Category Archives: Photos

Phantom Pro

Flickr’s revamp has led to a bit of confusion about the future of the “Pro” membership, with some claiming that Pro memberships are going away, even for existing Pro users:

The upgrade screws many old pro users as it basically eliminates it totally. Pros had unlimited storage, unlimited photo uploads, unlimited video uploads, the ability to have their original images downloaded, the ability to replace a photo, and a statistics chart. And now that was all basically just taken out from under their feet.

That doesn’t appear to be the case, however. Since Flickr has implemented infinite scrolling on the site, it can be a bit hard to reach the footer where they link to their FAQ—it’s there, just tantalizingly out of reach. So here’s a link to the relevant section.

As far as I understand it:

  • Flickr members who were Pro before May 20th can stay Pro if their account auto-renews.
  • Pro members maintain the unlimited photo/video uploads, unlimited storage, and unlimited bandwidth benefits.
  • The upload limits for Pro members are expanded to the limits for the new free accounts.

So, it looks like Pro memberships are grandfathered in, but only if you set your account to auto-renew. There is no longer any indication of membership level (which is fine, the “Pro” badge always seemed a bit unnecessary to me). Given that a yearly Pro membership is ~$25 and the ad-free Flickr account is ~$50, it would seem that any Pros still interested in using Flickr would just auto-renew.

Responsive Images Test

Update 2012-04-25: Seeing as how the script actually checks for the rendered width of the image, not the actual browser width, I was stuck trying to figure out how to keep the “medium” size for images at 300×300 but still serve those for users all the way up to 500px. I originally had a max-width: 100% declaration for images (which is a fairly common practice for images in responsive designs), but reviewing the Viewport Industries example I’ve removed that declaration up until the media query I’ve set at 600px. This way I can set a width threshold of 500px for the medium size, even though the native size of the image is 300px wide. Because the image is now allowed to scale past its native size the script now correctly detects when it has scaled past the 500px threshold I’ve set, and then it serves up the larger size. That way most smaller-screen devices get the medium size.

This is a test of the responsive images technique outlined by Viewport Industries. Originally I thought that the Responsive Enhance script was checking the screen width, but looking at the script it appears to check the width of the image. So for this example WordPress generates a 300px wide “medium” version which I’ve modified to B & W for easy identification. When the image renders at smaller than 300px 500px you should get a black & white version of the image, everyone else should get the full-size version. That’s how I understand it, at least.

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