Bugs: Flickr, Firefox, Safari

Flickr bug, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Just the newest headache to arise from Flickr’s approach to entering tags.

Flickr allows you to upload batches of pictures, and you can use the (better) approach of comma-separated tags when entering the tags for the pictures. You can also enter tags that will be applied to the entire batch. However, Flickr simply takes the batch tags, and adds them to the end of the list of tags for each picture… without commas between the multiple tags being added in a batchwise fashion.

So, I had uploaded six or seven pictures, and tagged the batch reston thanksgiving, then tagged the various photos with specific tags, like luigi bosca, wine, malbec. The result? The last tag applied to each photo was treated as if it was one multiword tag, and you see the result in the image.

I had to go through the series of pictures and fix the tags, manually.

Ugh.

The answer is simple: don’t slam the batch tags on the last tag. Add them one by one as new tags. Lazy programming.

The big answer is to shift to comma-separated tags consistently throughout, and drop the bad convention of blank separated tags.

The uploading of pictures to Flickr also involves another headache: Firefox is so unstable that I have stopped using it, except for uploading photos to Flickr. Safari doesn’t support the nifty-cool batch uploader — a Flash bug? — but Firefox keeps seizing up whenever I have used it for 30 minutes or so. I am ping-ponging back and forth. Man, I am in browser hell.