The Squidoo Flickr module was once one of my very favorites, and among the first I’d utilize upon registering a new lens. All one had to do was enter in a keyword or phrase, select the number of photos to be syndicated from the photo annals and presto! You had a little gallery which was usually fairly in accordance with your keyword search. Around a month ago, however, that all changed.

Now when you edit a Flickr module in your Squidoo lens, you are no longer able to select the auto-select option. You’ll have to navigate to the Flickr site, search for your subject matter and select photos for your Squidoo gallery one URL at a time. What once took a few seconds now takes fifteen minutes or so for a gallery of 6-10 photos. A message pops up which tells you that due to a “Request from our friends at Flickr, all photos must be selected manually”. I am paraphrasing a little bit, but one this is obvious - the decision was not made by Squidoo.

I imagine this boils down to simple bandwidth issues. And that’s perfectly understandable, but I’d be interested to know how it has affected the popularity of the Flickr module. I know I don’t use it as much as I used to. It’s still a nice addition, but I reminisce fondly of the early days when it was as easy as whacking in a del.icio.us or Technorati module. Let’s hope they’re not next!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 2:44 am and is filed under Flickr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.