Not the Friday Flickr

I’ve been trying (and surprisingly succeeding) to do a weekly feature on my blog – each Friday I’ve showcased one of my Flickr albums. This has encouraged me to build my presence on Flickr as well as having helped get me into a routine with my blog.

This Friday there was no Friday Flickr post.

This wasn’t from want of trying.

I’m using a new laptop and don’t have many photos stored on it. I’ve pretty much already uploaded most of the photos I have on to it and so have painstakingly transferred all my photos from two old laptops onto a portable hard drive. (I tried going the auto backup route and some things were copied several times and others not at all – sorting out the tangled spaghetti mess on my portable hard drive took me a whole weekend, but that’s a whole other story). My plan is just to plug the hard drive into my new laptop and upload photos to Flickr, my website, Facebook and anywhere else with simplicity and ease.

Why do the simple things always turn out to be the most complicated and time-consuming?

My photos will not upload to Flickr.

I’ve tried different photos from different albums taken with different devices.

I’ve tried saving them onto my new laptop and uploading directly from there.

I’ve tried 4 different ways of uploading in Flickr.

I’ve tried 3 different browsers.

I’ve even tried 2 different laptops – I went back to my old laptop and tried uploading to Flickr from that.

Each time I try, Flickr either times out or tells me I have to sort the problem out, but doesn’t tell me what the problem is.

When in doubt, turn to Google.

It seems as though I’m not the only one having these difficulties over the past few days. I even found a map showing Flickr outages which has a bright yellow cloud over the UK, most of Europe and part of North America.

So it looks like it’s not anything I’m doing wrong or anything wrong with my equipment after all and I’ll just have to wait for Flickr to sort themselves out.

It’s very frustrating though. I want to get lots of albums set up and transferred over to blog posts that I can set to go live whilst I’m in Sweden over the summer. I won’t have internet access for most of the time I’m there and so really want to get ahead before I go.

The best laid plans and all that …

Have you experienced problems with Flickr? Please share any tips for dealing with problems like this in the comments below.