better system than Microsoft.
Mark,
Can you please elaborate? I am not so sure that I fully understand your reply.
Right.
Sure.
As an “advanced user” (development envs, ui devel experience, unix/linux admin, win server admin), i can personally say that apple’s systems are very user friendly. but apple’s implicit mantra was “our customers are idiots and we know what’s good for them” all along.
“being an ‘Apple hater’ ”
Apple haters won’t like this from “All Things Digital” today: “First two months of the September quarter show Mac sales up about 7 percent year over year. iPhone sales are even more robust.”
“Our checks indicate that worldwide demand for the iPhone 3GS is outstripping supply.”
The article you are quoting from:
http://digitald...ripping-supply/
Also says:
“In quarters past, Apple has guided revenue four percent below Street expectations on average and earnings-per-share 12 percent below Street expectations. But the company’s actual results have typically beaten those estimates by an average of three percent on revenue and by 24 percent on earnings per share. Munster expects this to be the case again when Apple reports earnings on Monday.”
Correct me if I am wrong but doesn’t that mean that Apple under-estimates their future earnings on an average of 4% and then beats those numbers by only 3%? Those numbers don’t look as good as you originally made it sound.
Sales can be up but that doesn’t tell you anything.
Are they new or returning customers that is what is needed without that any results are useless you could have people buying a new mac because they decided the other one they have is getting old.
Who the hell cares if you’re an Apple monkey or an Apple hater, that’s not the issue.
The issue is how stupid people are in thinking their content is safe in the first place on a free service (yes I know Flickr is paid too) or on their hard drives. Backup! Backup! Backup!
I laugh at you.
Wow, Mac vs. PC in one comment.
You should have sealed your douchebaggery heroics by going straight for the nazi/hitler reference.
Anyways, bad software design is, shall we say, “platform independent”.
What? “The problem is that iPhoto treats this syncing very literally: if you delete a photo from from of these synced albums on iPhoto…”
USER ERROR. USER ERROR. USER ERROR.
Totally user error; pretty funny.
However, I wasn’t laughing myself when I learned the same lesson with Apple’s address book, accidentally deleting all my Gmail contacts.
Seems that all the Apple syncing works this way.
I’ve experienced the same thing with Facebook and iPhoto ‘09
Yup
Same thing here. Deleted something from my iPhoto library (cause I was moving libraries) and it deleted the entire set from facebook
pretty lame, imho.
Apple has an unusually strange definition of Sync.
try to “sync” a new connected ipod to your library, you will discover the library overwrites the ipod.
thats not sync, its overwrite.
This has always been an incredible “feature” to me. The “first do no harm” tenet is missing somewhere in the apple guidebook.
Apple’s synching implementation with Flickr and Facebook is horrible. When they first announced it I was looking forward to using it, but when I got my hands on the version of iPhoto that introduced this functionality… I wasn’t impressed.
I don’t care about synching my photos, I just want to push photos to Flickr and Facebook from iPhoto.
If I delete it in iPhoto it doesn’t mean I want it deleted on Flickr or Facebook. Nor do I want my Flickr and Facebook “albums” cluttering up my iPhoto interface.
It should have been a one way push… an easy way to upload albums to Flickr and Facebook. The synching part is just a pain in the ass.
It’s a terrible implementation. TERRIBLE.
Not to point fingers but this sounds like it is totally Apple’s fault. Flickr provides APIs to integrate with it’s service. It’s up to the 3rd party to integrate correctly and the end user to understand what that integration is. It sounds like Apple 1) did not integrate correctly and 2) did not make it clear what would happen in Flickr when you delete photos from iPhoto.
Not to say Flickr can’t do something to help. It would be nice if they required a confirmation when deleting a photo through the API or allowed users to specify if 3rd party apps are able to delete photos.
Everytime Apple has these embarrassing issues it reminds me that the more popular they get the more scrutiny they will come under. Hopefully this will all help them improve their software.
I do not sync my picture using iPhoto 09 because it is supported poorly by iPhoto 09. When you would just need to mark the pictures that you want to appear on Flickr and/or FB, etc. it would be too simple. Instead iPhoto needs you to create a batch of pictures you want to sync. The batch can not hold more than 500 pictures. So you need to create potentially lots of batches that stay hanging in your iPhoto. If you remove the batch it removes the pictures from Flickr/FB. So, I had a growing list of batches with not meaningful names (difficult to find which picture is in which batch). A user experience nightmare.
Very bad design indeed.
I like most of Apple products, but they clearly didn’t think(sync) twice here. I am confident this will be redesign completely, it just does not make any sense.
Sync means that changes apply both ways. If something is new here, it will be added here, if something is removed from here, it will be removed from here.
That’s.. usually the Sync.
I agree with others here. This isn’t just limited to iPhoto, but Apple’s definition of “sync” in general. Sync should be a purely additive process. it means that if it’s in one place and not another, it adds it to the other place. There should be a separate “cleanup” type of utility to remove files globally, so that there is no confusion as to what is happening. I don’t know how many times iTunes has wanted to just blast away photos or music permanently from my iPhone just because I want to add an some music from another computer or some backup restore won’t fit. They should change their slogan from “It just works.” to “It just works the way WE think it ought to.”
Pushing photos to Flickr that aren’t in a set and won’t be removed is called “Exporting”, not “Syncing,” and there’s been a Flickr Exporter for iPhoto available for years.
“Syncing” is exactly what it says it is… keeping things in sync. If you delete a photo somewhere, syncing should cause it to delete everywhere.
If you don’t want to publish a Set or you don’t want the photos to stay in sync, then use the Flickr Exporter instead.
Priceless
I fail to see the problem here. That’s EXACTLY how syncing is supposed to work! Sync should be absolute, not additive. Otherwise it’s a merge operation and not a true sync. Users should have realised that deleting from one copy deletes it from the other copy–otherwise syncing is broken. Likewise, adding an item to one copy of the library updates the other copy of the library.
Pushing photos to Flickr/FB is not syncing.
Pulling photos down from Flickr/FB is not syncing.
“Flickr provides APIs to integrate with it’s service” should be:
“Flickr provides APIs to integrate with its service”.
I don’t see the issue here– it’s mostly a user education problem in confusing sync with exporting. Putting images on Flickr and then deleting them in iPhoto is NOT a good idea since the images will be inaccessible on Flckr if you don’t pay. (you get a small number for free, true, but it’s easy to go over the limit and then you’re screwed.)
The iPhoto ‘09 and Flickr integration is the worst i have seen. I had accidentally deleted several albums of photos on Flickr when i removed the album in iPhoto. The synchronization between iPhoto and Flickr is excruciatingly slow, even the changes made in the iPhoto album was minimal. Also, descriptions made on photos in Flickr are not updated in iPhoto and the next time you attempt a sync, the descriptions are gone in Flickr.