Yes it might be the time to leave Flickr
Yahoo have ended the employment of George Oates - the guy who designed the Flickr interface, and along with Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, made Flickr what it was before Yahoo bought it out, and started meddling.
George was the main reason Flickr looks the way it does, and works the way it does.
This is probably the signal to start building a mass Flickr export tool - or maybe a migration tool to move everything you have in Flickr to one of it’s competitors - Picasa would be a good bet at the moment.
In a way, the impending doom - or uncertainty - surrounding Flickr is a wake-up call to those who use the “cloud” as a primary storage for their data. While you might not like it, having your own backups stored somewhere safe is still a better option than trusting some corporate behemoth to look after your data for you.
It’s a shame in many ways - Flickr was by far the best photo sharing website in existence, with a real sense of community and a loyal membership. Granted, their file uploading application was perhaps the worst engineered piece of software in the known universe, but the online experience more than compensated.
Time to crack out my python skills and start migrating I guess…
